Cigar Box Guitar

[InternationalPlayboy]

Reading a

recent issue of Playboy, I noticed a blurb about a Canadian company that made cigar box guitars. These are custom

made and sell for around $200 a piece. I had never heard of anything like that before, but wanted one. A web search

found similar instruments going for around $60 on eBay and also several sites on making your own. From what I

gather, many of the old blues greats started on homade instruments like these.

Not really able to justify

spending $200 on something like that on this time and not sure of the eBay ones, I made my own three string slide

CBG over two weekends, complete with CBG amplifier (see attachment). The amp is a 7 watt kit I found online. It does

suffer from some hum problems, so I've got to work on shielding and/or grounding problems.

Even with the

flaws that comes from a first attempt, I'm pretty happy with my gitbox. Sounds pretty good, better than I Imagined.

The neck is poplar, with tuning gears from an old broken Les Paul copy from Sears that I played in my late teens to

early 20s. The frets are drawn on with a Sharpie permanent market and the scale came from where I took most of my

instruction, cigarboxguitars.com. The pickup is a Radio Shack transducer and the bridge, nut and string ferrules

came from a music supply company. The sound hole fillers are soffits from a mini loveur company.

Despite

having both regular and Hawaiian guitar lessons as a teen, I haven't picked up a guitar for about twenty years now.

So I'm having fun making noise and once I learn to play this thing, I will be down at tlhe local shopping centers,

playing until people give me money to stop.

I did probably spend over $60 making both the guitar and amp,

including buying tools I didn't have, but it was fun to make and I'm looking forward to my next one, which I think

may be a resonator model.

[belgareth]

Clever project, IP. Let us

know how it goes at the local shopping center

[bronzie]

Playboy, if you make one and

sounds decent and want to sell, send me a music sample via email, I will buy one off you, Im starting to collect

original weird string instruments, most are eastern, and some north african. already have a few baltic type

strings.

if you are into these tunes, try listening to a band called the tea party. they are canadian, and in

thier music incorporate alot of different traditional sounds, they are a very successful rock group, here in Oz, so

although these alternative type instruments are deemed for alternative type music by the masses, not so, if they are

played right for rock music