A banjolele has four nylon strings tuned G, C, E, A on a neck about fifteen inches long. That is a ukulele. The drum head on the front changes what it sounds like and nothing about how it is played, so every ukulele chord chart, songbook and lesson works on it unaltered, from the first afternoon.
A five-string banjo has five steel strings tuned g, D, G, B, D on a neck of twenty-six and a quarter inches, and the first of those five runs from a peg set into the side of the neck at the fifth fret. You never fret it. Your thumb strikes it as a drone, and that one string is the reason a banjo sounds like a banjo.
So the question is not which one is easier. It is whether you want the banjo’s sound or the banjo’s instrument.
The banjolele — unless bluegrass or clawhammer is the point
It costs a fraction of what a banjo worth owning costs, it needs no setup, it will not hurt your fingertips, and if you have ever held a ukulele you can play a song on one this evening. The Kmise concert arrives strung with decent strings and with the action already set, which at this money is the exception. But if what you want is rolls and drones and the sound of a bluegrass record, none of that is on a banjolele at any price, and you should buy a banjo instead.
Side by side
| Banjolele | Five-string banjo | |
|---|---|---|
| Strings | 4, nylon | 5, steel |
| Standard tuning | G–C–E–A, same as a ukulele | g–D–G–B–D, open G |
| The fifth string | — | Starts at the fifth fret, tuned an octave above the third string, played as a drone |
| Scale length | 13⅝” soprano, 15–15½” concert | 26¼” |
| Head diameter | 8″ on most | 11″ |
| Weight | About 3 lb | 4½ lb open back, about 11 lb for a bluegrass banjo with a cast tone ring |
| Played with | Fingers, or a felt pick | Fingerpicks, or the back of a fingernail |
| Chord shapes | Every ukulele chart, unchanged | Its own |
| Sore fingertips | No | The first two or three weeks |
| What it plays | Music hall, 1920s and 30s jazz, anything a ukulele plays | Bluegrass, old-time, folk |
| Setup before it plays properly | Usually none | $50 to $100 on anything under about $300 |
The banjolele is a ukulele with a drum on the front
Four strings, nylon, tuned G, C, E, A, on a neck the length of a concert ukulele’s. Nothing in that list is different from the instrument sitting in the window of every music shop. A banjolele in your hands and a ukulele in your hands are the same object as far as your left hand is concerned, and that is not a rough approximation — the chord shapes are identical, the fingering charts are identical, and a person who plays one plays the other immediately.
What the drum head changes is volume and attack. The instrument was built for that reason and nothing else: the earliest banjoleles were made in 1917, by John A. Bolander and by Alvin D. Keech working separately, because vaudeville performers needed something with a ukulele’s playability that could be heard at the back of a theatre. It worked, and the thing had its decade — George Formby, Wendell Hall, Roy Smeck, most of British music hall and a good deal of 1920s dance-band jazz.
Practically, that means a banjolele is a good deal louder than a wooden ukulele and much quieter than a banjo. If you already play the ukulele and want more cut without learning anything new, it is the whole answer to your question.
The fifth string is the banjo
Look at the neck of a five-string banjo from the side and there is a tuning peg sticking out of it halfway up, at the fifth fret. The string running from it is shorter than the other four, and it is tuned high — an octave above the third string, not below the fourth. It is the highest-pitched string on the instrument and it sits nearest your thumb.
You do not play notes on it. It rings the same pitch every time your thumb catches it, threaded through the melody by the right hand. Scruggs-style rolls are built around it. Clawhammer’s bum-ditty ends on it — the ditty is the thumb dropping onto the fifth string. Take it away and neither technique exists.
A banjolele has four strings, all of them full length, all of them fretted. So it will not teach you the banjo, and time on a banjo will not prepare you for a banjolele. Same family and the same bright, percussive voice; no shared technique and no shared repertoire.
They do not sound the same, and the head size is why
Both are unmistakably banjo-family — that dry, percussive front edge on every note is what a stretched head does. But an eight-inch head and an eleven-inch head are not the same instrument. The smaller one sits higher, holds less bass and stops sooner. Put a banjolele next to a bluegrass banjo and it sounds like a smaller, drier, higher version of the same idea, which is exactly what it is.
Nylon does the rest. Steel strings ring and sustain and bite; nylon softens the attack and shortens the note. It is why a banjolele is friendly at close range and why it will disappear behind a guitar in a room full of people.
