Wayne's World - Banjo Newsletter Sept. 2010

WAYNE’S WORLD

The Gold Tone Story of Innovation,

Improvisation, and International Collaboration

 

By Chuck Levy

 

First of all, disclosures.  Gold Tone was created by and is owned and operated by Wayne and Robyn Rogers, and I am pleased to call myself a friend to them both.  I am an advisor to Gold Tone, primarily having influenced the Old-Tone line of open back banjos, and am proud to have worked with Wayne to design the Gold Tone OT-6, the first true 6-string banjo to be manufactured in a century, and a damn fine instrument too.

 

Gold Tone History:  Like a lot of good stories, Gold Tone starts out as a love story.  Wayne came to Florida from Massachusetts to enroll in Florida Atlantic University to study psychology, and in fact started his adult working life serving children as a mental health counselor.  Along the way, he met Robyn, a lovely young woman who played the guitar.  Their music meshed, and soon they were playing together in local coffee houses.  One day Robyn needed some repair work on her guitar so the two of them went to the local music store only to find that it was mostly about selling band instruments, and didn’t know much about or care much about acoustic stringed instruments.

 

Being the restless, creative sorts, they decided that Titusville needed a folk music store, so with no collateral and little cash on hand they drafted a business plan based on the plan a chiropractor friend had used to obtain a business loan.  They approached a dozen local banks that, one by one, turned them down.  There was no Plan B, so Wayne and Robyn went about their daily lives as they always had.  A couple of months later, Wayne got a phone call.  One of the local banks needed to fill a certain quota of community reinvestment loans, and thus if Wayne and Robyn were still interested, and could come to the bank right away and sign on the dotted line, they could open their own music store, which is how in 1978 the two 23-year-old’s, found themselves the proud owners of Strings and Things Music Center in Titusville, Florida.

 

Strings and Things sold 8-tracks, LPs, instruments, and music lessons.  As it turned out Wayne discovered that his friendliness and enjoyment of people as well as his attention to process and detail combined to make him an effective promoter and teacher.  He would  advertise free group lessons in the paper, and 20 or so people would show up.  By the time the evening was over, Wayne  had 10 new students.  Eventually Wayne had to hire additional teachers.  At its high point, Strings and Things had an active roll of 250 students.  The lessons alone paid for the overhead, so that the sales of instruments, music, and accessories were all profit.  On the side, Wayne’s natural mechanical know-how  was put to work in repairing musical instruments.

 

It wasn’t until 1993, that Wayne and Robyn entered the banjo-making business.  As a small business owner, Wayne always kept his eye out for what was selling and what was not, and how he could keep customers happy.  Through this he made two key observations.  First, he had a fine brand-name guitar-banjo retailing near $2000 in his inventory.  Guitarists would often be drawn to the instrument, and would take if off the wall and play on it some, but no one would buy it.  It took several years and a significant discount for the instrument to finally leave the store.  From this and similar experiences, Wayne came to believe that musicians were interested in buying alternative instruments that were a little different from their main instruments, but only if the price was right, at the time between the $300-1000 range.  Secondly, Wayne spent a lot of time adjusting and setting up his students’ first banjos, often manufactured overseas, and poorly planned and put together.  From this he noticed that while there were a number of relatively inexpensive, playable guitars to choose from, there weren’t high quality entry level banjos.

 

Wayne decided that he would see if he could build quality affordable banjos.  Remo had come up with some pre-tuned heads for drums, heads that did not depend on how they were affixed to the rim for their tension.  There were no 11” pre-tuned heads (the typical size for a banjo), but there was a 10” head.  Wayne had already noticed that there were several travel guitars on the market, but no travel banjos, so he decided to fill the gap with Gold Tone’s first instrument, the TB 100.  Wayne enlisted the help of Jim McGrane, a professional woodworker, and John Thompson, a local banjo designer, to help.  He got his rims from Keller, a drum manufacturer, and after three months setting up shop and making jigs, he produced his first working models.  At first Wayne made the necks himself. However, after a highly complimentary review in BNL, demand increased from ten instruments per week to as much as ten per day.  Wayne needed help to meet demand.  He found an American furniture manufacturer with a duplicating carver and ordered 200 necks.  Unfortunately, the manufacturing process turned out to be rife with imprecision, and only 75 of the necks could be salvaged.

