What do you do with a 22 inch kick drum?
Make a Bass Banjo!
Here we have some method of lifting the playing surface up over the standard drum hardware. Since the head does not have regular banjo brackets, these two triangular pieces of wood were glued into place to hold up a finger board at the right angle needed (at least in theory).
Head detail
A sturdy broom handle was used to bring up the rear after attaching it to the heel of the neck… at least that’s one way of doing it and it still falls within the normal design specs for a cigar box guitar or banjo.
Sliced drum
This dimension was based on a simple ‘2X’ proportion in that here we have a 22 inch diameter head and a banjo head is ‘around 11 inch diameter’ so, everything else is twice that of a ‘normal’ banjo. At least that’s how it was planned to work.
Frets added
I used a hand router to make grooves in the fingerboard and then glued the fret wire onto the grooves. The wire is from the wire that used to hold up political yard signs.
Testing it out
With the traditional weed whacker strings and a nice bridge we now have a bass instrument suitable for the orchestra pit or some other type of pit in hell where banjos belong.
Taking it out on the road with the dog and the Black Sheep
Could this be carried on the great feast of the RAGBRAI ? Would I want to drag this thing 500 miles across the state of Iowa?
Jamming with the folk
Finally some people who appreciate bass banjo! This was at the CROMA festival, also known as the Central Rockies Old-time Music Association. The fest was somewhat west of Berthoud, Colorado so it may have been more like in the Northern Rockies, but I guess CROMA sounds better than NROMA. OK?