Make Your Own Guitar with a Cigar Box

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 have never heard of cigar box guitars I shall explain what they are. A cigar box guitar is, as the name suggests, a guitar made from a cigar box. They tend to be home made instruments that use a cigar box as the resonator 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. Wooden boxes were used to package cigars from around the middle of the 19th century and etchings from the American civil war show soldiers playing a cigar box based fiddle.

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 fok instrument made from rubbish such as empty cans or cigar boxes. There has been something of an explosion in interest in these simple home made instruments, partly fuelled by the internet. And you don’t have to use a cigar box to make home made musical instruments. 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.