'83 Gold Star

I wanted to document the story of my main banjo. a 1983 Gold Star GF-100HF

I got really fortunate with the original purchase on this. I picked it up in Feb of 21 during COVID at an auction near my home in Towson MD. Because of quarantine conditions, Alex Cooper (the auction house) wasn't having in person auctions. Everything was being displayed and sold online. My Dad had noticed there was a Gold Star banjo for sale and sent me a link. The current bid on it was $300 and I guessed it was a newer Taiwanese made model and probably worth around $600. You could make appointments and go inspect the items, but I thought, what the heck, I'll put a max reserve of $500 on it and if someone bids higher, I'm not gonna worry about it. Ultimately I got lucky and ended up getting it for $375. 

When I picked it up, I immediately noticed it was in pretty good shape and felt pretty good about the purchase, but then I got home and took a look at the serial number and discovered it was a 1983 model which made it in an outstanding pickup.

As I do with every other banjo purchase, I took it up to my buddy Mike Munford's shop in PA. On top of being a super nice guy, he's an amazing player and the ultimate banjo setup specialist in the mid Atlantic. I'm extremely fortunate to live less than an hour from his place. So the first thing he noticed was that the string packs in the case had some interesting handwriting on them which led the to following post in Facebook...

"The Kids are Alright...

Back in the mid 80s, two kids stocking the store at Baltimore Bluegrass would put custom sets of banjo string packs together. When I bought an old banjo at an auction last week, there were lots of remnants from the old Baltimore Bluegrass store still in the case. When I showed the new banjo and accessories to Mike Munford (pictured), he was immediately drawn to the two sets of custom string packs in the case.

The one on the left with green lettering was labeled by Mike Munford (awarded banjo player of the year by the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2013) the pack on the right with the red lettering was labeled by Ned Luberecki (IBMA banjo player of the year in 2018)"

So after reminiscing a little bit about Baltimore Bluegrass, Mike began his usual setup. He replaced a couple frets, put in a new nut and pip, tightened the head, made sure the tension and fit was good with the rods, the ring and rim in general and he did a little slot work on the bridge. As he worked through all this, the tone really started to pop. But we decided to experiment with bridges a little and when we tried a Scorpion bridge from Silvio Ferretti suddenly BOOM! That was it. It had this perfect quintessential vintage tone that I look for in bluegrass banjos and it became my #1 banjo.

To describe it a little more, it's got a mahogany neck and resonator, a Presto tailpiece, rosewood fingerboard and again, at the time of purchase it was in really nice shape. There were very few (if any) scratches in the finish. (I've put a couple dings in it since then). It does have some cheap elements about it. For instance the binding on the side of the neck is actually painted and there's a few other things about it that wouldn't be there if it was made by a quality luthier. But it's a beautiful sounding banjo and it's always felt fairly easy to play.

One of the things I immediately liked about this banjo was it's slender neck. I had previously owned an 80s Gold Star that didn't sound as nice and had a really bulky neck. The dimensions of this neck felt really comfortable in my hand. But it also had a slight ridgeline or what I thought was a crack/bump in the finish that ran below an area from about the 4th to the 7th fret and seemed to get more noticeable the more I played it. And also, during the summer months, not only did that ridge line seem to pop out but the finish on the neck got really sticky. (way more so then the finish on other banjos I've owned over the years)

As that ridge line grew more and more noticeable I decided to get something done about it and took it to my friend Frank Schoepf in Manchester. Along with being another incredibly nice guy, he's a tremendous wealth of knowledge on all sorts of vintage banjos and he does really nice wood work and instrument repair. We decided to remove the finish on the neck and he immediately noticed that the ridge line was actually the truss rod cover popping out of a slight crack in the very thin neck. Apparently a previous owner had actually worked on the profile of this neck and in filing it down he accidentally got too close to the truss rod. 

So Frank ended up cutting a shim of mahogany wood, plugging the crack and gluing it in place and then he removed the original finish which he said had been applied after the neck alterations and were probably the cause of the extra stickiness that I'd felt when using it during the humid summer months. 

Now the neck feels AWESOME, no stickiness or weird bumps, it's got the slender profile that I like and the tone of this thing is just incredible. It's got a 40 year old vintage sound that has qualities about it that I don't think you can get from a newer instrument. I'm sure that some day I'll run across another banjo that will just knock my socks off, but for now I feel pretty content playing my 83 Gold Star and I don't have any desire (currently) to seek out a pre-war Gibson. 

Here's a clip of me playing my '83 Gold Star on a Bob Dylan cover that I did with some friends in the summer of '21... a couple months after picking it up and restoring this banjo. 

Let me know what you think.