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Cottin Pickin Blues has been nominated for the Martha Stewart Viewers Choice American Made Awards

Ten winners are chosen by the editors of the Martha Stewart Living magazine and are given American Made Awards. Additionally, six winners are voted on by the audience in unique categories with one grand prize winner who will get $10,000. The winners will be invited to showcase their goods at the American Made Workshop in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal Vanderbilt Hall on October 16th and 17th. Voting begins on August 26th.  

For sure we will need all of the votes we can get....Good PR for not only me but for the Cigar Box Guitar Revolution.

Voting is on August 28.

We'll keep you posted.

So, I get my new VooDoo Swamp Witch and show it off to friends and family and....suddenly it comes up missing! Seems as though this "woman" had an "idea" that she could "improve" MY VooDoo Swamp Witch!!!!! She wanted to "surprise" me by adding a few personal Touches.She overheard me mention a few ideas I had and apparently wanted to see me "happy"

Is there a connector for 2.5mm piezo rod to a 1/4 " jack without cutting off the 2.5mm jack and soldering wires to 1/4" jack?  I hope so>

I got myself a playable CBG as of the evening of the 23rd of June, 2013.  I've been so busy playing it and messing with it that I didn't get up to posting about it until now.

'T'ain't perfect, but I guess that's life.  It plays, and not too bad.  since these pics I drilled a couple 7/8 holes in the sound board and put psuedo-brass grommets in them.

I haven't put any electronics except the pickup in yet.  I didn't have the parts in a timely fashion, but I've got them now.  Might get to that today, and build a little Cigar Box Amp in one of my more nearly cubical boxes, too.

I'm not too thrilled with the "ring" of the strings.  I mean, I know its a Cigar Box Guitar, but I think my red oak nut tends to damp the strings, and I think my bridge could stand a little work too.

I built the bridge out of red oak, drilled a hole through it the long way and slipped a rod piezo pickup in there.  Then (not in this order, you understand) I ground a groove in the face of the bridge so I could lay a hunk of 1/8" bronze welding rod in there to carry the string vibrations down to the piezo pickup.  Trouble is, between the hole and the groove, there's too much red oak sticking up in the air so the strings ride partly on the bronze rod but partly on the red oak, another source of damping,  A little more sanding / filing ought to take care of that.

I'm not so sure about the nut.  It's glued in, and all the frets and the bridge are measured from its location at the exact end of the fret board.  Checking with a tuner, the 12th fret it a pretty accurate octave, so if I move my nut it will screw up my intonation.  And if I saw out the red oak nut and put in a hunk of thread rod, for instance, it will have the effect of "moving" the nut by half the diameter of the thread rod. I guess I can cut down the end of the fret board by half the diameter of  the new nut.  Or something.

I wish I could get brass or bronze thread rod around here.  It would go a lot better with the rest of the decor.  I guess I could cut in a hunk of my bronze welding rod, but that would be really tricky at this stage of the game.

My other problem is that, with the guitar tuned in open G (GDg) I can't sing with it.  It's too high or it's too low, but it's too something.  And singing is what I do.

It's all good.  I needed something else to do, and I figure I'll enjoy getting this guitar more to my liking before I build the next one.

These are four of our favorite cover songs to play, so we thought we would record them for you enjoy as well,....it's a little something to tide you over 'til our NEW full length album is ready in a couple of months. Stay tuned.

Click here to download...enjoy.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/snakeoil/248077105294592

If you want to venture more into the world of SnakeOil, please visit our page.

I know that cigar boxes mean that generally, anyone with one is going to play 'the blues'. But everyone just ends up turning out the same thing to a better or worse degree. I'm not knocking people who want to learn and play and get enjoyment out of music, but, these instruments are much more capable and far more adaptable to so much more than the same three chord turnaround.

I know im a grumpy git, just wanted to get that off my chest.

Yesterday I got to put some major components together and get something that looked like a Cigar Box Guitar!  

I failed to order the necessary internal electronic parts - jack, volume pot - in a timely fashion, so although I've got my piezo rod pickup in stock I'll have to wait for Monday's mail before I can put in the rest of the internal parts and fasten the box shut.

Course, along the way I had to make one rather serious blunder.  Can you tell what it is from the following pic?

Yup.  That's right.  I laid out the peg head from the back and instead of putting two up, one down, I put one up, two down.  D@mn dyslexia.   I'm using Shane Speal tuning machines here that come in sets of three. Fortunately I had bought several sets of tuning machines, so I went into another set and traded out the one I had for the one I needed.  

I haven't laid the resulting cannibalized set out and looked at them, but I'm thinking what I did means I'll have a set of three all the same.  I guess I'll be making a Fender-style peg head on a guitar pretty soon.

Besides gluing up the neck to the box and the fret board and little oak trim piece to the neck stub below the box to the neck, and clamping them all for several hours, I started work on the bridge.  

