Don, I thought of this thread while watching a bluegrass special on PBS tonight. They featured the band, Mountain Heart. Their banjo player does a hell of a good job of picking. He apparently has a birth defect (I don't like that term, but not sure what else to call it.) It looks as though he was born with a thumb and a tiny bit of one finger on his left hand and that's about it, but you sure wouldn't know it to hear him pick. He uses his thumb and that one shortened finger across the top of the neck of his banjo instead of coming up from around the bottom. At first it looked as though he was using a slide like a steel guitar, then they showed a closer view. I don't know enough to know how he had it tuned or anything, but the stuff he got out of the banjo was pretty incredible.

kat