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[The following article was originally published in the Banjo Newsletter, October 1993 Volume 20 Issue 12.]
Richard Kulesh is the person responsible for the development of the Gibson 20 hole tone ring for the banjos made from 1987 to the present time.
Gibson Company has an exclusive contract on that particular tone ring. Last winter, Janet Davis tested Mr. Kulesh's new 10-hole tone ring, developed for Rich & Taylor, Janet Wrote:
"The high-powered Rich & Taylor 10-hole tone ring is setting a new standard for five-string banjo tone rings. After hearing of the exceptional power and tone of the Rich & Taylor tone ring from respected sources, I decided to independently test and evaluate several of these tone rings, which were produced from different 'lots'. These were installed on various banjos, including "new age" professional banjos.
The results were remarkable. All of the ingredients for a pre-war sounding "state of the art" tone ring are evident -- incredible volume, quick response, excellent decay time of the notes, well-balanced tone with a clarity that spans the fingerboard, and a tonal depth tat seems to come from within the banjo, rather than from the surface of the head, projecting directly out the front of the banjo, rather than up.
You can feel the difference as well as hear it. The tonal difference was an improvement with each of the banjos, but it was particularly superior with those having high quality components and exact tone ring-rim fit. Also, the quick response made a noticeable improvement in the ease and playability with each of these banjos."/p>
In January of 1993, Nancy Nitchie interviewed Richard Kulesh by telephone. What follows is Richard Kulesh's story of how that tonering came about:
I guess I would have to say that my interest in the banjo started back in the folk music era. The Tom Dooley thing back with the Kingston Trio in the 1950s. Then, when I was in college in the early sixties, I had an Ode banjo that I had made up there in Jamestown. Star Route and I used to do a little frailing and a little folk music. I always loved the banjo, but as things went on it got put aside, and I didn't fool around with the banjo at all for many years. Then, in 1986, I decided I wanted to get serious and learn how to play it. I guess that was when I discovered bluegrass music. It got me all excited again. Folk music had died out, but I found the San Diego Bluegrass Club here in town and got very interested in bluegrass.
I started to look around for a banjo. What was Good? what was on the market? An educational process was taking place as I talked to people about banjos. All anybody had to say who was knowledgeable or serous about banjos was "pre-war" banjos. Well, the more I learned about pre-war banjos, the more disillusioned I got. I became aware of the fact that the market was proliferated with phonies, copies, imitations and parts of old banjos on parts of new banjos. I mean, it had been raped, pillaged and plundered and it became apparent to me that in order to knowledgeably buy an old banjo, it would take years of learning in order to become experienced enough in what you were looking at, to now what the hell it was. To me, this was ridiculous. All I really wanted was a good banjo.
I'd heard all these stories from people about what made a good banjo, and the more I listened, the more I decided that these people didn't know what they were talking about. Now, I'm not a graduate engineer. I'm sort of a backyard engineer. But when I took a banjo apart and looked inside, the thing that intrigued me was the tone ring. To me, this massive bronze part of the instrument had to be the motor -- which turned out to be exactly true. The tone ring is the heart of the whole thing, and is going to dictate the flavor and characteristics of the sound. Set-up and a lot of other things make a difference, but if you don't have a good tone ring to begin with, you're just wasting your time. so i decided I would make some tone rings.
We had a family metal business at that time. It was a small set-up -- we represented and distributed for different metal foundries. This was when southern California was heavily involved in the defense industry. I had access to the metals which go into tone rings, and access to metal testing equipment. So, I started to obtain other people's tone rings to find out what was in them and what made them work.
I got some tone rings, Greg Rich supplied me with a few more. Finally, I went out and bought a pre-war tone ring. (You have to destroy the tone ring in order to run these tests on it.) I cut out the tone ring and ran the test, and said to myself, "Oh-Ho-Ho." Now, suddenly, the key unlocked the door, I got my formula, and made some tone rings. That was just at the time that Greg Rich, who I had met along the way out here in California, had gone to Nashville to work for Gibson.
We had had a couple of conversations before this. He was intrigued with what I was doing and I was intrigued with what he was doing. anyway, right after I made 5 prototypes, Greg called and said, "Bring some of them to Nashville and we'll get Curtis McPeake to be the official, designated tone ring tester." So I did. I flew to Nashville with three tone rings, Greg picked me up at the airport and we went right out to Curtis McPeake's house. It must have been in the spring of 1987.