I'll be using a rod piezo pickup on this build. I'll probably standardize on them so I bough a 10 - pack from Gitty.

But back to the bridge. I'm not all that happy with my design ideas on this so far.  I'm happy with the rod piezo part, picked one out and cut it down to 4 strings wide, which will still give me room for a bridge wider than I need for my 3 strings.  I just think that I made the wood portion of it much more complicated than it needs to be, and I'm not happy with the way I laid out the metal portion of it.  More progress on it today maybe.

I haven't started on the nut yet, but my mental picture of the nut is stone simple.  A small piece of red oak, rectangular in section, long grain across the neck, small notches for the strings, and upper (peg head) end rounded down.  I don't anticipate much difficulty in executing it.  Then make the holes to feed the strings through.

I'm pretty pleased with the progress so far.

Lots of work around the house / yard yesterday, so I didn't get to the CBG until late.

Avid fans will recall that I cut three slots too wide with a high dollar manual miter box from Lowe's before smarting up and cutting the rest of them with a very narrow-bladed Stanley imitation Japanese pull saw.  Next I sanded down the fret board enough to fill the wide slots with sanding dust and then filled them in with glue in the hope that it would be strong enough to hold the frets in a narrower sawed kerf.

It appears to have worked.

I tapped them in with a tack hammer and followed that up with a home made "poor man's fret clamp."

Love that red oak!

I filed down the raggedy ends with a flat file, but with all of one side and all but three of the other side completed I realized that I should have used my Dremel tool to at least knock them down to about the neck level and saved quite a bit of time.  Live and learn.  I think that even with the Dremel tool for rough work I'd use the file at the end to dress them all equal and at equal angles.  Which I did on both sides.

A view of the CBG so far, with the fret board laid in place.

Be kind and don't mention that I laid the fret board in end-for-end with the skinny frets up by the nut and the wide frets down by the box.  I figured that out this morning.  Like I said, I was really tired after a long day's hard yard work.  It's not glued in place, I promise!

A close-up view of the notch the nut will fit into.  The nut and bridge will be red oak, too, with the grain running across the guitar.  I have a plan to put a rod pickup in the bridge and then run a brass plate over the top of it to carry the vibrations from the strings down to the pickup; stay tuned and find out whether it works.

I got a hundred dollar order in from C. B. Gitty today, but like a moron forgot to order internal electronics for the guitar.  Or guitars.  Ordered that stuff night before last but I'll be darn lucky if it comes in time to not hold me up.  We'll see.

Working on the 2nd nut and saddle.

Epoxy failed on the rod bridge.

Drilled a hole in the wrong spot that I have to cover up

The nut - beginning of the fretting - started too far down the neck so I put a piece of fretwire above it to protect the wood and it was too high and I had to file it down....

It's going to be cool when it's done, but I will be happy to see it out the door.

Another not much, actually.

Yesterday I laid out the fret lines on my fret board.  I printed out a 20 fret scale from StewMac's calculator and laid the frets out in mm using a tape I bought from Duckworks for my boat project.  Measured from the nut.

Then I measured from fret to fret as a backup check.

Went back and forth two or three times, measuring and checking, until I was reasonably happy with it.

I decided that I needed a miter saw to get as perfectly square as I could.  I've got a power miter saw, but of course it makes a kerf an eighth of an inch wide with its carbide tipped blade, and the circular blade wouldn't work anyway.  Wednesday nights I jam with a couple guys - play keyboard, not all that well but enthusiastically - so I left a little early and stopped by Lowe's and bought a fairly high-end manual miter saw.  Bad idea.

You've got to put everything together, you know.  You can't just take things out of the box and use them.  That's where part of today went, assembling the miter box.

Sawed two fret kerfs.  Way too wide.  Grim.

So I scratched around in my stuff and checked my saw collection.  I picked out a little Stanley imitation Japanese pull saw.  It looked pretty good.

I figured out a little jig to clamp the fret board square to a steel rule and cut along the edge of the steel rule.

The last three things I did today were:  

• Lay out a new fret board in case I can't save this one
• Fill the oversized fret slots in this board with sanding dust and glue in the hopes that it will allow me to salvage this board, and 
• Take the blasted manual miter saw back apart so I can take it back to Lowe's tomorrow on my way into Kansas City to the VA Hospital.

I did spend some time in the evening sitting in the back yard with my neck, a file, and a 22 rifle, prettying up the neck while I hoped the varmint that's been eating my wife's ducks would show up and volunteer for target practice, but it was not to be.  Made a little progress on the neck, though.

