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A little hello from Switzerland,

Here is my first cigar-box guitar created entirely pieces by pieces for laser cutting. My PIRATE'S GUITAR is an electro acoustic mini guitar with a special short scale of 488mm and can be mounted with 3 strings like a CIGAR-BOX GUITAR (tuned GDg) or with 4 strings like a UKULELE (tuned GCEA Low-G). She is playable acoustically but also amplified through a passive piezo pickup include under the bridge. The body and the neck are made of 61 pieces cut with a laser cutter in 2 peaces of 3mm and 5mm plywood. It also requires 4 classical guitar tuning pegs, a piezo mic capsule (already wired with an output jack socket), some screws, a fast wood glue and some nylon classical guitar strings. The graphics are burned by the laser during the cutting. For the mounting, it's like "Lego", every pieces clips with the other with some wood-glue, nothing to measure. Just look at the video...

The files of the original design are downloadable under Creative Commons Licence BY-NC-SA on our website: www.notsonoisy.com/pirates-guitar
We have not yet drafted "Instructables", but it's coming. In the meantime we have already organized 3 workshops where 30 people had mounted their own Pirate's Guitar, at the FABLAB-FRIBOURG, here in Switzerland.

I hope that will inspire you. Best regards. NOTsoNOISY Guillaume Reymond.

One of our workshops. Just 1 afternoon to build their own instruments.

Happy 5th! Here's a set of free plans. It's called a Rocky Mountain Dulcimer, a cardboard topped 3-stringed instrument. Sounds great! 

Here's a young lass playing one.

Making my own 3-stringed instrument has been such a joyous revelation!

It began for me when I met an ex-fourth grade teacher from Montana, named Ray Jacobs. We were in California, where he was helping people turn cardboard and scrap wood into something that looked like a 3-string banjo — it sounded just amazing! And it looked so simple! I thought “shoot, I could play that!” (I’ve been guitar and music challenged for years).

Here's Ray and Shirley playing: 

Ray taught fourth grade for 20 years; many of his kids learned to make and play these simple, 3-stringed instruments. He also gave them an old V-8 engine and challenged them to take it apart and put it together; he took them to a local pond to squelch and splash and take buckets of pond water back to class, where they put it in split 55-gallon drums so they could play and learn when their “other work” was done; he shepherded 20 generations of kids into 5th grade, many of them with dulcimers they had made themselves, on which they could all play melody and chords — extraordinary gifts!

I thought, “someone should put this into a book so every 4th grade teacher can do what Ray did!” (I’ve been a “teaching artist” in the Oregon schools, and know how hard is for kids to get good, hands-on activities. Teachers are so bound by schedules, test requirements, and policy that they can’t afford to engage kids in anything not specified in the curriculum. So it takes an outsider to do the creative projects.)

I tried to find someone else to write up Ray's story (he also makes a whole range of beautiful instruments from cardboard, gourds, wood, you name it), but noone was as excited as I was, so when I took the family back east last October, we stopped for a few days with Ray and his wife Shirley (here's a nice little video about them from Western Folklife). He and I put a dulcimer together, and I took notes and pictures. It turned into a book – you can download it (free) here. (It’s also available as a (full color!) $10 paperback at the same site, or on Amazon and createspace.) If you like it, please share!

I recently was with a group with the State of TN starting a new initiative. After a week long series of training was over we were to make an Action Plan for our District.

Right off the bat someone in my group shouted "I'm really interested in  [such and such]. I thought "really, that is a project, not a process; it has nothing to do with an Action Plan". A plan was to help state agencies work together to prepare clients to be received by non-profit orginizations so they could finalize sucessful reentry for these people into society.

Well we ended up selecting three projects - but no cohesive plan emerged. No wonder the State does not work any better than it does. There really was no cohesivenness between these three projects though all were great stand alone and excellent outcomes. Yes they were needed items of business that may have been goals of a plan, but they now had scuttled the chance to form a process that moved agency through agency into the non-profit orginazations to provide seemless service.

I look at my last build. I wanted to build a certain way, build a four stringer, fretless, and had some design features I wanted to try. The results was pretty good. Then I look at the really good stuff on the Net. Why doesn't mine look and sound like that? It dawned on me. I put a lot of projects together. I want a fret board like that, the box/neck connection like that, this number of strings so the neck needs to be this wide, this many pickups so lets find a schematic, need sound holes these look snazzy, borrow them, and then mix it together and after all these projects get done I should have a CBG.

Is that really making an action plan before we start building  -  just asking?  Any opinions? If we are aiming to build that CBG with the greatest appeal soundwise, appearance wise, and playability wise: what does a real CBG building plan to produce quality in appearance, playability, and sound look like? What should we have in place, how much should we prepared in what areas, what is it important to have precicely worked out before even starting, how organic can we allow ourselves to be and in what areas? Where can we be sloppy and where must we be right to that silly millimeter?

Opinions, experience, your personal process or preferance, feedback, referances, any contribution welcome!