The Great Synth and Software Sampled Banjo Roundup

How many banjo players does it take to create four different sample libraries?

The historical scarcity of decent, playable convincing banjo libraries for electronic musicians is a personal matter. That’s because I’m both a professional 5-string banjo player (you’ve probably heard me on many jingles, perhaps on stage or recordings with renowned artists), and a sound designer (Korg, Silicon Graphics, Seer Systems, etc.).

For years, electronic banjo emulations have seemed like someone took a decrepit instrument out of a closet, recorded a couple of samples, and committed them to ROM. (One nameless manufacturer’s response to my complaint about this was a chart showing how the use of banjo instruments was dwarfed by acoustic piano ones. Oh well.)
 
So the banjo is the Rodney Dangerfield of acoustic instruments: it gets no respect. But has that changed? Have banjo libraries kept up with the improvements in other sample libraries?
 
In fact, five-string banjo is a thorny instrument to sample. That high-pitched fifth string is situated next to the lowest wound string, rather than sitting at the normal position of the top string, confounding a linear keyboard layout. It’s often referred to as a “drone string,” as it starts at the fifth fret, and older playing styles often use it as a drone.
 
Since the days of classical banjo and banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs, however, the string is fretted and is essential to more modern styles of picking. The four libraries under review here have taken some of the unique characteristics of fretted strings and the banjo into consideration. 
 
Realitone Realibanjo $59

For composers in need of quick and dirty bluegrass-style tracks, Realibanjo offers helpful amenities to get started. It’s actually been out a few years, and it was always intended to be quick and simple, not a substantial sample library like Realitone’s Sunset Strings and Nightfall string instruments. Nonetheless it is one of the options on the market, so we’ll include it here.
 
The upper range of keys (highlighted in green) select and trigger a variety of useful, if not entirely authentic, rolling patterns. These patterns can sync to your host’s tempo, or you can drag and drop the resulting MIDI data to a track for further editing.
 
Along the way you can add swing, change the speed to half- or double-time, or humanize the pattern to add a bit of slop to the timing. An Auto-Legato feature ensures that one note will slide to the next at half- and whole-step intervals, and a key switch at B1 allows slides of larger intervals if you wish. This allows convincing slides without the interference of the frets.
 
Realitone might consider an upgrade that allows for variable speed, as sliding speed is rarely consistent in real life and often varies with tempo.

Realibanjo’s UI is pretty simple to understand. Switches toggle two banjo articulations: Normal, straightforward banjo picking; and Mute: an almost toneless damped sound. Bluegrass pickers often resort to muting chords on the off-beat when another instrument is soloing. I often do this when the mandolin drops out of the rhythm to solo. Handily, Realibanjo supports assignable MIDI CC messages so you can switch back and forth as needed.


The Fret pull-down menu is essentially a capo simulation, with notes sounding slightly damped when any fret above Open is selected. Velocity opens up the tone a bit. Real-world fretted notes will definitely sound different from open strings, but the difference seems exaggerated here. You get a switch to toggle reverb, simply on or off with a knob to change the amount. 

The Drag and Drop and End with Chord fields relate to the controls on the right side of the panel, which deal with the library’s built-in patterns. These patterns are a mixed bunch of patterns, mostly emulations of banjo rolls.
 
In fairness, bluegrass banjo can get pretty convoluted, and the supplied patterns create a decent feel, if not a perfectly authentic performance. There is no provision for user-created patterns in the instrument, but you can create them in your DAW the standard way.
 
Ring the banjo. Like everything else about it, the sound of the banjo is open to debate. Some people like bright, crackly instruments in the style of the late Ralph Stanley; others prefer a deep, mellow, plunky tone somewhere between Bela Fleck and Earl Scruggs.
 
Banjo session great Bobby Thompson covered his banjo head in tape to kill off any spiky overtones. I like a bit more enharmonic stuff, but your mileage may vary.
 
Realibanjo has the spiky overtones in spades, and because the voice editing options are minimal, what you hear is pretty much what you get.

