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| Tone Ring Alchemist |
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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.]
