Just picked up a rogue travel/starter banjo at a pawn shop. With gig bag, no tools, dvd or booklet for $125. Not remotely set up. Head loose, neck bowed, bridge misplaced, crap action. Almost exactly as it had come from the factory (except that the bridge WAS on banjo instead of in the little baggie). I figured it had never been played - if anyone had tried to play it, they would have been cruelly disappointed.
Then when I took the strings off to clean it up, I realized that it HAD been played - there was fret wear. So some poor soul had been trying to learn the banjo on the thing. That's really too bad.
Buying a mail-order Chinese banjo is a lot like buying a bookshelf from IKEA. If nothing else, you'd better be pretty good with an Allen wrench. Or I think of the old toy ads: "Your parents have to put it together."
We think that labor in China is cheap, but in fact, the cost is rising to the point where these entry level banjos are only assembled enough to come out of the box in one piece. If you think you're going to order a $125-500 banjo and it's going to arrive in playable condition, you're likely to be disappointed.
On the other hand, if you spent half your spare time in college fixing broken stringed instruments for your friends, and you need a "beach banjo," because the last "beach banjo" you bought (my Samick) turned out to be a "keeper," you might just buy one to see if you can turn it into a musical instrument. Or you might just loan it to a friend who keeps saying he wants to learn banjo, just to see if he'll actually try.
Once I snugged up the head and adjusted the neck and reset the bridge, it started to look and sound like a musical instruments of sorts. The action still sucks, though. I can play it, but I can just about fret a cheese slicer. There's no comparison to my other banjos. Then I cleaned it up. Next I will replace the strings with Martin Bluegrass light, and see if that helps the action any.
Oh, the strings are closer together at the nut than they need to be, almost an eighth of an inch narrower between the 1st and 4th strings than my other banjos, even though the nut width is the same. The tuners are cheezy, too. So if I were to keep it, upgrading the nut and the tuners would be a consideration.
So the jury's still out. If you think I'm being harsh on this poor thing, you need to know that there are about eleven other brands, I wouldn't have taken out of the store for free on a bet. But the second Rogue mandolin I got (after sending the first one back to MF with inexcusable factory defects) turned out to be a surprisingly good instrument. So poor quality control works both ways. This one didn't have any obvious defects, so I thought I'd take it at face value and see what I could do with it.
Stay tuned . . . .
