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Can Jo Consortium

The simplest little resonator instrument of all. Please add links to plans, photos of your canjos and ideas you've found that make the most of this diminutive instrument. (The image is a temporary placeholder, I'll replace it any day now!)

Location: the vegetable aisle in a grocery store near you
Members: 250
Latest Activity: Jan 31, 2023

Discussion Forum

The Cookie Tin Variety: a community image bank

Started by Diane in Chicago. Last reply by Keith Zorn Dec 27, 2022. 37 Replies

Post up photos of your tin-tars!  These are the ones that look mostly like this:Continue

Canjo Tablatures

Started by Adam Jellison. Last reply by Adam Jellison Jan 8, 2020. 6 Replies

Maybe it is just me, but I love to sit there and pick out songs I know or songs people want to play on my Canjo.  I own a couple of Canjo Song books from Gitty, and looked around online and found a…Continue

Can Cutting

Started by Mike Whisenhunt. Last reply by Glenn Watt Nov 22, 2019. 9 Replies

So I've made a few of this tin can banjo things. Having a blast playing on them. I've made a couple out of empty tin "soup" cans and one out of a beer can. I cut a few other cans to prepare them to…Continue

The Gas/Kerosene/Oil Can variety: a community image bank

Started by Diane in Chicago. Last reply by James Conder Nov 5, 2018. 7 Replies

If you've used an upright can on a chordophone, here's the place to show your work.I'm looking for an olive oil can right now, one of those really pretty ones from Eastern Europe.Continue

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Comment by Mark on June 21, 2010 at 9:06am
On a more positive note, this video might interest folk here. It's Bob Zentz at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

http://shipsofthesea.org/video/view/canjo/high/
Comment by Mark on June 21, 2010 at 8:55am
I've got no problems with the claim on "CanJoe" as a trademark - but some of the other stuff seems like it might be on slightly less firm ground. The history of people improvising musical instruments from cans goes back a very long way so I don't know how you can say for sure there isn't prior art - at least to some extent. And I think canjo has pretty much entered the general lexicon as a generic term for banjo-type instruments built using cans or tins. That's as much as I have to say on the subject though, because I agree with Joker about the feeling you get from reading a post that long with that much bad grammar and that much superfluous use of the words "actual" and "actually".
Comment by Joker on June 21, 2010 at 8:22am
Wow, nothing gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling about a group than a long post about copyrights and proprietary's. Can we call em can-tars? Or how about canharps, cylindrical food storage containment-jo's. Looking at your website though I would agree that you have a claim to the name canjos
Comment by CanJoe*John on June 20, 2010 at 1:09pm
Hello Canjo Consortium members,
This topic is of great personal interest to me and to my many years of livelihood by which I have actively made my living for now nearly twenty years. For any here who are unaware of the actual history and origin of these instruments, there is a posting relative to them on a blog that I posted on my CBN profile awhile back. Briefly, the "Herschel Brown" instrument design that has been referenced about in this comment string refers to the historically documented origin/creator of the "string, stick and can" musical instrument with a diatonic scale and is also the originator who coined the name "canjo" or "canjoe" as the first ever instrument identity and brand name. Herschel Brown was my personal friend who also personally helped me establish the CanJoe Company to become the world's first publicly marketed & recognized use of the instrument design and brand name "canjoe" (co-sharing/identifying either as Herschel's own version of the instrument design or as the CanJoe Company's authorized design and name for the instrument). The CanJoe Company was officially established in 1994 as the actual first officially licensed business for the purpose of manufacturing/marketing/distributing of these instruments in the world market. There was never such instrument, product/item made, sold, or identified as such (as a "canjo" regardless of the spelling) anywhere on any market by anyone prior to Herschel and myself who both worked together in concerted effort to introduce, produce and make them public. Many years of very expensive (financially, physically, and emotionally) personal hard work in designing, introducing, branding, marketing, continuously redesigning & improving upon, experimenting with various versions and in making publicly available these now high quality products, world recognized, as the official, original, accurately functional musical works of art which have been the sole mainstay of my own personal livelihood for all these years. Over these years I have personally hand made thousands and thousands of these instruments and either sold or given them away (mostly as one-on-one, eye-to-eye, hand-to-hand transactions) introducing them to the markets anywhere and everywhere that they now exist and though the CanJoe Company has never been grossly or abundantly profitable, and excluding Herschel's own separate canjoe instrument related marketing and manufacturing efforts, my own personal blood, sweat, and tears have been passionately poured into and over each and every one that, up until recently, has ever been publicly sold or distributed. My intent on this posting is to simply ask that my and Herschel Brown's years of efforts and history be simply respected. Flooding the public with similar items and calling them by any similar identifying brand name without respect to their true history, I believe, is highly unfair and injurious to my personal hard earned business recognition and livelihood if others making them generically label their similarly made instruments without respect to the legally first established CanJoe Company brand name that is and has always been used to identify it's legitimately and publicly recognized products labels. For those of you making them, I would ask that when identifying your own instruments that you call them something in addition to or something other than just "canjoe" or "canjo". Many instruments that use cans of any type as their resonators have now generally become categorized as or are now being called "canjo instruments" but generically labeling any and all similar stringed instrument products with the same or similar name is unfairly misleading to the public when they seek out the established and identifiable brand name of the CanJoe Company products and can no longer tell any difference because of the generalized or generic term use to identify the instruments/products. I have no problem with competition by any means except that when my own company's legally established, first on the market, product brand/ identifying label is simply not respected or acknowledged. I hope this posting does not become misconstrued or ill perceived but instead is accepted as the justifiable request for respect toward hard earned established brand labeling,(product identity), of an already clearly established marketed product and publicly active proprietary business. Example of similarity, if I may offer, is that all guitars or banjo instruments though are similar in design and function, each are recognized by the companies/manufacturers use of their own brand names that identify to the public their products, such as "Gibson" or "Martin"; labels identifying their respective guitar or banjo instruments/ products. The CanJoe Company as well as Herschel Brown's instruments, over these many years has established the brand name use that the public now commonly identifies these simple but proprietary stringed instruments by; with the established use of the marketed brand label recognized as "canjoe" (and/or any similar spelling). As each of you make your own "can" instrument versions, I see it justifiably fair to ask that you each also separately and uniquely identify your own instruments with your own label names, eg ( your own product/instrument name/identity)"__ stringed instruments" thus avoiding any infringement of the already established CanJoe Company label. You all are invited to view the official CanJoe Company web site at www.canjoe.com and I also honestly hope that you each have fun designing, making and naming (branding) your own can related instrument designs and personal creations with rewarding benefit... CanJoe*John
Comment by Patrick Morrison on June 20, 2010 at 9:14am
Hey guys great group! I have built about 30 of these things so far and I have recently ran across a tool that has come in handy. I had trouble at first figuring out the simplest way to actually attach the can and this tool does it simple and fast. Its called a nail driver. Great Neck makes a model called a BD1, check it out. You can get them for around 10 dollars. Hope this helps you all.
Comment by Diane in Chicago on June 20, 2010 at 7:44am
Rand, when you are posting a comment, click on the little picture of a black camera that is in the grey bar above the text window and it will ask you to link to your photo file. It will embed your photo in your post.

