The How-To Repository for the Cigar Box Guitar Movement!
How to Build and Play Cigar Box Guitars and other Homemade Instruments
One-string cigar box violins/fiddles played a big role in early vaudeville performances, and if you’ve ever thought about building one, here’s your chance! We just added a new entry to the “Historic Plans” section of the knoweldgebase – a great old magazine article from 1948 showing you how to build a simple one-string cigar box violin.
We even included a link to a video post over on Cigar Box Nation where you can see W. C. Fields making quite a todo over playing one of these instruments.
Shane Speal may be King of the Cigar Box Guitar, but he doesn’t just stop there – he has built and collected an amazing variety of crazy homemade instruments. In the article linked below, he walks you through how he built a dobro (resonator guitar) using a cheap metal mailbox. I’ve seen him play this monster on stage and it really has a great sound, so if you have been looking for something cool and different to build, click the image below and check it out!
We have created a new knowledgebase category here on the site, specifically dedicated to historic plans for building cigar box guitars, ukuleles and other homemade instruments. These vintage plans from long-forgotten publications helped keep the do-it-yourself instrument hobby alive through the years, and without them who knows if we’d have a modern cigar box guitar revival!
Click here or on the image to the right to check out the category. We will be adding many more entries in the near future, so be sure to check back often. And if you know of any such plans, be sure to let us know!
A few days ago we shared an awesome video of UK-based Ben “Uke” Rouse playing Led Zeppelin’s classic song “Kashmir” on a 3-string cigar box guitar. Well after a huge hue and outcry, Ben has worked out tablature for his arrangement, so that now you can try your hand at it too!
Ben has been a professional ukulele player and mandolinist in the UK for years, and only recently (VERY recently – he first picked up a CBG only a couple of days before creating the Kashmir video). You can find out more about Ben here on his FaceBook page.
We’re very happy to feature this here on CigarBoxGuitar.com, and hope to be presenting more of Ben’s tab arrangements soon.
Temporary stick-on contact pickups are a great way to quickly and easily add a pickup to an acoustic instrument like cigar box guitars. Using it is simple – just peel off the adhesive backing on the pickup disk, place it on the sound board of your instrument, plug in an amp cord to the other end and start rocking out. Continue reading “Product Feature: The Red Dot Stick-on Pickup”
We’ve been wanting to add some ukulele-specific content to our knowledgebase for a while, but we didn’t have a uke expert in-house so it wasn’t going very well. Enter One-Hand Dan Russell, a performing musician with an awesome unique style and immense musical ability.
We first met Dan down in Huntsville, AL at the Lowe Mill Cigar Box Guitar Festival last May, and ran into him again at the Chicago CBG fest this past November. Dan plays a mean cigar box uke, so it’s a natural fit to feature some of his how-to-play content in our knowledgebase here on CigarBoxGuitar.com!
This first video lesson has Dan walking you through how he plays the song “Hold On” by the Alabama Shakes. We’ll be adding more great videos from Dan as he creates them, so stay tune. Viva la Ukulele!
Folks have been asking us to show the how-to steps behind installing electric guitar pickups in cigar box guitars for a long time, especially our P90 Soapbar clones. Well, you asked for it and Glenn Watt has delivered it: a well-produced 10-minute vid walking you through every step of installing one of these babies on a neck-through cigar box guitar.
Click the image to the left or this link to got to the video’s entry in our knowledgebase encyclopedia.
Glenn is quickly becoming a leader in the field of creating informative, easy-to-understand and well-produced cigar box guitar how-to videos, and we are proud to be able to feature his work here on CigarBoxGuitar.com. We hope you are able to make great use of this info in building your own cigar box guitars!
Three new tab sheets have been added to the knowledgebase library in the last couple of days, ranging from classic Americana to feel-good classic rock to a popular modern song. All are tabbed for 3-string cigar box guitars tuned to Open G “GDG”. Use the links below to view the posts about each:
Camptown Races by Stephen Foster
Now that we’re through Christmas, it’s time to get back to creating cigar box guitar tablature for popular songs, and here are the first two!
Your Cheatin’ Heart by Hank Williams – arranged by Glenn Watt
Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan – arranged by Ben “C. B. Gitty.” Baker
Enjoy!
We’ve just added a great new resource to the knowledgebase: Gitty’s Jamming Guides for 3-string Cigar Box Guitar!
This collection consists of 3 printable sheets that show you all of the chords needed to play most songs written in the keys of C, G and D – majors, minors and sevenths. These were designed with jam sessions in mind – with these on the table in front of you, you’ll rarely be at a loss for how to strum along with most popular songs!
Click the image to the left to go to the knowledgebase page, where you can click to view all 3 printable jamming sheets!
We’ve just added 3 new pieces of 3-string cigar box guitar holiday tablature to the library. All three were arranged and tabbed by Glenn Watt, who during the Christmas rush of orders has taken over from Ben/C. B. Gitty as the resident tab-master. Click the links below to check out each – all 3 even include videos by Glenn showing you how to play the songs!
This is probably the last batch of holiday songs we’ll be adding this year, so we hope you are able to put them to good use, and we also wish all of you a Merry Christmas and happy holiday season.
Just in time for Christmas, we’ve just posted a PDF of the 4-page Christmas Eve with Uncle Enos story, written by Daniel Carter Beard (co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America), and first published in the 1884-1885 edition of The Book Buyer.
This is more than just a story though, as it contains full how-to plans meant to get boys building their own 5-string banjos out of cigar boxes. As such it was both one of the earliest published mentions of cigar box instruments, as well as one of the first sets of published plans for how to build them!
Disclaimer: We present the digital version of the original document here in its full, unedited form. Some the terminology used in it in regards to race may be considered by some today to be offensive. We present it here only as a historical curiosity and educational artifact.