The Gary Sosebee bridges

Gary Sosebee makes several different styles of custom bridges, all of which are superb. Gary's standard bridge is made from recovered maple that came out of a cotton mill located near his home that was not completed until 1924. The wood is heartwood, not sapwood-in comparison with the trees of this generation.

When I first started doing business with Gary, I asked if he would send me several of his bridges to test for consistency of transmission of tonal qualities. They were all excellent: if you were to weigh them by the gram weight, they would be interchangeable (should anything ever happen to the bridge you've worked your setup around). Gary gives great attention to detail in the manner in which he initially cuts the wood-stock that he uses for his bridges. If he can't cut a piece to align the grain lies perpendicular to the angle in which this bridges leans, he refuses to use it in the production of his bridges. Gary also uses extremely fine grained ebony on his bridges and only buys stock that meets his consistency requirements.

He also cuts his string notches in a manner where the string sets no deeper than needed to keep the string in place & give maximum string vibration. His attention to relief notches on the tailpiece side is something that is often over looked by many bridge makers. It is this attention to detail that makes Gary's bridges outstanding.

He has also embarked on making bridges out of submerged wood from Lake Superior. This wood is very dense & possesses great tonal qualities that other woods do not. They are several reasons for this, cell structure being one, and the "age" for the wood being another. Once the banjo is setup taking into account the compression of the material from the water pressure & the density of this wood, the quality of note separation is superb.

Only the extremely old distressed wood, through many years of drought, can come close to equaling the transmission qualities of note separation of this wood. This wood is from truly first-growth canopy trees. It transfers bass & midrange tones superbly, and really accentuates the bass strings transmission & timbre. All of Gary Sosebee's bridges are superb in consistency in tone, timbre & and attention to detail.

Keep on Pickin'
Angie's Banjo.com