Overview of
Style 5
Mastertone Banjos
Gibson's "Mastertone" line of higher-end banjos debuted in 1925 with style 5 as its highest-priced model. Style 5's specifications included a walnut neck and resonator with two concentric rings of multicolored wood purfling on the back of the resonator:
The neck, resonator,
and bottom of the rim were bound with this same multicolored purfling along
with, in most cases, what Gibson called "iridescent ivoroid":
Style 5 banjos also featured an oval and fan design in wood marquetry on the back of the peghead:
The hardware was gold-plated with engraving on the tension hoop, armrest, tone ring skirt, flange, and tailpiece. The earliest style 5 Mastertones had grooved tension hoops with flat hooks, first seen in conjunction with holes in the outer tone-ring skirt:
This first Mastertone
tone ring was the ball-bearing design with sixty holes; later examples had no
holes in the outer skirt:
Throughout the production run of the
style 5
Mastertone, the peghead was fiddle-shaped and, along with the rosewood
fingerboard, was inlaid with the "wreath" pattern in mother-of-pearl:
The
earliest version, seen primarily on examples from 1925, had the word "Mastertone"
inlaid in small individual letters on the peghead just under the script "Gibson"
logo:
Circa 1926, the word "Mastertone"
moved to a mother-of-pearl block at the end of the fingerboard:
Circa 1927, all
Mastertone models including
style 5 changed from the ball-bearing tone ring to a
cast metal raised-head, or archtop, tone ring. While the exterior
"beveled" appearance of the head remained the same, the new tone ring
construction is evident inside the body. Some of the earlier raised-head
rings had no holes. . .
. . . while the
forty-hole variety soon became the standard on all Mastertone models:
With the change to cast
raised-head tone rings also came a change to notched, rather than grooved,
tension hoops with round, rather than flat, hooks:
Style 5 Mastertones of the 1920s were typically equipped with Kerschner tailpieces engraved with the word "DeLuxe". . .
. . . while a few later examples were equipped with the Grover "clamshell"
tailpiece:
Style 5 was discontinued with
the introduction of style 6
in 1928 and remained out of production until being revived briefly by Gibson as
a reissue model in the 1990s.
