DO DO tha DO, Do DO tha DO, tha tha. Welcome to the Twilight Zone, do not attempt to adjust your tone knob or volume, we are in total control.
I cannot play anything on any guitar, except thanks to Night Owl can now muddle my way through "Amazing Grace" on a 3-string in GDG tuning. Oh and can do the first opening licks of "Bad to the Bone" - thanks! That's a lot more than I could do two months ago!
I have now officially built three guitars - amazing. Who'd a thunk? I am totally flabbergassed. Took a web cam picture of them together, you can tell the progression. The first one is really rough. The second more refined, but far from looking sophisticated. The third more primative but also more sophisticared. The first two were three string and the fourth a four string inspired by the Purgatory Hill Harp.
Do you know what makes something a harp? It is a stringed instrument where at least one unfretted string has no fret board behind it. Mine cannot be called a harp, all strings are over a fret board though the fret board is not fretted - yet. The Purgatory Hill Harp is built on Round Dowells and Two strings are positioned so the dowell is not behind them. Wondered why they called it a harp - now I know.
OMG, wierd facts seem to be creeping into my mind. It is close to Halloween. Other wierd things are happening. I was listening to the videos on CBN in my office on break, a co-worker sits down and ask me to build him a CBG. I showed him a blurry web cam photo of the four stringer, told him it was tuned at this moment to EEBE. He asked what tunings could he use. I said a Tenor Guitar, and other tunings, even a banjo I guess. He said, "I'm gonn'a have so much fun with my new guitar" so I guess the sale is pretty much a done deal! How is that possible? I am not a Luthier! I am not a good woodworker even! I cannot even play one of the contraptions I build. Has to be a spell on me!
I take breaks every day at work and leave the facility to drive to a turn around close by to just get some fresh air. Today a guy I had never seen there before gets out of his car, opens his hatch back, takes out his banjo, and starts playing. I just had to introduce myself and strike up a conversation. For 8 years of going to this place to get freshair, snow, rain, blazing heat, all sorts of weather, nothing like this has ever happened.
I work at a prison. Yep, a prison folks. Was thinking of screen printing some of my hand made boxes in the future. An inmate walks in and sees me looking at screen printing sites and informs me he does that on the street and takes me through the process step by step and totally educates me so if I go that way I will be totally ready.
My wife came home with mini Butterfingers [AND DID NOT WANT TO SAVE THEM for Halloween]! What kind of creepy stuff is in the air? We've been married 38 years and this has never - ever - happened, and especially since I hit the 220 lb mark! We all know Butterfingers are pure sugar rush and pounds.
I read to my wife the article in the book I got on famous CBGers. At the very back was an article on the guy who makes pickups by winding copper wire on bobbins with a sewing machine. Want to guess his name?
I have seen her wind bobbins, not recently, she seldom if ever sews anymore, but I have seen this in the last twenty years. Anyway, asked her if we owned a sewing machine that had a bobbing winder, she said in the basement by the clothes washer we has not one but two, and confirmed both had bobbin winders that worked on the top. However both had breaks I would have to remove - which was fine with her. What is going on? I have never seen her that agreeable, that cooperative, that informable! What have you done with my wife - and who is this woman in my house that looks and cooks like her?
Four weeks till "THE" election. I'll test out my theory to see if I've crossed over into another deminsion. Einstein said "insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different result". Ergo keeping in the two party systen by voting for any republican or democrat - especially for president - is insanity. That is the standard, comformity, convention, the store bought sound if you will.We already know what that has been producing.
All agree the two party system no longer works. The only other party with a ghost of a chance is the Libertarians. I don't agree with them, but they are the only viable alternative to break the cycle - so by gum I'm gonna vote a streight Libeterian ticker - I'm refusing to be insane any longer! If they should win I'll know the cosmos has entered the Twilight Zone, or I've finally gone schizo for good! But this blog is not about politics - really it is not. Nor is it about weight, or domestic bliss.
You see all of this is about deciding to build a CBG and not just buy a regular old "store bought" six string standard guitar. You have to go against conventional wisdom, to understand things in a totally different way but in a much more rational and logical way.
They [the ones refusing to believe there are workable and viable alternatives] are only comfortable and can only understand or see the standard, that which comforms, that gets the same results. How many people [like the current owner of the Purgatory Hill] have I read about saying they went with the CBG because they had spent years looking for "that" sound and had modified their thousand $ guitar and just could not get it - till they thought "inside" the box, not inside the standard curves?