I’m not certain what particular model instrument was sampled, but I get the impression that it needed a bit of a setup, in particular tightening of the head for a bit more brilliance in the tone. That’s mostly a matter of taste.
 
The fourth string (which thankfully extends to C) sounds thin to my ear. With the library weighing in at just 200MB, the samples sound somewhat abbreviated – as expected, since this is a light library, rather than a deep one with all the complexities of tone the instrument possesses. Not surprisingly, that makes it suitable for mixes where the banjo isn’t too exposed.

 
Still, part of Realibanjo’s pool of samples is shared with assorted cries of “Yee-Haw” and other stereotypical musical tropes. As a professional musician, I wish that the extra data would have been diverted to longer instrument samples rather than contributing to the canon of banjo jokes.

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Bolder Sounds Bluegrass Banjo 3.1 $59.95
 
This is a generously sampled, nicely set up instrument with a number of features aimed at a convincing performance.

For starters, they chose a boutique Ron Stewart signature model manufactured by Yates. The tone of the samples throughout is fat and plunky, partially due to the chromatic sampling of all five strings up to the seventh fret.
 
What’s more, you can adjust the resonance of the instrument using an impulse response sampled from the banjo. This significantly increases the tonal responses of the instrument, and because it’s derived from the instrument, it never sounds synthetic.

To keep things real (virtually, at least), extensive round-robin mapping keeps notes from sounding repetitive. All the strings are sampled with five different right hand plucking positions between the neck and bridge. That is especially important because it brings multiple tonal options, and bluegrass banjo players often vary their tone continuously.

 You get a button that lets you modulate the pluck position (as it’s called) with velocity – which seems odd to me, as you might want to play softly – but closer to the bridge or louder on neck-position notes. Luckily, you can have your cake and eat it: key switches at the lower end of the keyboard select different pluck positions. I prefer to assign another MIDI CC with the Learn function; a fader to modulate the position feels more continuous and natural.
 
Bolder hasn’t forgotten all of the cool banjo articulations, either. You can trigger samples of Scruggs-style tuners, which are cams attached to the second and third string tuners that are used to create pedal-steel guitar-like bends.
 
There are hammer-on and pull-off switches and whole-step slides – and you can vary their speed. All of these articulations are also bolstered by round-robin maps.
 
String muting is also continuously variable. All the articulations are on a separate page, and fully programmable, as are the key switches, pitch bend, and vibrato. Unique to this library is Bolder’s scripted Intelligent Pitch Bend, enabling one note to bend without affecting simultaneously held notes. That type of scripting would be a worthy addition to any stringed instrument.

There’s lots more, including built-in EQ, a modicum of voicing tools (including a resonant, low-pass filter), and a decent handful of effects including reverb, delay, and chorus.
All in all, Bolder Sounds Bluegrass Banjo 3.1 is a worthy addition to any sample library arsenal.

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Impact Soundworks Special Reserves: Nashville Banjo $39
 
Impact Soundworks seems to have a knack for eminently playable instruments, so I looked forward to their take on bluegrass-style banjo. Adding to the library’s cred, the samples were played and recorded by ace banjoist Ron Stewart, one of the most musical and articulate players in the bluegrass banjo cosmos. The banjo is a 1951 Gibson RB 250 Mastertone: a holy grail among many bluegrass-banjo pickers. 

Nashville Banjo is a relatively simple library; there’s no deep editing for synthesis. Instead, Nashville Banjo’s real-time controls are meant to lend expression and variety to evoke realistic bluegrass banjo.
 
Controls are laid out as a group of knobs – a somewhat curious choice for simply toggling poly or mono performance. However, it’s good in conjunction with the Release Time knob when you want to emulate a “single-string” guitar-style performance, in which one note cuts off the next. 
 
Nashville banjo weighs in at 1.97GB, which includes a chromatic, full range sampling of each string – including a separate key map for the 5^th string. The string is identical in gauge to the first string, but the difference is subtle here.

