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Newly hooked on CBG's

Hi, I'm Cameron from the west side of Washington. I recently built my first cbg slide guitar and love it in spite of my mistakes (too wide a neck, too tight to the lid, I can fix that). I'm currently building a six string with a scavenged neck off a no name bargain guitar. Using a cheap Chinese humbucker and I'm leaving some room for the lid to resonate this time. I like hollowbody and semihollow guitars myself. Intonation is going to be horrible because it's going to be a fixed tail.

I'm already planning my next, a 3 string fretted with a C. B. Gitty fret board and a cheap Piezo pickup. I've been looking at the license plate ones. Are those for resonating? I assume the box is custom built from cedar or something.

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First CBG.jpg, 151 KB
Electric CBG in process.jpg, 116 KB

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Permalink Reply by Richey Kay on May 26, 2014 at 8:04pm

Hi Cameron, and welcome to the Nation. Seems like you're off to a good start from the pictures. I've never tried a 6 string conversion but your first looks a lot better than mine did :)

I'm imagining you have some guitar playing background, as I did, so I'd recommend making yourself some fretted 3 and 4 stringers. They are literally all I currently want to play, and all of my nice bought guitars are now gathering dust :)

I recently finished a license plate guitar, and it was a little trickier to iron out all of the little problems. I made a box for it out of some pine I had lying around. I ended up winding a single coil pickup for it as it was too quiet acoustically and the piezos I originally fitted sounded pretty awful. It sounds pretty nice now, here's a couple of vids if you'd like to see

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/video/distortion-test-with-new-licenc...:

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/video/clean-sound-test-on-new-license...

Good luck!

Rick

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Permalink Reply by Slow Slough Guitars on May 31, 2014 at 4:32am

Yes, I have a couple of years playing 6 strings. All self taught. I ordered a C. B. Gitty fretted finger board that showed up yesterday along with a rod piezo pickup with preamp that I ordered off amazon.

Most of the license plate resos I've seen have magnetic pickups in them. The piezos seem to be an issue with them.

I'm going to take a little time on this one. It's going to be a 3 string and I want it to have a little more fit and finish. Oil the neck and fret board, maybe carve a bit of style into the head stock. This site has given me more ideas than I have artistic ability.

After that I want to make a traveling 4 string with the head stock and tuners built into the box. I should be able to keep it under 27 inches with a 25 inch scale. Ought to be perfect for taking camping attached to a pack. Tuners in the body will keep them protected.