Sha-banjo!

I originally planned to tunnel the fifth string from its fifth fret starting location to the peghead. This is an old technique that never went mainstream. Some of the cool kids are doing it these days, and it's a great design with either a solid (Romero) or slotted peghead (Jon Whitney, Doc's). But the more I thought about the fretboard in that configuration, the less I liked the look of it. A nub at the fifth fret just doesn't look right without the tuning peg there. If you draw a straight line from the fifth fret to the nut, I think it looks chunky. My fretboard is already radiused slightly from LMI, and I really want it to be symmetrical. That means running a full length fifth string to the peghead. It's not traditional, and I risk being made fun of and made to repeat "a banjo is not a guitar" 1000x. Well, tough.

A full length fifth string presents a string tension problem by the time you tune it up to G at full length, but that's easily fixed by tuning it down and raising the pitch to G by holding the string down at the fifth fret with a small spike (or using a smaller gauge string than a normal fifth string).

So far, so good, but there are other practical problems. For example, how does one acquire five normal banjo tuning pegs, other than by buying two sets of four and wasting three? (Make four banjos, obviously.) Wasting one from a set of six solid peghead guitar tuners isn't so bad, but the machines take up a lot of room on the relatively skinny banjo peghead and the buttons stick out too far to fit in a normal banjo case. Another option is to use guitar tuners for a slotted peghead. The buttons point down, meaning the banjo fits in the case and it looks more like a traditional banjo.

The latter option is where I'm leaning lately. Here are some sketches I've been toying with since I started moving that direction. Three small circles on each sketch indicate where the strings pass out of the slot and above the peghead surface. Any circle that doesn't appear in the slot means the slot needs to be changed. Dealing with three strings leaving a slot, one of which is headed right to the middle of the nut, is going to present a problem. If I can make that work, I'm golden.

Velociraptor, adapted to five strings from Tom Bills's sweet acoustic guitar:

T-rex, loosely inspired by various electric guitars:

Whale, inspired by the classic Rickenbacker electric bass:

Feel free to leave comments with any thoughts or suggestions or just to vote on the names.