Eight inches is not a law, though, and it is the number to look at if the sound is what you came for. Deering build their banjo ukuleles on full-size banjo pots — eleven inches on the concert, twelve on the tenor — and a ukulele neck on an eleven-inch pot gets closer to a banjo’s actual voice than anything else will.
Weight, size and playing at ten at night
A banjolele weighs about three pounds and is roughly two feet long, which is hand-luggage territory. An open-back five-string banjo is about four and a half pounds. A bluegrass banjo with a cast bell bronze tone ring and a one-piece flange is around eleven, and nearly all of that difference is metal rather than wood.
Volume follows the same order and it is the practical question if you share walls. A resonator banjo is a loud instrument by design — that is what the resonator is for. An open back is noticeably softer. A banjolele is softer again, and nylon strings mean it has no ring to carry through a floor.
If neither is quite it, the answer is a tenor banjo
Four steel strings, no fifth string, a scale between twenty and twenty-three inches, and a full-size head. It has the banjo’s ring and volume without the drone string and without the right-hand technique that goes with it, and it is the banjo of Irish sessions and of 1920s jazz.
Tuned in fifths — C–G–D–A, or G–D–A–E if it is going to a session — it reads like a fiddle or a mandolin. Tuned D–G–B–E, which players call Chicago tuning, the top four strings of a guitar and the whole of a baritone ukulele land on it unchanged. If you want a banjo you can strum, that is the instrument, not the banjolele — how it differs from a plectrum banjo, and which tenor banjos are worth buying.
What to buy, on either side of the fork
Kmise Concert Banjolele
- Concert scale, four nylon strings, G–C–E–A
- Polyester head, closed geared tuners
- Resonator unbolts, so it plays open-backed too
- Aquila strings fitted, action set at the factory
- Gig bag, strap, clip tuner, picks and a bracket wrench in the box
- ~$90
At the bottom of this market a banjolele tends to arrive with the head slack and the action high, and the couple of hours it takes to put right are how a new instrument ends up in a cupboard. This one comes with the action set near 3mm at the twelfth fret and Aquila strings already on it, which is the whole difference between an instrument and a souvenir.
The resonator coming off matters more than it sounds. Bolted on, the sound is punchier and throws forward; taken off, it softens and sits back, which is the friendlier setting for playing in a room with other people in it. It also has a piezo pickup fitted, so it will go through an amp without a microphone.
- Playable out of the box, which is rare at the price
- Aquila strings rather than the usual fishing line
- Two instruments’ worth of sound from the removable resonator
- Everything you need to start is included
- Hardware you would replace before you sold it on
- The bundled clip tuner is the first thing you will outgrow
- No case, only a bag
Kala Mahogany Concert Banjo Ukulele
- 15″ concert scale, 18 frets
- 8″ Remo Weatherking head on a five-ply mahogany shell
- Open back
- Aquila Super Nylgut strings
- 24¼” overall, gig bag included
- ~$225
A Remo head is the specification that separates this from the budget end. It is the same head a real banjo wears, it holds its tension through a change of season, and it is the single component most responsible for a banjolele sounding tight rather than thuddy. The five-ply mahogany shell under it does the rest.
Open back, so it is the quieter of the two here and the more forgiving one to practise on. At two feet and change it is the instrument to buy if you expect to still be playing it in five years, and it is priced below Kala’s own list.
- Remo head and Aquila strings, both from new
- Full 15″ concert scale — no crowded frets
- Built by a company that makes ukuleles for a living
- Quiet enough for a flat
- Twice the price of the Kmise for a smaller jump than that suggests
- No resonator, so no way to get the harder sound
- Bag only, and nothing else in the box
Jameson 5-String Banjo
- Five steel strings, 26¼” scale, g–D–G–B–D
- Remo Weatherking head, five-ply maple and mahogany shell
- Resonator unbolts
- Geared fifth-string tuner
- Purpleheart fingerboard, 24 brackets
- ~$175, plus $50 to $100 for a setup
The removable resonator is the reason this is the first banjo to buy when you cannot yet say whether you are heading for bluegrass or clawhammer. Bolt it on for volume and bite; take it off for the lighter, drier old-time sound. That decision usually costs you a second instrument, and here it costs a screwdriver.
Budget it at $250 rather than $175. Nothing at this price has been touched by a human being before it ships, and an hour with someone who knows banjos — bridge placed, head tensioned, action dropped — does more for how it plays than any spec on the page. Our first banjo guide goes further into the choice.