There were a couple of other guys there too, I think Nick Kimmons. It was so funny, because Curtis told me at the time, "You know Dick? I've tested alot of tone rings. Nobody as ever been able to beat the pre-war tone ring sound." But I knew I had it. Everyone was always talking about age. But you have to understand that 50 years of age with a bronze formula means absolutely nothing.
Curtis took apart his banjo and put my tone ring into it. I was watching him as he began tuning the thing up. When a little smile slipped across his face that he tried not to show, I knew we were on the right track. Then he looked over at me and said, "By God Dick, you did it." By this time it was 9 o'clock at night, and by 9 the next morning Greg and I went over to Gibson and they had already prepared a mutually exclusive contract on the tone ring. A 20-hole, "pre-war" Gibson formula, and nobody (but me) knew exactly what it consisted of. So, that is how I got started with the Gibson banjos, beginning in 1987. To date, we have shipped around 4,000 tone rings to Gibson. We also have shipped 200 tone rings of a slightly different alloy to Flatiron. [A division of Gibson in Montana that no longer is making complete banjos.]
I became really motivated to pursue this whole tone ring project because of two big disappointments in the mid 1980's. When the Gibson Company first came out with the Earl Scruggs banjos, I ordered one. That old type is now referred to as a Stew-Mac Parts Kit, I guess. I was displeased with that, but I didn't want to give up on Gibson. I wanted a Gibson banjo because that is what everybody was supposed to play.
Anyway, I ordered the first gold-plated custom Gibson banjo from the Custom Shop in Nashville. It was interesting that when I got that banjo (it comes with the bridge folded down) and put the bridge up to tune it, the strings draped across the 22nd fret! That's how far off the neck cut was. It was an absolutely unbelievable thing. Those were a couple of real sad experiences. But it was a motivation for me to keep looking for a banjo -- which goes back, once again, to the tone ring, and making my own.
Our family business was named Anti-Friction Products, and our logo was stamped into the tone rings until mid-1991, when we closed the business because it was essentially part of the defense industry. Business was just drying up on the west coast and our lease was about to expire. So, we closed it. But, being intrigued with the banjo, I bought that part of the business out of the company and took it on as an individual. At that time, starting in 1992, the logo changed to my initials R K with a W below. These marks will be found on the last thousand of the Gibson 20-tone rings. All of them, though, have been made by me. both through the other company and now.
Anytime you come up with a new product, there is a learning curve involved. We went through trying to get the castings right, modifying the tooling and all sort of stuff. Once we had the bugs worked out for the 20-hole tone ring, I got to thinking that it's pretty sad that the best you can do is duplicate something that is 50 years old. If you are talking about the aging of wood, as in a guitar top, that is one thing. But that really does not apply with a banjo. You get a banjo, you get everything adjusted right, and you're off to the race track.
You're essentially set for the next 50 years. It's not in the same ballpark as a guitar because the instrument's half metal. The tonal qualities are being taken from the metal, not from wood. Really, the wood just holds a banjo together. Although I admit that the wood does provide an essence to the sound, the real important thing is the tone ring.
I had experimented with certain alloys and from time to time we would pour this, weld that. I also had access to a centrifugal foundry (through Anti-Friction Products). This is a process where molten metal is spun in a rotation barrel mechanism. It is hollow on the inside and spinning and there are orifices on the end to pour the molten metal into. (It is sealed off except for a small opening.) What happens in the centrifugal process is, the metal is spun to the outside of the barrel-shaped thing. There is a liner to the appropriate size of what you want in diameter, and you regulate the thickness of the metal by how much you pour into the mechanism. These things are spun. Once it has stopped spinning and cooled down, it comes out like a piece of pipe.
However, all the impurities and the gases in the metal have been forced to the inside by the sheer weight of the metal being forced to the outside. So you wind up with a product in which the ingredients in the metal have been mixed much better than they would be in a sand casting. You wind up with a much purer alloy with a denser molecular structure, and more gas- and impurity-free, because this object then has to be machined out and all the impurities on the inside turn into garbage or waste products. We know today that banjos like high quality metal. When we started, we didn't know if they wanted just metal, good metal or whatever, because we were after a tonal quality, not a strength-quality, or some other thing. We wanted a sound. Hence, we found out that they like this.
Now, this process that I have just described, and the resulting product, has come to be known as the "10-hole tone ring." The 10-hole is probably the first new tone ring on the market for many years. We don't preach it as a "pre-war ring" because it's not. The formulation on it is mine. It's not the 20-hole ring or anything else. It's also the most expensive casting method you can utilize.