Once you step "inside the box" life changes, people around you change, the universe, the cosmos realigns in some unfathonable way - it is like you are finally properly aligned to finally receive blessings and fulfillment, and fate, providence, the spiritual world begins to make arrangement to fulfill your apparent destiny and bend others to be favorable to your predestined path.
Comments
I think you have hit the nail on the head. These boxes have a special magic all their own. It's like you see a box and it tells you "I will sound different than the ones you have built before" and you just have to build it to find out. It seems like each one has it's own personality waiting to be released. I built my first one before I had ever played a stringed instrument and it seems like they are teaching me to play as I go along.
Gets in your blood eh ;-)
I built my first about a year ago i was playing one night had the window open and a neighbor walked past with his dog He stoped and listened for a 15mins or so took his dog home and came and knocked on the door. I was just doin a bit of 12 bar blues Bad to the bone sort of thing and not good. He said his brother plays guit but he never heard anything like that what sort of guitar is it? I showed it to him He said no WTf is that well that sort of thing in Swiss german. I played it again He said I want one.
Now I only knew this guy to say hello to when passing or see him in the woods with the dogs.
His brother has a guit now and some of his friends well I am on 7 sold to order I never built one to sell just for that sound after seeing and hearing one on youtube Sea sick Steve and here CBN later.
Now I have a good friend well a few here in Switzerland now. We have a play a couple of times a week drink a beer have fun.
If I had not built that first guit I wouldn't have got to know these nice people!
If I had not found the Nation I would not have built that first guit
Thank you to all on the Nation.
Cosmic ;-)
OK continue my thought. One guy spends years as a professional musician. He has the best guitars money can buy. He spends thousands on these modifying them looking for that sound that is in his head, put there by that greater intelligence - the unfathomable cosmic one.
By "chance" he meets someone.
Ok, a builder is talked into building an instrument he does not want to build because a musician is convinced that builder, and no one else, must build this instrument he has in his head. He is about to go into the finals in a competition and must have this instrument for the finals.
This guy enters the finals with a contraption made of what looks like spare parts - and wins!
This contraption falls into the hands of another well known successful musician. He thinks it is a novelty, a toy, a worthless amusement. Then this cosmic guidance has someone say, "Have you plugged it in". The rest is history. Spare parts put together by an unwilling builder, for a frustrated musician, given to a unimpressed musician comes alive, becomes a magic something, greater than any dragon, any spell, any enchanted forest! Ah, so many minds had to undergo a transformation, a shift from this stayed assistance to a new diminsion operating by different laws.
A man steps on a nail, and life become one long series of pains and frustration. Out of this emerges something new, bright, totally unique, a business, a community, a way of like. It was as if the cosmos had to arrange things to make it all line up leading to one finite moment in time so that that spark would happen and the fire be kindles. But the dross of the old had to first be burnt away so a new way of thinking, of sight could be given.
How do I make a really good CBG? Well become like a child! A child finds a stick and a box. He puts the box on the stick and has a horse. All the grown-ups are saying a stick horse has to look like a horse. But this kid isn't listening, he names his "horse" Silver and rides it everywhere. Grownups stop and shake their heads, but the boy just keeps riding and grinning. Later the boy finds a block of wood more like a horses head so he takes off the box and using his daddy's hammer nails on the block of wood, and rides off on the new and improved Silver. Then he finds a better stick. The evolution just goes on and on. That's how you build a really great Cigar Box Guitar!
But you cannot do it thinking you have to conform to the Luthier trade, or go to the guitar store, or buy a six string, or conform to the strumming or picking styles or fretting.
Like me, and I mean me all the time - this whole blog as an example - you have to be willing to be seen as eccentric, "special" [as in he rode the short bus special]. What nut proudly nails a stick of wood to a box, adds strings and then plays the darn thing in public and has the gall to call it a guitar?
But when you are willing to step out and say "what the Hell" suddenly new constellations appear in the Heavens. You hear different music. You join Beethoven Chopin, Mozart De Vinci, Ben Franklin, Einstein, and others who walked where the air was crisp and full of color. These men and women whom the cosmos adopted as its own. You may never become famous, but you know you can never be ordinary, common, stayed, conventional, one of the crowd again