30 Days of Creativity - #21-25

Cigar Box Guitar

Figure 1. Cigar box instrument as it was.

I brought home a cigar box guitar that needed some improvements. A friend had started it and roughly finished it, and he decided to give me a shot it. It was an unelectrified, three string instrument with a very high action suitable for slide playing (Figure 1).

I worked on it over a five-day period, and accomplished the following:

(1) Made a new nut from a piece of 1/4-inch steel rod. Filed string grooves into the rod with a jeweler's file.
(2) Reshaped and sanded the neck and headstock to make it smoother and look a little better.
(3) Reshaped the sound hole to make it look a little better.
(4) Reshaped and stabilized the steel the bridge by reinforcing it with a brass backing plate.
(5) Machined a slot in the neck to hold a pickup. I purchased the pickup used from a local music store.
(6) Installed and tested pickup. It didn't work. Further investigation revealed a broken wire inside it. I couldn't fix it so I returned it and they gave me another one. It worked.
(7) Improved the string holes in the back of the neck by using three identical nuts (the previous nuts didn't match) held in place with super glue.
(8) Made a backing plate for the tuners from  thin piece of walnut. The headstock was a little too thin to properly fasten the tuners in place. Even when tightened all the way they were loose.
(9) Stained the neck.
(10) Painted the body brown since it was kind of torn up looking and did not have an attractive cigar box look.
(11) Assembled it and strung it up.

Figure 2 shows how it looked in a state of disassembly. You can see the pickup slot in the neck. Due to the through-body design of the neck this was the only way to mount the pickup. The pickup was a used single coil (made in China).

The string holes were supported in the back with steel nuts inserted and glued into the wood. The groove between the string holes and the pickup hole is where the bridge was installed. The saddle is held in place by string tension only. It works!



This is how it turned out:






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30 Days of Creativity - #20

Music

When me and Colin were working on "Rotgut Highway" the other day, I had a kernal of an idea for an intro. I made recording of it (much later) with GarageBand using an acoustic guitar played through an M-Audio Audio Buddy preamp sent to the audio-in jack on an iMac. I added a drum beat just for effect.

Here it is:

It's not much but like I said, it's only an intro.

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30 Days of Creativity - #17

Music

I had already written the lyrics to "Non-Linear Dude (see Day #13) and had piddled around with some music for it. I finalized that (more or less) on this day. Then I went to my nephew's house to jam and do a little recording.

He is a songwriter and guitar player and we occasionally gt together and talk about doing some open mics together. So far its ll talk, but we still keep talking about it. On this particular day, I made a demo recording of "Non-Linear Dude" and we worked together on a few other things, including an acoustic version of "Sweet Jane."

We also worked on a song together. He always has some music he has been working on so I threw out a few lyrics and we took it from there. We even wrote them down somewhere. It was tentatively called "Rot Gut Highway" and the first few lines went something like:

Travelin' down a broken highway
The side of the road all covered with bones
Picked up a dog that was headed my way
Threw him in in the back and kept on goin'

Uh-huh.

We even recoded part of it. Come to find out later, that his computer crashed and as far as I could understand, all the work is gone. Oh well.

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