cigar box guitar pickup – The How-To Repository for the Cigar Box Guitar Movement!

How to Transform a Gold Foil Pickup into a Vintage Top Mounted Pickup

The C. B. Gitty Gold Foil acoustic pickup is one of the most versatile and easiest magnetic pickups to mod for cigar box guitars. At only $14 each, they’re deliciously cheap and I always have a half dozen of them in my woodshop at any time. (It should be noted that these suckers have such a gloriously trashy 1960’s vibe to them, just like Hound Dog Taylor’s guitars.)

I recently used a Gold Foil in a cigar box guitar and I radically modded it to look like a rusty old Harmony/Teisco top-mount pickup. Here’s how I did it. Continue reading “How to Transform a Gold Foil Pickup into a Vintage Top Mounted Pickup”

Daily Tip: Better Tone from Disk Piezos

Here’s a quick tip for “toning down” a disk piezo in your cigar box guitar, if you are getting too much noise, feedback or if it is just too treble-heavy.

Try soldering a 0.01 uF (microfarad) capacitor from the positive to ground legs of the output jack. This capacitor will shunt some of the higher-frequency signal to ground, and can really help tame an overly hot piezo.

Product Feature: The Red Dot Stick-on Pickup

Click the image above to view the product listing at CBGitty.com

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”