Cigar Box Guitar – Goin to Brownsville
Although I’ve been playing guitar for many years it is only recently that I have discovered the fun that can be had with a cigar box guitar.
If you are new to cigar box guitars I should explain what they are. The clue is in the name, a cigar box guitar is a guitar made from a wooden cigar box. These tend to be home made folk instruments that use a cigar box as the resonator body in the same way that an acoustic guitar uses its resonant body to make the guitar sound.
Back in the 19th century cigars were far more popular than they are today. They began to be packaged in wooden boxes from around the middle of the 19th century and there are etchings of civil war soldiers sitting at a campsite where one of them is playing a fiddle made from a cigar box.
Turning a cigar box into a guitar like instrument is relatively easy to achieve with a length of wood for the neck and a few tuning pegs. The simplest of cigar box guitars might have only one string, but they are commonly made with three strings and no frets. Fretting the steel strings would be achieved using a bottleneck or a piece of animal bone.
Cigar box based musical instruments are a traditional form of folk instrument that could easily be made using items that would otherwise have been thrown away. In recent years many people have discovered the fun that can be had playing and building home made guitars and other instruments. And home made guitar like instruments don’t have to be based on a cigar box. Many creative cigar box guitar builders use anything from oil drums to biscuit tins and lunch boxes to make some fine sounding instruments.
So if you’re struggling with augmeted thirteenths on your six string guitar toss it to one side and get yourself a three string cigar box guitar and make some noise.
