Banjo Bridges by Bart - listen to some example sound bytes

Here's a few MP3 sound clips of the various bridges the way they sound on my Fender Leo. I didn't spend a whole lot of time recording them, please excuse the sour notes, they're me, not the bridges. Also, the microphone made a lot of the quality of the sound disappear. Hopefully it'll still give you an idea about the sound you can expect to get with these bridges. The files are approximately 300K each. The sound level was measured at a distance of 1 meter, "A" weighting, "slow," look for sound volumes on the Volume Chart page. For some of the recorded samples I used compensated and non-compensated bridges, all of them however, are available either way.

All in all, a lot of choices wood wise. The standard hard maple jobbies do a fine job, no question about it. Playing around with some of the other woods though, listening now to the maples ones (including the sunken/submerged maple wood), hmmm, no offense - the word "yawn" comes to mind. Nothing wrong with maple, its cheaper to buy than the other types, but there's a huge amount of additional sound to be had with some of the other choices. Woods like "mystery" or "enigma" punch out a noticeable higher volume on many banjos.

By the way, the tune I'm playing for many of these sound bites is the A part of Bridges, you'll find the tab for it in the "Bart's originals" section on this website.

Bridge	Description
MEC	Compensated, hard maple, ebony topped. Nice and snappy all-round bridge suits 3 finger and clawhammer styles.
MC	Compensated, solid hard maple. A smidgen mellower than the one above, clear low notes.
X	Non-compensated, mystery tree wood. A super thin bridge with crispy highs and punchy lows. Mind blowingly loud and bright for hard driving bluegrass.
XE	Uh, well, uh, I made one for myself (Oct. 2003), ebony topped it anyway and beefed it up to about medium thickness, just to see what would happen. Made me reach for the ear plugs and especially the Wildwood banjos love this one.. Totally awesome!
JE	Right after I made the one above, I made another one using enigma. Had to ebony top it because as dense as this wood is, the fibers come peeling off easily and the strings would end up slicing into it. The "JA" model really thin - talk about yer Stanley archtop sound. The thicker one (JB) - wow, makes my lowly Framus sound like a big boy! Listen to the 2 leg model and the 3 leg model
TE	Teak. Yup, that's right - teak, ebony topped. Awesomely neutral sound that packs a huge punch and looks gorgeous, devastating on archtops.
G	I don't sell these, but just so you can compare: one of the most common bridges around, a regular no-frills ebony topped Grover. By the way, this is an old Grover, really old, when they still were darn decent bridges and nothing like today's came-with-the-banjo cheapos
Listen	These are some of the sounds you can expect to hear while you're doing the fine tuning (this MP3 is about 500K in size) sounds with the MEC bridge. The notes you'll be hearing are the chimes followed by the fretted notes.

Banjo bridge sound bites