john_kidder
Senior Member
I mentioned in another thread that Neil Young plays a guitar-strung banjo on one track of the "Heart of Gold" movie.
The song is "Old King", and the instrument is, I now know (from the little extra bits on the DVD), a mid 20s Gibson "ball-bearing" guitar banjo. James Taylor used this banjo to record the original banjo part on "Old Man". The head is sretched over some sort of assembly of ball bearings on springs, so that the skin wouldn't crack every time the temperature/humidity changed.
Larry Cragg, Neil Young's guitar tech says (accurately) it has that "kind of a garbage can tone". He also says, casually, "here we got Neil's D-45 - it's one of the first of the re-issue D-45s, a 1968 Brazilian rosewood . . . 1n '74 I did a bit of a strut job to it, you know, I scalloped the braces to make it sound a little better" Now there's chutzpah.
Gotta love these DVDs with all the little arcane bits.
The song is "Old King", and the instrument is, I now know (from the little extra bits on the DVD), a mid 20s Gibson "ball-bearing" guitar banjo. James Taylor used this banjo to record the original banjo part on "Old Man". The head is sretched over some sort of assembly of ball bearings on springs, so that the skin wouldn't crack every time the temperature/humidity changed.
Larry Cragg, Neil Young's guitar tech says (accurately) it has that "kind of a garbage can tone". He also says, casually, "here we got Neil's D-45 - it's one of the first of the re-issue D-45s, a 1968 Brazilian rosewood . . . 1n '74 I did a bit of a strut job to it, you know, I scalloped the braces to make it sound a little better" Now there's chutzpah.
Gotta love these DVDs with all the little arcane bits.