As with the Bishline Clermont, no regrets with this purchase. It's a totally professional instrument in terms of playability, looks and volume. Any banjo at any price point will not be enjoyable to play without a good setup and this one required a little bit of work to become playable. The intonation was way off but easily fixed in a few seconds by moving the bridge around. A more annoying problem was that the 2nd fret was about 0.010" higher than the 1st and 3rd frets. In fact strings fingered at the 1st fret would bottom out on the 2nd fret and go THUNK! I took about 0.008" off the second fret, re-crowned and polished it and the instrument plays perfect now. After looking at a lot of expensive banjo stands I ended up purchasing a very low cost banjo stand works that well with the banjo's low center of gravity and although it looks precarious it's extremely stable. The Gold Tone has a sharper tone than my Bishline which is more mellow but still very clear. I was able to procure a set of Keith D tuners which will go on the Bishline and a set of Schaller D tuners which will go on the Gold Tone. My recordings above represent my progress after 6 weeks with the Earl Scruggs 5 string banjo course purchased from Amazon.com. I have a lot of experience with pedal steel guitars so using the finger picks and learning a different picking patterns was not too hard. I can't recommend the Earl Scruggs course too highly as it includes tabs and sound files for the tabs all on one place if you use it on an iPad or iPhone. I've been using the blue Herco plastic thumb pick and old style heavy National metal fingerpicks which can attack the strings real hard when desired. At times it seems like I might want more attack from the thumb pick so I've ordered a BlueChip J D Crowe medium thumb pick, a Fred Kelly medium and one Zookie large and one Zookie medium thumb pick to try out. In addition to the Earl Scruggs course I am learning a lot of chromatic riffs off of YouTube and a really nice version of Blackberry Blossum from Ross Nickerson's "Beginning The Five String Banjo" course. I've actually tried out all these thumbpicks and have grown to like the hard attach and fit of the J D Crowe but it does have a noticeably bassier tone than my other favorite blue Herco thumbpick which provides less attack but a crisper tone. The Zookies and Fred Kelly picks, though not my personal favorites are totally useable so YMMV!