My first banjo was an old Vega Little Wonder with a new five-string neck. I played that for a year or two and then picked up my fathers Wildwood.

I played the Wildwood for almost twenty years. When it finally died (it actually fell apart) somebody gave me a Wildwood Heirloom long neck.

I can't stand neck banjos - even when they are free - so I swapped out the long neck for a factory-second standard neck. The long neck and the few usable parts from my old Wildwood wound up being given to one of my students so he could build himself a professional level banjo.

Anyway, I played the Frankenstein Wildwood for about five years. It wasn't great, but it worked well enough for an instrument that cost me less than $300 to put together.

Earlier this year my online workshops started getting more attention and thousands of new banjo players started asking me for recommendations on what banjo to buy.

Since I work pretty hard to keep what I do noncommercial I decided to refuse to recommend or endorse any particular brand. People started buying Wildwoods simply because they saw the logo on my headstock, so I gave away my Wildwood (it went to a firefighter in Bristol while I was visiting the UK) and picked up a generic Vega copy with nothing on the headstock.

So nowadays I play "a banjo". When students ask what to buy I tell them to get what they can afford and make the most of it.

-Patrick
http://tangiersound.wordpress.com/