 

Since Remo made a 12” pre-tuned head, Wayne decided that his second product would be a banjo-guitar.  American-made hardware was just too expensive to meet the price point so Gold Tone ordered Asian-made parts.  However, when the parts arrived, it was obvious that the quality just wasn’t good enough, and nothing fit together.  For example, the tension hoops were too large.  They had to be re-cut and welded back together.  The tone rings were too small, and were made of steel, not brass or bronze, and thus didn’t sound right.  Poor material and poor fit equals poor sound.

 

When Wayne brought his wares to the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, he was approached by several representatives of Asian manufacturers.  Here Wayne met Paul Kim, representing a small start-up manufacturer in Korea with about 20 workers.  Paul had an exceptional ability to communicate, and because the factory was small, they were willing to take on a relatively small order from Gold Tone.  Wayne decided it was worth a try so he entered an order for 50 necks.  Much to his surprise and delight, the delivery was of outstanding quality.

 

This convinced Wayne that he had finally found a good partner.  Wayne then traveled to Korea to visit the factory, to see things first hand and also to see if there might be a solution to his parts problem.  Wayne found eager collaborators who were already doing good work.  With Wayne’s design and banjo making and playing experience as a guide, he helped them retool, and to invest in some of the new equipment.  This started a long-term relationship that continues to this day, with Wayne visiting Asia every one or two years to renew relationships, and to help set up for the manufacture of new instruments and models.

 

This relationship has worked out for both sides.  The original factory has grown to employ hundreds of people, and is in fact the largest banjo manufacturer in the world.  They supply not only Gold Tone, but other names that would be familiar to readers of BNL.  Gold Tone has also grown.  They now have the largest inventory of banjo parts in North America, and manufacture and market 135 different musical instruments.  (A sore point for Wayne is that some of his original work in setting up the tool and die is now used supplying Gold Tone’s competitors.  Ahh, capitalism!).

 

There are advantages and disadvantages in working with an Asian manufacturing base.  Some are obvious, and involve time, distance between the production site and the intended customers as well as cultural and communication barriers.  Others might be less obvious.  Sometimes a certain material is simply not available.  However, there are some terrific advantages to working with factories located in the Pacific Rim beyond the fact that labor costs are significantly reduced.  Large American-based companies might be reluctant to restructure and re-tool their manufacturing processes to produce new products that had not yet been proven in the market place.  Because of Wayne’s long history and personal mentorship with his Asian partners, he is able to design new instruments and order small runs (as few as 30 instruments).  This gives Gold Tone the ability to blaze new trails with new instruments that others in the industry might not attempt.

 

Of course the Asian connection is only part of the formula.  It is one thing to direct the production of instruments manufactured beyond the U.S., it is another thing to deliver instruments to dealers that are consistently high quality.  Wayne and Robyn pay great attention in trying to get this latter part of the formula right because their perspective has been that of the music store owner all along.  To do this, Gold Tone employs a dedicated staff that assembles, inspects, adjusts, and attends to each instrument before it is shipped.  While this is easy to state, it is something else to see in action.  I spent a day at the new Gold Tone headquarters at 3656 South Hopkins Avenue and was very impressed with what I saw. 

 

Gold Tone moved from a 3,000 square foot facility to the new building, a completely renovated 14,000 square foot (previously a warehouse) in 2009.  It turns out that 14,000 square fee is big!  Imagine your high school gymnasium.  Now multiply it by a couple of times.  Since the building was renovated  at Wayne’s direction, everything is laid out from the loading dock to the storage room, from the well-lit work benches with their tools hanging from the pegboards, to the shelves behind with row after row of parts, to the dowel rods affixed to the back wall adorned with rims of various sizes, to allow the efficient flow of instruments to circulate from arrival, to inspection, set-up, and delivery to dealers across the country and throughout the world.  At the work bench, the staff is busy with a variety of instruments.  At one bench, frets are being dressed, while at the next a nut is being filled.  At a third, the spider and cone of a resonator guitar is being installed, while at the next bench a custom order to install a graphite neck of a 1920’s Vega Electric rim is being carried out.  Robyn is on the floor conducting the final inspections and packaging, while Wayne is answering a question regarding the disposition of a certain instrument.  The atmosphere is business-like (after all, this is a business).  Movements have been honed to the essentials, and work is moving along.  The front office is much the same.  People are working at their desks, updating the website, taking orders, giving information.  If you call Gold Tone, you are answered by an actual person.