There isn’t much in the way of tone alteration here. You can add a bit of release noise, but in truth, bluegrass banjo rarely exhibits much in the way of release noise. The Pluck control is so subtle as to be barely noticeable.
 
Modulating the Hand Position knob imparts a degree of realism, but this is essentially a crossfade between similar notes fretted on different strings. It would have been more effective if the recording captured picking-hand distance between bridge and neck positions. Nonetheless, the result is useful for emulating a banjo picker’s real-time playing.

Nashville Banjo Is a good choice for a no-frills banjo library with baked-in, authentic bluegrass tone. I wish there were round-robin sampling and more tonal variation available, but played carefully it can provide a convincing recreation of a pro-sounding banjo.

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Ample Sound Ethno Banjo $119
 
Ample Sound specializes in stringed instruments. A quick glance at their products page reveals a slew of guitars: acoustic, electric, and slide varieties, along with a number of Chinese instruments. That’s a small wonder, as the company is in Beijing, China.
You’ll also find Ethno Banjo among their offerings. I’m no purist, but I often balk at the use of Ethno, because it’s a made-up word connoting folky authenticity. Nevertheless, this instrument is folky and authentic.

Unlike the other libraries in this batch, which all rely on Native Instruments Kontakt, Ethno Banjo is a bespoke sample-playback instrument, comprising a sample editor and some unique playback features.

Samples derive from a Deering Sierra, a well-made, sweet-toned professional instrument. A rendering of the instrument greets you at startup.
 
Just below the image are the instrument’s performance and sound-shaping controls, most notably faders for Body, Bridge, Neck, and Master. These can be mixed to emulate the player’s variations on the picking hand’s position.
 
The list of additional articulation and editing features is extensive, including several types of legato behavior, among them hammer-on and pull-off as well as slides, automatic legato.
 
There are also three modes of playback: Instrument, Keyboard, and Solo. The first adheres to physical stringed-instrument rules, specifically only one note at a time on a string. Keyboard is a basic mode in which notes of the same pitch can overlap. Solo is a basic Mono Mode setup with only single-note playback at a time.

I used Keyboard Mode for the music demos in this story, and the sequences come from a real project. This mode lets the notes ring out and overlap, which helped tracks behave more like bluegrass instruments. In use with tablature, which can be imported, your files might play back more accurately using Instrument mode. 

Banjoists will appreciate the ability to tune any string within a whole step up or down of its default tuning (gDGBD). That means that you can recreate a number of popular alternate tunings used by Earl Scruggs and others. You can also use the built-in capo, which provides a subtle, slightly warmer timbre to the strings.
 
As to tablature, a Tab-Reader feature is among Ethno Banjos unusual amenities. (If you use it, you’ll understand the following; if not, feel free to skip the next paragraph.)
 
Ethno Banjos can import GP3, GP4, GP5, and GPX tablature files. A banjo-playing friend emailed a Tabledit file of a popular Earl Scruggs tune, which – after conversion to a GP file – played back without a hitch. You can drag the tab to a MIDI track. Unfortunately, the MIDI file didn’t take kindly to the second ending and simply appended it to the first.

The graphics for the instruments FX section are as pleasing to the eye as they are informative. For example, choosing a reverb type provides a picture of its dispersion pattens, and EQ and Filter Curve graphics provide points to grab, curve, and shape. The Echo page is a piece of work – grab a point and you can localize the reflections.

Most importantly, the samples are hands-down the best-sounding capture of a bluegrass banjo I have yet heard: sweet-toned and plunky, with an unhyped, genuine banjo tone. The effects are great, and the feature set is clearly a cut above.
 
If you are looking for a bluegrass banjo library that can even satisfy a picky (sic) banjo player, here is your instrument.

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Take your pick
 
Any one of these libraries will give you a decent simile of an acoustic banjo, depending on your budget, the depth of detail you need, and the level of exposure in your tracks. All are relatively inexpensive.
 
Although Ethno banjo is considerably more expensive than the others, the combination of its sound, ability to load tablature, and create user music patterns does give it an edge.