Well, on Monday (today's Wednesday) I went to Kansas City to a cigar store and picked up 8 cigar boxes for $24.00 plus tax. Three bucks apiece. Stopped by the hardwood lumber yard (Schutte) in KC and bought two poplar 1x2 and a red oak 2x2, all four feet long.  Laid 'em out in the shop to look at and make a decision.  Picked a couple boxes for my first two CBG's, measured the top thickness, and cut fretboards on the bandsaw.  Then came in and mortgaged the farm to CB Gitty.

The plan is to let the fret boards equal the box top thickness rather than to have to notch the neck to fit up even.  Just glue the neck to the back of the top and then glue the fret boards to the face of the neck so it all comes out even.  One of the boxes is pretty fancy and has a curvy top edge on it.  Having a separate fret board will let me file down the end of the fret board to match the curves of the box.  That one will be the second guitar.

Yesterday I got seriously to work.  Cut the holes in both ends of box #1 to fit the neck.  For that I used a Fein MultiMaster to cut parallel to the box top through the edge board, then marked down with a try square and sawed those two notches with a little tiny Japanese pull saw.  Then I closed the box and marked through the hole on the interior lip, opened the box back up, sawed slots down that lip from above, and cut the long line with a chisel,  

Next I sanded the saw marks off the front (top) face of the fret board and softened the corners on the top face of the fret board.

That was it for one day.  I'm doing some actual work around the place, too, so I didn't have all day to play with a CBG, but more to the point I was at the end of my knowledge.  I didn't know how to lay out the neck and fret board.

So-o-o-o-o-o... I came up to the house, snooped a bit on Cigar Box Nation, found a link to StewMac's Fret Position Calculator, and did some calculating.  I printed out a few different choices of fret counts for a 24" scale and then spent some more time on CBN reading about people's experience with, and thoughts about, fret counts.  I can maybe accomplish some more today.

So...a festival in Belgium..sounds pretty dull, not worth bothering with? Well, I've just got back from a trip over there with Hollowbelly and it has been an amazing weekend. If you think the UK music scene is hip and happening, get yourself over to Muddy Roots Europe next year and prepare to be amazed. It's a small festival, just one stage but the range of music is amazing, the quality is excellent, and the enthusiasm of the audiences is totally refreshing.  At this modestly sized event there were people from all over the place...Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Norway, UK, Switzerland, USA, Canada, Italy..and some top-line performers from Europe and the USA.

For me, head and shoulders above everyone was the Reverend Beat Man from Switzerland...185% Blues Trash as he proclaims himself. He's the tightest, loudest, most surreal and funny one man show you'll ever see...DO NOT FAIL TO SEE THE REVEREND BEAT MAN BEFORE YOU DIE!!!

Here he is, down in the audience after his set, casting out demons.

The festival is just outside Bruges, 90 minutes from Dunquerque, so it's an easy drive, and at €55 for an advance  weekend ticket with free camping, it's cheap. It's very relaxed....I was lucky enough to jam on the campsite with some of the top-line performers, such as Lone Wolf and Jayke Orvis..here's Jayke acompanying me on mandolin, with Lone Wolf spurring me on, after he'd given me his banjo to play...despite me never having played 5 string banjo before...Sunny Wheeler on bass mixed up a round of excellent White Russians after this number..and the jam went on.

So...look out for Muddy Roots Europe next year.....be there or be square daddio!!!

how to hook up a piezo rod

Lots of Folks love these little devils. Seasick Steve and Hollowbelly ply them to name a few. Well mine sounded great for the last 4 years, but after experimenting with my homemade bass, the speaker started flapping around and making "fart" type noises-not good! I stopped playing it entirely.

Then, I thought, why not replace the speaker. Even better, Upgrade that little 5"  2 watter! So I found a Jenson MOD 6-15.

It is a 4 ohm speaker just like the stock one except this on is a bit larger and is a 15 watter. Time to move on up!

Ordered it off Amazon for under $30.

Hi, just joined. I play ukulele and have a Grizzly soprano nearing completion. Next I'm thinking about building a solid electric uke... What I have in mind is pretty much a CBU without the CB. But I am thinking I'll probably get around to a CBU or CBG eventually!

I had an idea.

I just ordered some zither pins.

No, really, it'll be amazing.

I am currently serving in the United States Air Force, stationed at Langley AFB, VA, been in for about a year and a half now. Absolutely loving every bit of Virginia. I was born and raised in Mississippi, home of the delta blues. I have played guitar for about 8 years now, picking up my blues roots. Currently do not own a Cigar Box Guitar, wanted to build one while I was stationed in Texas during some down time but never got around to it.

A good freind of mine named Rod Wellington from Ontario, Canada wrote a nice story I thought I would share. Here is the link, enjoy.

http://zeroemissionsexpeditions.com/2013/maddog-cigar-box-guitars/

Rod is an adventurer and has just completed a 3,800 mile Kayak journey down the entire Missouri/Mississippi river from source to sea. Amazing person!