 

Underlying the industrious activity at Gold Tone is a feeling of family.  People like each other here, respect each other and look out for each other.  This isn’t built on a management strategy taken from a textbook.  Rather, if you are in the Gold Tone orbit for any amount of time, you become part of the family.  This is the only way Wayne and Robyn know how to relate.

 

Gold Tone since 2000

When Gold Tone was last profiled in BNL in 2000 by Geoff Hohwald, the story was how this upstart company had in a mere seven years risen from a back-room mail order operation into a full-fledged musical instrument manufacturer.  At that time, the story was about Gold Tone’s success in delivering full featured high quality resonator banjos at reasonable costs.  In the last decade, and particularly in the last five years, at least part of the story is how Wayne and Robyn decided that it was worthwhile to expand into the open-back/old-time and folk market, and the banjos that have been delivered as a result of that expansion.

 

It is not that Gold Tone didn’t offer open-backed banjos before 2006, including two models with Whyte Ladie-style tone rings.  It is just that those instruments were built around bluegrass aesthetics, and didn’t always work for demanding old-time players.  Often the instruments were simply versions of the bluegrass line without the resonators.  When Gold Tone introduced a model with a spun-over rim inspired by the banjos of the late 19^th century, it neglected to scale the neck appropriately to the rim, leaving it unbalanced.  The peghead design, although attractively appointed and inlayed, recalled bluegrass as opposed to 19^th century proportions.  The banjo looked and played like what it was, a banjo not quite comfortable in either world.

 

However, by 2006, when Wayne and I started to get to know each other, Wayne had gained a real interest in clawhammer, and was determined to go after the market in a serious way.  He had met BNL columnist Dan Levinson at NAMM, and they hit it off.  Dan was forthright in recommending that Gold Tone develop a Tubaphone-stle banjo which eventually led to the creation of OT-800, as well as a high quality entry level open-back with a scoop, which eventually matured as the CC-OT.  Dan’s insistence to keep the price as low as possible to make the instrument as easily within the reach of new clawhammer players greatly influenced this instrument.  Dan encouraged Wayne to visit the Appalachian String Band Festival at Clifftop, West Virginia, which was a real eye-and-ear opener for Wayne.  Dan also introduced Wayne to Bob Carlin, which lead to the creation of the BC-350, the BC-350+, and later the BC-120.

 

Bob was looking for a manufacturer who would take an interest in his ideas, and wasn’t having much success until he met Wayne.  Bob felt that the kind of features that many devoted clawhammerists were looking for were only available from a handful of smaller “boutique” makers.  Although these makers were producing fine and worthy instruments, these instruments often had waiting lists and were priced beyond what many could afford.  Bob thought, and Wayne agreed, that there was an unmet need in the market for less-expensive models for those looking for a “Round Peak” clawhammer banjo.  Bob’s concept was to introduce a model based on Kyle Creed’s banjos, with modifications that suited Bob’s playing.  Bob and Wayne conducted a series of meetings to develop a production model with 12 inch rims, a simple rolled bass tone ring, a slightly wider fingerboard, a bridge located more near to the center of the head.  The original BC-350 was deliberately on the plain side, meant as a wonderful workhorse banjo, that wouldn’t be so precious that you would be comfortable to take to Clifftop and play all day and night and then start again the next day.  The success of the BC-350 led to the BC-350+, essentially the same banjo but with Orpheum-style inlays and appointments, and the BC-120, with all the essential features of the original, but with a rosewood fingerboard and guitar-style tuners, to make the instrument as budget friendly as possible.  During this period, Wayne was also gathering input and advice from Dan and Bob and a number of others not only about their preferences in instruments, but also learning from them how to play in a fiddle tune context.  Some of my conversations with Wayne during this period included the idea of choosing a peghead head shape that could represent the Gold Tone family of openbacks, and naming the line “Old-Tone”.

