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Permalink Reply by Rand Moore on May 17, 2011 at 4:33am

Hi Dustan,

That looks like a pretty nice canjo. How do your canjos sound? 

One recent line of inquiry on CBN was how to make the canjo sound better. All my canjos sound very tinny - like a banjo, but even more tinny. When I was building them (a year ago) that seemed the norm and I didn't expect much since my McNally Strumstick also sounded thin and tinny. However, since I started building with cigar boxes, the sound is a lot richer, and it's even more so when you get around to building your own boxes optimized as sound boxes. The other change was my switch from banjo strings to guitar strings. That alone might be enough to make a canjo sound better. I should try building another canjo with guitar strings. One project that I have on the back burner (started but stalled due to a lack of fret wire), is a 3-string dulcijo which uses a cake tin, but I cut out the bottom of the tin (which would have been the soundboard), and replaced it with 2mm ply veneer. I'm hoping that combination of a wood soundboard over a tin resonator box will mellow out the tinny-ness of the cookie tin. We'll see...

-Rand.