- Resonator on or off, so no style decision on day one
- Geared fifth peg, which the cheapest banjos skip
- Remo head rather than an unbranded one
- Full 26¼” scale — a real banjo, not a short one
- Needs a setup before it plays as well as it should
- Heavier than a banjolele by several pounds
- Steel strings on an untrained hand hurt for a fortnight
If clawhammer is already the plan, skip the step and take the Gold Tone AC-1 at around $315 instead. It is an open back with a composite rim, three and three-quarter pounds, and it leaves the factory set up, which is roughly the money the Jameson’s setup costs anyway. More of them in open back banjos.
What you will want alongside it
A clip-on tuner does both instruments and costs about twenty dollars — the Snark ST-2 reads a nylon string and a steel one equally well, which not every cheap tuner does. Clip it to the peghead and leave it there.
Strings are not interchangeable between the two and the sets are not expensive. A banjolele wants Aquila Nylgut banjo ukulele strings in high G, which is what most of them ship with anyway. A five-string takes a set like D’Addario’s nickel 10–23 — the standard medium gauge, and worth changing before you decide a new banjo sounds dull. There is more on choosing gauges if you want it.
For the banjo, a method book is worth more than any accessory, because the right hand is the part you cannot work out by looking at a chord chart. The Hal Leonard Banjo Method Book 1 is the standard one and teaches Scruggs style from the fifth string outwards. A banjolele needs no such thing — any ukulele book works, which is rather the point of it.
FAQs
What is the difference between a banjo and a banjolele?
Both stretch a drum head over a circular pot, and that is where the similarity stops. A banjolele has four nylon strings tuned G, C, E, A on a ukulele-length neck of about fifteen inches. A five-string banjo has five steel strings tuned g, D, G, B, D on a neck of twenty-six and a quarter inches, and its fifth string starts at the fifth fret and is played as a drone by the thumb.
Is a banjolele just a ukulele?
As far as playing it goes, yes. Same four strings, same tuning, same scale length, same chord shapes, same nylon under the fingers. The drum head changes the sound and nothing about the technique, so any ukulele songbook, chord chart or lesson works on a banjolele without adjustment.
Does a banjolele sound like a banjo?
It has the same dry, percussive attack, because that is what a stretched head does to a plucked string. It is higher and drier than a banjo and it stops sooner, because most banjoleles use an eight-inch head against a banjo’s eleven, and because nylon does not ring the way steel does. Deering build theirs on full eleven- and twelve-inch banjo pots, which get closer than anything else.
Can you use banjo chords on a banjolele?
No. A five-string banjo is tuned to an open G chord and a banjolele is tuned G, C, E, A, so the same shape gives a different chord on each. Ukulele charts are the ones that transfer, and they transfer exactly.
Can you play bluegrass on a banjolele?
Not in any recognisable form. Scruggs-style rolls and clawhammer are both built on the fifth string, which a banjolele does not have, and nylon strings will not produce the ring those styles depend on. A banjolele plays what a ukulele plays, with more bite — music hall, 1920s and 30s jazz, songs.
Which is easier to learn, a banjo or a banjolele?
The banjolele, comfortably. Four nylon strings on a short neck, three-finger chord shapes, no sore fingertips, and a first song within an afternoon. A five-string banjo asks you to learn a right-hand technique before you can play anything at all, and steel strings on a twenty-six-inch scale take a few weeks to stop hurting. That is a reason to expect the banjo to be slower, not a reason to buy the banjolele instead — they play different music.
How do a banjo and a banjolele compare in size and weight?
A banjolele is about two feet long and around three pounds. An open-back five-string banjo is about three feet and four and a half pounds. A bluegrass banjo with a cast bell bronze tone ring and a one-piece flange runs to about eleven pounds, and the extra weight is metal in the pot rather than a bigger instrument.
What music is each instrument best suited to?
The five-string banjo is the bluegrass and old-time instrument, and the only banjo that plays either. The banjolele belongs to British music hall and 1920s and 30s dance-band jazz — George Formby is most of its recorded repertoire — and it handles anything else a ukulele accompanies. For Irish tunes or trad jazz, neither is the instrument; a tenor banjo is.
What do a banjo and a banjolele cost?
A banjolele worth owning starts around $90 and a good one is about $225. A five-string banjo starts around $175, and you should add $50 to $100 for a setup, because nothing at that price has been adjusted by a person before it ships. From about $315 you are into banjos that arrive playable, and about $600 buys an American-made one you would not replace.