Jo guitar, the banjo guitar…

The Jo guitar was exposed at the Issoudun festival in 2013, check out its presentation by Jacques Carbonneaux on the website laguitare.com.

It is the result of the collaboration of two music makers loving this instrument, Philippe Berne (as for the drawing and the external structure), and Bruno Torrès (internal banjo), this “Jo guitar” includes a banjo drum body within a guitar sound box. The bridge is half set on the banjo skin on the high string side and on the soundboard (made of larch). The goal of this research is to enrich the balance of the sound of the instument, guitar banjos used to be quite poor in the low frequencies. The back and the sides are made of rowan tree from Ardèche: magnificent wood that used to be considered as precious and then the production was stopped and the love for exotic woods finally pushed it into the background of fuelwood! It is similar to maple due its density and the “color” of its sound. The drum banjo body is made of walnut wood of high quality with synthetic skin, natural skins were put outside the project due to their vulnerability to humidity of the air. The fingerboard is made of purpleheart wood and the neck is made of maple.

You can see the very first banjo guitar prototype just below…

The soundboard is made of larch, the back is made of lime, the neck is made of maple, the fingerboard is made of rosewood.