Cigars and strings
Cigar Box Guitars
I found and interesting web site while surfing
blues related sites: a site on how to build 'cigar box guitars'. Apparently many
blues players who couldn't afford a real guitar made do with a home made guitar
made of 3 strings and a cigar box. I thought that would fit perfectly with my
plans to busk as a one man band (drums, guitar, harmonica, vocals).
I quickly started making plans to buy
the parts, knowing full well that there was a large chance that I would fail
miserably as i was notoriously BAD at building anything from scratch, even with
detailed instructions. My total cost would be about 5 hours and $20 so I figured
what the heck, might as well give it a try. I started by emailing someone on the
email digest group from yahoo Groups asking where I might find a cigar box that
would work for this project as I couldn't find anyplace in town that sold
anything but the tiny cigarette boxes which are about as big a a cigar box uke
would be. I quickly goat a response form a nice fellow who offered to send me
two boxes for the cost of shipping. I quickly obliged and fired off payment via
paypal. They came a few days later, after I had enough time to procure the other
parts which included a $2 piezo pickup form Radio Shack, a 2x4, guitar tuners, a
guitar jack and some bolts for the nut and
bridge.
The hardest part was cutting a
chunk out of the neck that would fit around the cigar box - I didn't have the
right tools and it took me several hours of hacking and sanding to get it right.
Then it was easy - attach the tuning machines, pull the strings thru, put the
top on and test it as an acoustic guitar. It sounded fine so the next night I
added the guitar jack and pickup and plugged it all in. it sounded great! A
little trebly but that can be adjusted on my amp. I grabbed three strings (A, D
and G) and tuned them to DAD which was the same as the top three strings of my 6
string acoustic guitar. All was well. I transposed a few of my open tuned songs
to the 'CBG" and off I went.
After
playing with it for a few days I decided to add a tone control to help bring
down the mid range a bit. This was easier said than done as there weren't any
instruction on how to add a tone control without a volume control. After several
hours of searching the web and experimenting, I finally stumbled across the
proper wiring and it all worked - except for one thing: it hummed mercilessly. I
spent another couple of hours shielding the tone knob and finally succeeded in
removing the awful hum. i then replaced the nails that held the top on with wood
screws (MUCH better choice!) and my CBG was complete. You can hear some of the
tunes I recorded on it here as well as see some pics of
it.
http://homepage.mac.com/bjagitsch/PhotoAlbum39.html
Posted: Mon - February 14, 2005 at 12:16 AM