Here’s a great little idea by Shane Speal to get a pro look on your cigar box guitar sound holes.  By simply using window screen wire, you can get a cool Dobro look.

 

The New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival took place January 10-12, 2016 at the Frenchmen Theater inside Bamboula’s in New Orleans.  The event featured concerts, seminars, build-off contests and more.   See our entire photo gallery of the event here.

 

Make your New Years Eve celebration even better by performing the classic Auld Lang Syne on cigar box guitar!  Glenn Watt has taken the time to transcribe the traditional tune for you in 3-string Open G.  Get the TAB here and start practicing!

Auld Lang Syne – 3 string Cigar Box Guitar TAB

Chasing Steam, starring Cigar Box Nation’s own Shane Speal with Ben “Gitty” Baker.  Speal searches for the sound of a 100 year-old steam whistle Christmas concert and is joined in by Ben Baker, who creates his own homemade version.   Continue reading “Chasing Steam – Shane Speal’s documentary on the York PA Steam Whistle Concert”

So are we legally allowed to use branded cigar boxes in our builds?  Will one of these cigar companies come after us if they see their stogie branding on the face of our latest Stradivarius?

C. B. Gitty founder, Ben Baker recently went through legal proceedings based on a cease-and-desist he received for using a Jack Daniels metal sign on a 4-string banjo.

The simple answer to the question lies in whether the objects used in the instrument are discarded containers or new products.  Read the whole rundown here:

Legal Considerations of Repurposing Branded Products (like cigar boxes) for Resale

Guitar pickups can be such fickle beasts.  You wire them up, close the cigar box, plug them in and then… *ZZZT!*  You got the dreaded hum.

We’ve put together a quick tutorial on how to eliminate the humming in your setups, whether in cigar box guitar building or standard guitars.

How to Eliminate Hum and Buzz

This freak of nature belongs to the “King of the Cigar Box Guitar,” Shane Speal.  According to Speal, it has been heavily modified twice since he built it two years ago.

“I originally built this as a simple neck-thru electric cigar box guitar with a Foundry Tone P90 pickup.  I realized afterward that the narrow box felt odd on my lap as I would play in concert, so I only used it as a backup guitar.  It also became my ‘travel guitar’ for the 2014 Musack Charity Concert in LA [as evidenced by the autographs by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, The Minutemen’s Mike Watt and The Specials’ Sir Horace Gentlemen].”

Speal continues, “as the tour season rolled along in late 2014, I broke my main cigar box guitar after throwing it across a dive bar.  That meant I had to bring this one back out as a main player again. 

“In order to make it feel more comfortable, I added an arm rest and bottom cutaway that were cut from a junk Epiphone SG body.”  What was added for comfort also made the instrument look like something from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

After performing with this setup for most of 2015, Speal recently added a Hard Tail bridge, replacing the bolt that served as a floating bridge.  “The Hard Tail just give the guitar more stability, sustain and less string breakage.  I’m starting to replace bridges on my other guitars with Hard Tails, too.  I love ’em.”

Shane Speal will be headlining the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival on January 16.

 

 

 

The DIY ethos has wormed itself so deep into the cigar box guitar movement that now people are making their own guitar picks.  First, there was the Guitar Pick Maker ($23.99 at C. B. Gitty) which allowed you to punch out traditional style picks from old credit cards.

Now, builders are taking their wood scraps and painstakingly crafting wooden plectrums in their wood shops.  Cigar Box Nation member, Paul Renato documented his entire process which includes sanding belts, thickness planers and coats of polyurethane.

Making Wood Plectrums by Paul Renato

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