The Rich and Taylor Banjo company that is just starting up in Nashville put a couple of these tone rings into their prototype banjos and have met with instant success with them. A lot of the professional banjo players here have been really pleased with them, according to Greg Rich. There are only eighty of them out there as I write this. Janet Davis has been selling them, and Rich & Taylor plans to use them in some of their banjos.
This whole business has been exciting. There are some other people I want to mention, Jim Burlile has been of great assistance to me throughout the years, and so has Doug Moore, who lives over in Imperial, and is a super banjo player. Burlile has lent technical assistance at different times -- tolerances and configurations and what not. From the very beginning, Doug Moore was fascinated in what we were trying to do, and I have used Doug as the official banjo tester, demonstrator and player. Doug Moore made the observation that one of the characteristics of the 10-hole ring is that the volume doesn't diminish as you go up the neck. It remains constant while on most banjos the sound will diminish. This one does not diminish.
Along the way we would sit for hours sometimes. We would be in my living room taking banjos apart and putting them together. Building in different loadings and stress loads, finding out what helped and what hindered a banjo's performance. Building stresses into the pot with the coordinator rod. We found out that that is a real "No-no" with this kind of tone ring.
What we like is a typically round shell. We measured the inside with a ruler to keep them within 1/16th of an inch in roundness and I like to be able to take the tone rings on and off by hand with little-to-no difficulty. You can lift them out, but I don't want them loose. These are just little se-up things. The neck has to be a good fit, tight. The tail piece has to be down on the stretcher band and has to be anchored on. This is especially true if it is a Presto type tailpiece to begin with. I am talking basically abut the Gibson style of banjos.
Some people are concerned about using the coordinator rods on their banjos. Once you get your pot set up straight, then you can adjust your string height with banjo bridges, not with coordinator rods, which I think have created difficulties for many people. I made up a whole bunch of maple bridges with some wood that came from and old piano that was built before the Civil War (talk about a pre-war bridge!) They worked out great -- Janet Davis has been selling them. The point is that we made them in different heights so that you could adjust your string height with your bridge once you got your pot set up straight because that is going to be the crux of the sound situation. this is going to solve problems for people who have found that the coordinator rods have created difficulties for them.
I want to mention too, another problem with older banjos -- namely their cost! 8 or 10 or 12 thousand for the cost of one of these supposed replicas is a lot of money for a banjo that is, in all probability, not an original anything -- unless you get lucky. Most of them have repro necks.
I just want to also add some background information about bronze. There is no natural metal named bronze. Bronze is a copper alloy. There are hundreds of different bronze formulas in a number of different categories. When yo talk about making a tone ring, there are four principle elements that go into it. Try and think of an apple pie, if you change this or that, you change the pie's taste. The very same thing happens in the tone ring business. You have to have a particular mix of four principle ingredients, and there could be thousands of combinations of all the different types of bronzes you could use. If people think that a bronze tone ring is just a bronze tone ring, they are mistaken. There are literally hundreds of combinations you can use.
Ironically enough, there was a bronze produced in the early part of this century that was used strictly for military purposes. The chemical specifications of bronze used during WWI, and the bronze used in the Gibson "pre-war" tone ring, are almost identical. I think that when the people at Gibson (in the 1920's) went out to have these tone rings cast, they probably wound up at a foundry that had this material in stock, because you buy ingots (which are like bricks of metal) in large amounts -- by the ton. These come from a smelter in a particular formulation. You can't buy a couple of ingots. I think that the alloy that was developed for a certain military need was discontinued, which would explain why, in the post-war era, the Gibson tone ring formula changed. If they went back to the same foundry, the same metal might not have been available or was not being poured. I offer this as an acceptable theory of how the pre-war tone ring alloy was first started.
When I first got involved with Gibson, Greg Rich had just gone there. Greg gave Gibson back the quality and the accuracy and the authenticity to Gibson banjo, and I like to think that I gave them back their sound. So they came out with a well built, good sounding instrument, like they should have been doing all along, but weren't.
The world of banjos is somewhat small. After the news got out that Gibson was once again making good sounding, good-playing banjos, Gibson had 1,000 back orders on their banjos. That was in 1988.
I enjoy an excellent relationship with Gibson. The Gibson Company has the exclusive rights to the pre-war type ally and the 20-hole tone ring, and we continue to do business as usual. I also supply some banjo hardware and the coordinator rods. The Rich and Taylor Company is going to be working with the new 10-hole tone ring, so it will be interesting to see how this new product is received. Onwards and upwards.
