Photo Title : Buehling - dipper 5 - front  |  close this window

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Clarke says he played this gourd quite a bit to his son William in his crib. It fell over and broke (a cat was involved!), but was repaired in 2002 by David Hyatt. An improvement on this gourd, but maybe hard to see in the photos, is a trick shown to him by an African man (perhaps Mangara) at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in 1988. That trick is to tilt the drone string peg upwards towards the fingerboard. This has the effect of raising the string up (to match the plane of the other strings).

Overall length: 27.5"
Gourd diameter: 6"
Scale length: 18.5"
Head size: 4"