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Old 01-28-2016, 01:51 AM
jaybones jaybones is offline
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Default Going to use a piccolo snare and a guitar neck to make a trashcan

Was talking to a friend of mine who plays, about a spare guitar neck I have. He asked me if I wanted to sell it, and I said I was thinking about a cigar box guitar or something. He said "Get a piccolo snare drum and put the neck on it."

Bingo! I've always wanted a trashcan, after seeing Neil Young's unplugged performance of Love is a Rose. Searching out the pieces I'll need, neck block mounted to the rim, a trapeze tailpiece, and I've decided I'll have to get a banjo type rod to support the bridge.

Any of you fine learned gentleman have any insight into what I may have missed? The neck is complete, taken off a playing guitar, and is a bolt on so that makes things easier. No need for tuners or a nut. But its a Strat style neck, and I'm not sure how that'll work with the scale length.

A 14" snare drum should be wide enough, yeah?
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Old 01-29-2016, 10:33 PM
chucksurette chucksurette is offline
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https://youtu.be/z-Ok9HeMJNs

Done with a bass neck. May give you some ideas.

https://youtu.be/jgJeHtssCtI?t=3m35s

DIY Banjo Uke - shows the support rod installation

Good luck - sounds like a fun project.
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Old 01-30-2016, 07:17 PM
jaybones jaybones is offline
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Thanks, already starting to see problems with a trapeze tailpiece. Length is too long for proper scale length, unless I want the neck to not be attached right to the rim of the drum.
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Old 01-31-2016, 03:44 PM
chucksurette chucksurette is offline
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Jaybones,
It's never easy being different but sometimes the results can be fun.
Hang in there.
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Old 01-31-2016, 03:50 PM
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srick srick is offline
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uh Chuck--- the four string on the left - looks - like - a bedpan?
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Old 02-01-2016, 07:28 PM
chucksurette chucksurette is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by srick View Post
uh Chuck--- the four string on the left - looks - like - a bedpan?
Yup
24.75 scale tenor with a floating walnut top. People either loved it or hated it.
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Old 02-10-2016, 07:59 PM
syrynx syrynx is offline
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Back in the 1960s, Frank Davis and his Daddy Banjo (low-res picture on this page) were distinctive features of Houston's folk music scene.

After dismembering a Fender Stratocaster (the same one, he claimed, heard on the 1957 Bill Justis instrumental hit record "Raunchy"), Frank reassembled it-- with a snare drum for a body. Two of the guitar's three pickups sensed the vibrations of the strings; the third pickup he fastened to the bottom head of the drum, now the back of the Daddy Banjo, to pick up the vibrations of the snare. More about this below...

Inside the drum, Frank mounted a bass drum pedal. A string attached to the pedal emerged from a hole in the rim and terminated in a loop around his foot, which was thereby empowered to create the Backbeat from Hell. But wait... there's more!

Protruding from the rim was a gooseneck, which supported a microphone, which fed a mixer mounted mostly inside the instrument; mostly, because the controls sported knobs of the type common on mixing boards of the 1950s, which is to say that they were about two and a half inches in diameter. These knobs sprouted from the rim like a row of mushrooms, leading away from the gooseneck. The audio output of the instrument went to the house sound system-- but Frank controlled the entire mix himself.

Remember that pickup positioned to sense the snare? During a performance, Frank would laboriously tune the snare, by ear, to provide an amorphous drone sound, its pitch roughly centered on the root note of the next song's key. During this lengthy process, he would tell ethanol-fueled tales which never seemed to end, but of such hilarity that the song itself was often an anticlimax. In fact, sometimes during a story he'd change his mind about what the next song was to be. If that involved a different key, the retuning process would begin again. It was not unknown for Frank to play only two or three songs in an hour, but no one seemed to object...

Following a concert one evening in one of Houston's less fashionable districts, Frank was relieved of custodial responsibility for the Daddy Banjo, by a lover of the arts who, in the process, also relieved him of an upper incisor. I didn't see Frank again until after the turn of the century. By that time, dentistry had restored his infectious grin, and he had built another Daddy Banjo, though I've not yet had the chance to hear it.
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