I am working on making the can able to move a small amount so you can intonate the can/bridge a bit so the tuning is accurate once you've strung it up. On a shorter instrument, you have less room for error. Photos to follow
Comment by Rand Moore on June 20, 2010 at 6:55am
P.S.

I'll have to take some photos of my canjos, so you can better see what I'm talking about. How does one upload and post a picture so it shows up on this discussion forum?
Comment by Rand Moore on June 20, 2010 at 6:52am
There are a couple of canjo plans already posted on Cigar Box Nation. You can search on "Canjo Plans" and "Canjo(e) question?" (or just "canjo") and you should find them. One of the plans seems to be Herschel Brown's original "CAN JOE" Kit Plans. and the other is another "blue print" drawing of a canjo. Both make a great starting point for the discussion of good canjo design, but I feel these design may be a bit "dated". If I knew how to put a link to them, or just copy them over to this group discussion area I would.

Also, forgive my long winded posts. I live in China and rarely have a "chat" style of experience with folks in the States. My responses are usually information dumps. Hopefully, you can find some gems of information in there somewhere.
Comment by Rand Moore on June 20, 2010 at 6:09am
Okay! We have a canjo group on Cigar Box Nation! What a great name "Canjo Consortium". I sure wouldn't have come up with such a nice name. Thanks for starting up the group. Seems like a fair amount of interest... a good sign! I'll put all my canjo posts here from now on.

As I was saying in an earlier posting, I've made 3 canjos. Two of the three canjos are the "cola can on a stick" variety where the can is oriented in-line with the stick. For the first one, I oriented the can so the open side was facing the "tail" of the stick, and for the second one, I oriented the can opening toward the head. From a player's perspective, the sound level is about the same, but I seem to prefer the orientation where the opening of the can toward the "tail" of the stick, because this shortens the scale length and gives me a bigger place for my right hand to pick/pluck/strum the string.

If I put my ear close to the can I can hear more sound coming out of the open end of the can, so I decided it might be better if the can were facing my (imagined) audience. So, I found (bought) a stainless steel bowl (10" diameter, and 2.5" deep) to use as the resonator. I punched a hole in the middle of the bottom to attach it (via a single bolt and nut) to the canjo stick. I also punched a hole about halfway up the side of the bowl to serve as the bridge, thru which the string passes and comes into contact with the can resonator. The string is secured around the bowl's center mounting bolt/nut and the other end of the strings is routed over the frets up to the tuner. The resulting instrument did not produce as much volume as I had imagined. Maybe stainless steel does not vibrate as readily as the thin aluminum on soda and beer cans. I should try it again with a stainless steel soup can, to see if there is a difference in sound output between an aluminum can verses a stainless steel one. Another factor might be the shape of the bowl (a rather shallow concave shape) as opposed to the shape of a can (a deep cylinder) which may explain why it wasn't as good a resonator as the cans. Have any of you done any experiments on aluminum cans verses stainless steel cans, or a shallow parabolic shaped resonator verses a deep cylindrical resonator. I'd be interested in hearing what the results were.

