Banjo String Instrument

Really fantastic big string sound in the VSL instrument family.

Dust cover, stretchy material, pull string to tighten around instrument base. Plenty of slack to fit just about any keyboard 49-61 keys.

Excellent for tuning your Banjo

This is my go to tuner for acoustic guitar, banjo and fiddle. Reliable and accurate.

A quick way to not string cables across the stage.

Can’t beat this little instrument for the money!

Fine instrument, does what it should do and more. I recommend it.

I am using this lav mic to amplify a 5 string banjo. I had been using a generic electret battery driven lav mic (think radio shack) for that purpose, replacing the mini-plug with a female 1/4 inch, then using a standard guitar cord, plugging into a Baggs Para DI, then into the board of the sound system with an xlr mic line. That was OK, but I had lots of thin wire to coil, a fragile battery pod and the nusiance of dead watch batteries if I forgot to switch the thing off. The SM11 of course needs no batteries and the wiring is much more robust than the cheap lav mic. I can go direct into a mixing board and the sound is quite nice. The banjo doesn't really need a lot of high end amplification, and doesn't produce deep lows -- all of which the dynamic mic doesn't pick up. So the result is a nice warm sound, and much more full-spectrum than the electret mic to my ear. Probably because the diaphragm is larger, I guess. I don't need to hide this rather large (thumb size)lav canister in clothing, like a video person would. It rides in the backside of the banjo. The included tie clip worked fine, clipped to a little jig I sometimes use. But instead I wrapped the body in some dense memory foam, and made my own mount that also acts as a tone regulator behind the head -- it's an open-back banjo thing. Looks like this product is robust and should work for years. Works fine going straight into the mixing board. But when I run it through the Baggs Para DI (which is a preamp as well as a DI) I have to use a transformer to change the signal to HI-Z for the 1/4 inch input. Then the output from the Bagg's male xlr (lo-z again) is too hot for the mixing board, so I use a 20db attenuator between the DI out and the board mic-line in. Works fine that way.

I had an older Snark and it worked well. But this works way better. I play the banjo and it is very hard to tune because of all the harmonics going on this tuner seems to get right too the center harmonics right away.

I needed a quick way to record some quality acoustic music for my dad's family trip DVD, and the Snowball did the job. Plug-n-play, used Audacity, and recorded a few crisp old-time banjo parts for the video (I know what you're thinking--deliverance, but that's BLUEGRASS banjo). Sound was very clean, a perfect alternative to the noisy racket recorded when using my laptop's internal speaker. Used the second setting, I thought it wasn't going to record hot enough but it gave me plenty of volume for what I needed. Great produce, would recommend.