 

From his experiences at Strings and Things (which finally closed its door for good in 2006), Wayne has always been happy to position Gold Tone not only as supplier of high quality, easy-to-sell banjos, but also the home of “alternative” banjos and similar instruments.  The development of the Banjola, the CEB-5, and now the new BG-10 and OT-10 illustrate this point.

 

The Banjola is a lovely instrument with a mandola-style body and a 5-string neck.  Wayne calls it the “spouse pleaser” because of its subdued tone and volume (less likely to drive loved-ones crazy!).  The inspiration for the Banjola came from Richard Hefner, Gold Tone dealer and the creator of EZ Folk.  Richard was roaming in cyberspace one day and spotted an instrument with a 5-string neck and a mandolin-stlye body on a luthier’s website.  The instrument looked well-made and attractive, but the price, near $5000 seemed a little steep.  Richard thought, “I bet Gold Tone could make one just as good for a whole lot less.”  So Richard sent the link to Wayne.  Wayne was intrigued.  Digging further, he found references to August Pollman’s “Mandoline-Banjos” of the 1890’s.  The way Wayne looked at it, Gold Tone was already making an octave mandolin, so it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to design a banjo-style neck for it.  The first prototypes were a little too quiet so Wayne reduced the thickness of the bracing.  This brought the warmth and woody sweetness of the instrument forward.  Instruments like these have at times been called “mandolin banjos” or “banjolins” but these terms have also been used to describe instruments with banjo pots and 8-string mandolin-style necks.  Wayne needed a new name for the new instrument:  Eureka!  The Banjola.

 

Gold Tone offers three Banjolas.  The original has a scroll-style peghead with a shooting star inlay, and a similar inlay at the 5^th fret.  A customer wanted to install Keith-style tuners which don’t fit on the original banjola in-line banjola tuners, so Wayne created a second model, the Banjola Deluxe, with a more traditional headstock and a hearts and flower inlay.  Pat Cloud got hold of a Banjola, and wrote to Wayne to express how much he enjoyed the “mellow sustain” and playability of the instrument, and how it had drawn him back to the banjo family of instruments after a long hiatus.  Soon the two were collaborating on a third model, the Pat Cloud Banjola, which features a wider body, pin-style bridge, maple/abalone full body binding, and a mutilayered  backstrap and a stereo pickup built in.  When amplified, the instrument produces a new cool-jazz style tone that suggests smoky nightclubs with the lights turned low.  On yes, and several months after he e-mailed Wayne, Richard looked in his mail to find a new banjola, courtesy of Wayne, with a thank you note for giving Wayne the idea in the first place.

 

One of the most successful recent Gold Tone banjos is the CEB-5, the cello banjo, a banjo with a 14-inch rim tuned an octave below standard.  This is the banjo Bela Fleck is holding on the cover of the Downbeat, June 2009 issue.

 

Bob Carlin was part of the staff at a banjo weekend at Dusty Strings in Seattle when Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer were featured for the first time.  Marcy brought her Gibson Cello 4-string banjo with a 14” rim, an instrument she found at Mike Seeger’s house during a visit.  She was immediately drawn to the instrument, so Mike let her borrow it.  The instrument allowed her to play ferocious bass runs and low counterpoint to Cathy’s rippling clawhammer.  She and Bob were talking when she remarked, “Wouldn’t it be great if I wouldn’t have to worry about this thing when I travel.  People are always coming up to me to ask where they can buy one, but I don’t have one to sell.”  Bob thought, “This is a case for Gold Tone,” and in short order had introduced Marcy to Wayne.

 

Marcy sent Wayne a 6-string banjo-guitar sporting the same 14” rim that propelled her Gibson cello.  She didn’t feel comfortable sending Mike’s Gibson Cello so she traced the scale length and headstock shape, the location of the nut along with critical measurements in crayon, and sent it all along with the banjo-guitar.  Wayne looked everything over and decided for his model, he could use a ½” rim instead of the ¾” hollow rim in the original, and that he could contour the neck since he would use truss rods for strength and stability.  He decided to keep the snakehead shape for the peghead, and after studying hundreds of inlay designs, chose a traditional floral pattern that had been used on vintage Weymann instruments.

