An Homage to Will Key's Paramount
by Lew Stern
Paramounts intrigued me first as architecturally unique banjos. The rims represent an evolution of innovations from the minds of William L. Lange and William P. Rettburg, patented acoustical experiments and shapes that emerged in the period from 1920 to late 1930. The tailpieces were uniquely cammed inventions themselves, and also emerged in an evolution of ideas from the late 1910 to the early 1930 period. The rims are weighty, sturdy structures built as archtops, configured so that metal pieces run in intervals across the top of the rim toward the metal tone ring, forming compartments that must have represented some great theoretical design intended to make clever use of space, air and the juncture of metal and wood to produce a unique sound.
I confess to having little of an engineers' or designer's understanding of what Lange and Rettburg intended in structural and scientific terms when they organized their thoughts and applied for their patent. If anything, I have more of an intuitive sense of what emerged from their experiments: an extremely bright sound that lends itself well to all sorts of playing styles, especially up picking, in my opinion.
So, after several practice runs on old maple necks that I keep around the shop for precisely such eventualities,, I took the simple Style One Paramount I won in auction, detached the copy plectrum neck, mounted it in the fangs of a well padded portable vice, squared it up with a level, secured it to the platform of my drill press, selected the right and pre-tested bit, and slowly cut into the neck to excavate the hole for the fifth string peg, right where the 4th fret meets the fifth, as close enough to the photo of Will's own work as possible.
I pre-tested seating several different kinds of fifth string pegs, looking to find something that might match the original Page tuners (not from the Style One, but painstakingly accumulated in my search for Paramount artifacts). I eventually settled on the simplest all metal peg, resembling what Will selected for his project, possibly because the part of the peg that would anchor into the neck was shaped cylindrically, could be seated by screwing the mechanism straight down into the neck instead of cutting a hole for a modern generic fifth string peg, wider at the mouth and narrower at the bottom of the shaft, which I thought would likely be harder to accomplish on a narrow plectrum neck.
I selected an old ivoroid pip, possibly off of an old Fairbanks, large enough to exceed the height of the fret alongside of which it would be anchored, mimicking what I could figure out was the specs for Will's banjo. I had to cant it slightly to the left side of the fingerboard, and drill the hole close to the purfling, always a risky proposition, but the stem was thin enough so that I was able to seat the thing securely without doing structural damage to the fingerboard. The fifth string runs a bit close to the 4th, far enough away to allow good clawhammering and accurate downstroking in up-piacking patterns, but close enough to have to concentrate on getting finger positions right the first time.
