real guitar pickers here amongst us......

But first a little background......the lead guitarist of our church's praise band does a subtlety restrained overdriven bluesy zippity-doo-dah in between the singing but there are songs which something more primitive and twangy would be more appropriate. So I was asked to instruct him on the banjo but the problem is I am self-taught and don't play the ubiquitous conventional open g scrugg/reno style. So the guitarist aquires a six-string banjo in hopes that there would be no learning curve what with the same tuning as his les paul. Turns out the low e & a & d are heavy gauged and plunky sounding. So we experimented with lighter strings where the fatter were. Nashville tuning it is called. It is supposed to give a six string banjo the twang of a conventional banjo. Problem is the second string (b) is the same gauge/tuning octave as the old conventional tuning so that b is now oddly lower than the rest and sounds out of place. Which sets up the scenario for my question......

What string gauge/type would allow that 2nd string position tune a whole octave higher b ? Is this even possible ?

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So... is he going to play the 6-string banjo like a 6-string guitar? or is he going to retune the guitar to open "G" (which I do on occasion)... I've replaced the top (low octave) "E" string with another high octave "E" string before on a guitar to give it some "banjo like" playability... if he's gonna play the 6-string banjo like the old "river boat" style of strumming the strings or just individually plucking the strings the using "lighter gauge" strings will work fine... trying to get a blue grassy sound or mountain (Gandpa Jones) frailing sound with a 6-string banjo is a bit hard to do.. he might be better off getting a 4-string "jazz - river boat" style banjo and just tune the strings like the bottom 4 strings on a guitar... the learning curve on that would be fairly short.

I'm originally a guitar player that self taught myself banjo back in the 1970's... started with low-key two finger style blue grass sounding playing .. then upgraded to three finger Scruggs style as I go more proficient and then finally learned to frail mountain style much later...

good luck