Brian Hefferan, Director

Track details...

Track details...

The Instruments:

Gibson banjo ukulele - Loud and bright, three of these finger-pick the lead on all the tunes in the Music Box Rag project.

Slingerland banjo ukulele - used for rhythm. Its old original skin head gives it a wonderfully rickety tone.

Gretsch banjo ukulele - A clear-sounding banjo uke used for fingerpicking the lead on Ragtime Annie & Epley Breakdown.

Vega banjo mandolin - two of these play the lead on most numbers in the Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay project.

Gibson banjo mandolin- One of each pair of strings is tuned down an octave, which gives this banjo a distinctive, never-exactly-in-tune croaking sound. Two of these second the lead on most numbers in the Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay project.

Lyon & Healy five-string banjo - Nylon-strung. Fingerpicked on Buffalo Gals, strummed on Epley Breakdown.

Gibson banjo guitar - Big brother of the Gibson banjo mandolin. It fills out the ensemble sound.

Heftone Lojo(tm) bass banjo - The invention of my father Lawrence A. Hefferan.

The Recordings
These recordings were made in my living room using a single Shure SM-57 or Electovoice microphone plugged into my laptop computer. The instruments were played one-at-a-time, layering 4-12 tracks which were later mixed down to stereo. For software I used gnusound, which is free (GNU GPL) software writen by Pascal Haakmat, running on the linux 2.4.18 kernel. No electrons were harmed, no copyright laws were broken, and no licenses were violated.