 

Then he had some samples made.  In one sample, he placed a bluegrass tone ring, and in the other, he used a simple rolled brace rod.  Amazingly, everyone preferred the sound of the simpler brass rod.  Now, here is where things really get interesting!  In order to justify the cost of new tooling, Wayne needed to purchase 300 pieces, a larger order than usual.  So he consulted with Curly Miller, of the Old 78’s, in regards to the design of a 5-string banjo the CEB-5), and me for the 6-String the OT-6).  With input from us both, he produced samples of each, and sent them to us, got more feedback from us and others, and then went into full scale production.  All of the instruments are great players, beautifully designed and constructed, but the smash hit has been the CEB-5, while the original inspiration, the four-string, has not made nearly so much of a stir.

 

Wayne’s newest creation is the 10-string banjo, available with a resonator as the BG-10, or the OT-10, an open back.  The inspiration is Bela Fleck.  Four or so years ago, before the cello banjo was created, Wayne met Bela in Orlando during a tour.  Wayne brought half a dozen instruments with him for Bela’s inspection, and although Bela was pleased with the offerings, nothing really excited him.  For example the Gold Tone electric banjos (EBM-5), but he felt they sounded too similar to acoustic banjos—which ironically, had actually been Wayne’s goal.  Bela and Wayne talked about graphite necks, but then Bela said that what would really be cool would be a 10-string banjo, with 5 double courses of strings kind of like a 12 string guitar.  And as long as he was at it, how about a radiused fingerboard.

 

This was enough to get Wayne going.  To produce the 10-string, he would have to solve the problem of where to place the tuners for the thumb strings (there isn’t really enough room for two tuners located at the 5^th fret), how to get the rest of the tuners in the headstock without making the peghead gigantic, how to place the strings so that they all fit at the proper angle of pull through the nut so they tune properly, what gauges of strings to use, and a number of similar challenges.  For the headstock, he modified a shape common to many 12-string guitars, and to place the strings properly across the nut, Wayne placed three posts (“string trees”) that deflect three of the strings to improve their angles and to make sure they don’t get tangled up with each other.  Wayne tried to tunnel both thumb strings under the fingerboard to emerge at the 5^th fret (like English zither banjos) but the strings rubbed against each other, making them hard to tune.  The ultimate  solution was to tunnel one string using an aluminum tube with just the right angulation (brass might tarnish, and plastic had too much string resistance) and to secure the other string with a traditional 5^th string tuner.  Wayne modeled the radius on that found in Taylor guitars.  Wayne had prototypes built with a bluegrass tone ring and the head resting directly on the wood of the rim.  He found that the tone ring produced a sound that was a bit harsh, while the wood alone provided balance for ringing tones of the multiple strings.  An additional plus is that no tone ring means a lighter instrument, which is important when you are supporting double the number of strings and tuners.

 

Whether this will be another home run like the CEB-5 or simply another one of the many alternative instruments in the Gold Tone treasury is hard to tell.  My circle of friends (which unfortunately doesn’t include Bela Fleck) have not been clamoring for a ten-string banjo.  I admit to some trepidation when I first played the prototype.  To my surprise, the instrument did not seem ungainly, and it did not take much adjustment on my part to feel familiar.  My left and right hand worked as they always do.  It was not hard to fret, and it was not hard to strike or control the response of the strings.  As the weirdness of the instrument receded, I found myself  being charmed by the chorale of sound.  I was transported to some strange land where I was part Kyle Creed and part Roger McGuinn at the same time.  I liked it.  While I’m not sure how it would fit in an old-time string band, I think it will bring color to a solo performance.  It is handsome and well made, and as with all Gold Tones, reasonably priced, so I am looking forward to getting one.  How big a hit it is somewhat beside the point.  It fills a niche that no one else would have thought existed.  This is perhaps the lasting legacy and peculiar genius of Gold Tone.