Also, as a FYI, I prefer to make all my canjos with diatonically spaced frets. And the easiest way I have found to to this is to use medium sized soft plastic tie-wraps which are easy to install, and are movable... making tuning (and later retuning) of the frets much easier than having to cut permanently spaced frets with a fret saw, cutting and pounding in fret wire, only to find you've made some mistake. But, I aspire to develop the skills to create a professional looking fretboard. The only real downside to using tie-wraps as frets is they dampen the sound somewhat. Other alternate materials you can consider for frets include solid conductor copper electrical wire which you can also wrap around the neck to produce movable frets, or wooden frets which must be preciesly glued into place. I've tried the fret calculators on the Internte. They are a good place to start, but ultimately I tune each fret as I lay them starting with fret 1 and working my way up the neck (toward the can resonator). What other ideas have you tried to easily come up with a workable fretboard short of scavaging one off another instrument?

Also, here is a quick definition of a bais canjo I wrote a while back...

A typical canjo is basically a 30" x 1" x 1" stick of wood with a string tuner on one end and a tin can on the other end. The tin can serves as the instrument's resonator and a hole through the bottom of the can serves as the bridge. Most canjos have just a single string which is run down from the tuner, across the nut and maybe 10 or 12 frets to the hole in the bottom of the can, where it is then tied down at the end of the stick with a screw or nail. The tin can is attached to the stick using a couple wood screws or nails. Because the resulting instrument sounds "twangy" like a banjo, it was named variously as "canjo", "can-jo", or "Can Joe".

When the canjo is built with diatonically spaced frets (essentially the same as a mountain dulcimer's melody string), it becomes an idea instrument for teaching children the basics of music, including the physics of stringed instruments. It's inexpensive to make, provides a range of about an octave and a half, and the diatonic fret spacing eliminates concerned with sharps and flats. The instrument can be taught solfeggio (Do-Re-Mi) along with singing to get the kids producing music right away with minimal up front music theory.

Well, that's all for now.
Comment by Diane in Chicago on June 20, 2010 at 3:11am
Guy, do you have a link to pix of a can ektar like you described?
 

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Discussion Forum

The Cookie Tin Variety: a community image bank

Started by Diane in Chicago. Last reply by Keith Zorn Dec 27, 2022. 37 Replies

Canjo Tablatures

Started by Adam Jellison. Last reply by Adam Jellison Jan 8, 2020. 6 Replies

Can Cutting

Started by Mike Whisenhunt. Last reply by Glenn Watt Nov 22, 2019. 9 Replies

The Gas/Kerosene/Oil Can variety: a community image bank

Started by Diane in Chicago. Last reply by James Conder Nov 5, 2018. 7 Replies

How to adjust Intonation???

Started by JL. Last reply by Wichita Sam Mar 10, 2017. 9 Replies

1st Electric Canjo Build

Started by Greg Thompson. Last reply by TN Twang Aug 19, 2016. 4 Replies

Reds Wicked Apple canjo

Started by Greg Thompson. Last reply by TN Twang Aug 14, 2016. 8 Replies

Chromatic fretting.

Started by Graham Alibone. Last reply by Graham Alibone Sep 15, 2015. 6 Replies

Gunpowder Jug Resonator

Started by David Harris. Last reply by Greg Thompson Nov 27, 2014. 1 Reply

Can Jo for Children

Started by David Bowes. Last reply by David Bowes Sep 29, 2014. 11 Replies

Strings: Materials, Techniques, Sound, Etc.

Started by Dustan Eichler. Last reply by TN Twang Jun 13, 2014. 23 Replies

Circular hole tuner design

Started by Philip Daniel. Last reply by Rand Moore Apr 4, 2014. 10 Replies

cookie tin banjo (tinjo)

Started by Hillbilly Hobo. Last reply by Rand Moore Apr 4, 2014. 1 Reply

mag pup

Started by jabes. Last reply by jabes Mar 25, 2014. 2 Replies

Overthinking a simple cookie tin ?

Started by Piht Bull (Delta Dawg Guitars). Last reply by PKB Jan 31, 2014. 7 Replies

brass canjo/cbg

Started by Mario Poggio. Last reply by Mario Poggio Nov 28, 2013. 7 Replies

Can Orientation

Started by Alan "Poor Boy" Ackerson. Last reply by Alan "Poor Boy" Ackerson Oct 20, 2013. 6 Replies

Scale length and bridge

Started by Battmann. Last reply by Thomas "Duck" Petry Jul 23, 2013. 5 Replies

Attaching the Can

Started by Jim burt. Last reply by Russ Dugger Dec 13, 2012. 9 Replies

Loudness Versus Scale Length

Started by Randal. Last reply by Randal Oct 27, 2012. 9 Replies

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