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Edit Step 17 ¶
Slip in a bridge and a nut under the strings. I used a wooden barbecue skewer to make the bridge and the nut. Snip 2 pieces to size and place one above the line you drew for the nut. Place the other under the strings on the cigar box at a distance equal to the scale length you chose; this is the bridge.
Edit Step 19 ¶
Make a sound hole. Use a small hole saw (¾" diameter or so) to cut a sound hole in the top of the box. Make sure to position the hole so it doesn’t cut into the neck. (I made this mistake when I made my first cigar box guitar!)
Guess what — you’ve built your guitar! In the next section, I’ll explain tuning and playing, as well as direct you to other helpful cigar box guitar resources.
Edit Step 20
— Get in tune.
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The most popular tuning for cigar box guitars is called open G tuning. Many of the original blues guitar players used open G, and it’s a favorite with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.
Visit makezine.com/21/cbg for an MP3 file of this tuning played string by string on a six-string guitar. For the CBG, you can ignore the first string that’s plucked, and tune it to the 3 strings after that: G, D, and G.
Edit Step 21
— Free Online Lessons
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Keni Lee Burgess, a well-known New York street musician, has posted a terrific series of cigar box guitar lessons on YouTube.
Shane Speal, co-founder of http://www.cigarboxnation.com, also has fun lessons on YouTube that show you how to use a slide, and how to experiment with different tunings and scales. Visit the URL above for links to both of these series.
Edit Step 22
— Make a bottleneck slide.
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Bottleneck slides sound great with open tuning, and both Burgess and Speal use them to enhance their playing. To make one, take an empty wine bottle and score a ring around the neck with a Dremel cutting disc (wear eye protection).
Wearing a pair of oven mitts, tap the score line with a spoon and snap off the neck (do this over a trash can to capture the shards).
Sand off the rough edges and you’ve got something far superior to a store-bought slide. YouTube has instructional videos on making bottleneck slides using different techniques.
Edit Step 23
— Turn it up!
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You can electrify your cigar box guitar in 2 ways. The easiest is by adding a piezoelectric buzzer. Buy one at RadioShack or salvage one from a discarded smoke alarm. Carefully crack open the plastic housing, remove the metal disc, and sandwich it between the neck and lid of your guitar. Wire it to a patch cord jack and plug into an amp (if you don’t have an amplifier, make our Cracker Box Amp).
Another way to electrify a cigar box guitar is by adding an electromagnetic pickup.
This guide has been completed 5 times.
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I was watching my friends son for a weekend while she was out of town. After the second day of playing with my model trains he was in the mood to do something else so I went to the cigar store up the street and picked up a few wooden cigar boxes and we made 2 of these guitars. It was a blast and he's still playing with his 6 months later.