Shubb FS-LB 5th String Long Bar Banjo Capo - Stainless Steel

I've played banjo nearly 50 years and have tried spikes and a different type of sliding capo. The Schubb has worked the best for me. Two Gibsons and a Derring all have one.

I have several banjos and have always used hooks (model railroad spikes) to capo the 5th string at higher frets. The Shubb slider is not hard to install (with the help of supplied instructions) and if installed correctly provides a good clamping action and a clear sound on the 5th string, unlike the spring loaded sliding capos that were common before the Shubb and, in my experience never really sounded good. However, even after using the Shubb for a couple of months I am still getting use to working around the bar and the sliding stop piece as I move up the neck. When installed in the correct position, the slider bar also covers up most or all of the side dots that indicate fret positions, so if you look for those higher frets rather than depend on muscle memory to shift to the correct position you will have to adjust your technique or look at the face of the fingerboard to see where you are going. The 5th string does stay closer to the correct pitch when using the Shubb than it does when you are using hooks, but small corrections are still needed. There is a clearer advantage if you want to play in keys that require a higher pitch 5th string (e.g., C or D in G tuning or F and G playing out of a D position) because it is faster and easier than using a hook at the 12th fret and retuning down. I think some people may find it substantially better than using hooks, but while I am glad I tried the Shubb, I am more likely to go the hook route for banjos I build in the future.

i used to use spikes to capo the 5th string, until i tied the Schubb capo which was over 15 years ago! i have since used them on all my 5 string banjos, and have set them up on my students instruments as well.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best 5th string capo around - it's solid, smooth and precise, and you won't lose it in a dark room during a performance or jam. It also serves as a position indicator so you can easily see where the string 'starts', unlike railroad spikes. You do just need to be careful installing it - follow the instructions exactly or have a pro do it (I'm actually not all that handy and I've installed a few of these).

This 5th string capo was as big a piece of junk as the shorter one that I installed a week ago. I have been installing these kind of Shubb capos for the past 46 years. I've used them on Fenders, Gibsons, and Deering Banjos. I paid $4000 dollars for my Gibson 10 years ago and installed this kind of capo on it myself because no one else is going to touch one of my babies and it works fine. Luckily I was installing this capo on a used Deering that I bought off of an on-line swap shop but it still cost me $450 which isn't chump change. I wound up punching 5 holes on top of the neck slightly behind the fret depth on this banjo to install both of them, one at a time, which infuriates me. About the 2nd time I used this thing to capo my banjo to A the capo device flipped off the track. Wow, quality control problems. CCC - Cheep China Crap. Thank God for Amazon Prime. I am going to give Shubb one more chance and order a capo that comes in the blue box like the one I ordered in 2019. The last two came in a brown boxes. Maybe it is the box. If that doesn't work I will have to resort to the railroad spikes which I don't like because they stretch your string out of tune and you have to retune every time you cap it.

Good

Fit just fine. Nice price.

My old Shubb was worn out, so I got this one as a replacement. I'm not impressed with the quality of manufacturing on this one. My old one was still a lot tighter after 40 years of use. I added a strip of 0.004" shim stock under the mechanism to take out the excessive slop at the ends of the bar, then had to shave the bar down in the middle about 0.010" before it would slide end-to-end.