Open A Tuning for 3 String Cigar Box Guitar

This week, I will cover the Open A tuning for a 3-string CBG. I just built an Open A tuned Cigar Box Guitar for my youngest son which I will use to teach him songs. Before I can teach him I need to get the fretboard layout and some scales mapped to help me out.

The first song I plan to teach him is one of his favourites, Little Ghost, by The White Stripes. The CBG is tuned to Open A which means that playing this will be super easy. The song has 3 chords, A, D and E. To play those, we just need to play the strings open for A, then 5th fret for D and 7th fret for E. Here is a bit of it with me playing solo on the new CBG.

The thing to remember with these open tunings is that you can look at the note on the top string (in the diagrams below) and that is the note you are playing when you fret all 3 strings at the given fret. So for example:

• Open = A (nothing fretted)
• 2nd Fret = B
• 5th Fret = D
• 8th Fret = F
• etc.

This is why open tunings are loved by slide players. You can hit all the notes without fingering if you desire. To get other chords like minors, 7ths, etc, you are going to need to finger the strings. But for my purposes to teach the note circle and the importance of frets to my son, slide playing will do.

Fretboard Notes

For reference, here are the whole notes laid out on the 3 string guitar.

Legend for my Diagrams

A Major Scale

Here's what the A Major Scale sounds like on the high A string (the one on the top of the diagram).

A Minor Pentatonic Scale

Here's what the A Minor Pentatonic Scale sounds like on the high A string (the one on the top of the diagram).

A Blues Scale

Remember, the Blues Scale is more of a roadmap. Take the Minor Pentatonic Scale and sprinkle in some of the Major Scale and see what works. Not every note on here is going to work but think of this as the options you have when working with the Blues.

Here's what the A Blues Scale sounds like on the high A string (the one on the top of the diagram).

Cigar Box Guitar #2

My 5 year old is really into my instrument building and he wants to be just like Dad. He has also been asking for a guitar for a long time.

At first I wanted to jump in and get him a guitar but I know kids; who's interest can quickly wane. So last year we tried music lessons. He did not have the attention span for it and so he did not get a guitar last year.

Flash to the last few months and I have started building various stringed instruments. With that and all the guitar playing I have been doing he has been wanting a guitar again.

First I built a Diddly Bow with him, which he played on and off. That worked out well so I built the Canjo with him (a Diddly Bow with a can at the end to resonate the strings). He loved that.

So, with that it was time to build him a Cigar Box Guitar. We built about 50% of it together on Saturday, planing, sanding, and drilling together. Then on Sunday I finished it off for him.

A trip to the Music Store to get some soft acoustic strings and now he has a Open A tuned Cigar Box Guitar. This will work well since I plan to teach him "Little Ghost" by The White Stripes as his first song.

Why that song? He loves the lyrics, knows it almost by heart, and it only needs 3 chords (A, D, E). With the Open A CBG that means he can strum open for the A, then the 5th fret for D, and the 7th fret for E. The beauty of the open tuning being that to fret the strings at the 5th and 7th he can use the slide to fret all 3 at the same time. So he can do less fingering at first and instead start to learn about the note circle (A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb, F, F#, G, G#) and how frets work.

To play with the slide though I needed something small enough for his 5 year old pinky finger. So, we went to Home Depot for some copper pipe (tried on for size so we bought the correct diameter) and then I got to building him a custom slide. Those chords should be easy to hit with the copper slide I made for him. Here's the slide being built:

To build the slide I just used a hacksaw to cut one long enough to fret the 3 strings on his CBG, then used a precisions filing kit to file the large hunks of metal, and finally finished the cut ends with some 320 sandpaper. The slide is nice and smooth and a perfect fit for his finger.

So, now we will begin working on learning what frets are and finding the 2 that he needs for Little Ghost.

But first, Dad has to mark the frets. I am going to need to hold off on that one though since he won't let anyone else touch it at the moment. It is his!

I adjusted the height of this CBG so that it was lower to make playing
chords easier when not playing an open chord.

With this 2nd CBG completed I now have my sights set on building a Cigar Box Uke (Ukelele) and a Cigar Box Bass. The Bass will be interesting since I will be investigating Piezo Pickups in the bridge. Not sure how to do that yet.

The Cigar Box Uke is another for fun build I want to do. The idea was to give it to my youngest but now that he has his CBG, just like Dad, I think the Uke will become a family instrument. That way anyone can play it. He seems so partial to the CBG.

I love that there are no rules with CBG. I needed something to hold the
rope "strap" on so a U-shaped nail filled in at the time.

My youngest does not really like the sound of the CBG plugged in due to it's grainy Piezo Pickup. I think that will be fixed once I get the Boss Super Overdrive pedal which I tried out in the guitar store but have not purchased yet. So, at the moment he does not want an electric pickup in his CBG but now that he knows how I build them (participating and watching a huge amount of the work) he said, "Later I might want to plug it in, so you can add that later for me."

This little hobby started as a way to try out a cheap instrument but has turned into a fun way to teach my kids about creating and building. They are really into the fact we are building instruments and can play songs on them.

Who could ask or anything more?

Cigar Box Guitar: Open D Tuning for 3 String CBG

This week, I will cover the Open D tuning for a 3-string CBG. Last week I covered the Open G tuning for 3 string CBG.

While at a workshop from Michael "Hawkeye" Herman, he mentioned that as a Blues Slide player we should concentrate on the Open G and the Open D tunings. Those are the two most common and though a lot of songs are listed as E or Open E he thinks tuning to Open E puts too much strain on your guitar and risks breaking your neck.

So, to map an Open E song to one of these tunings, you could tune to Open D and put your capo on the 2nd fret so that you are not playing in the key of E.

Fretboard Notes

D Major Scale

And here is what that sounds like on the high D string, the D' on the top above.

D Minor Pentatonic Scale

And here is what the D Minor Pentatonic Scale that we will build the Blues Scale on sounds like, again on the high D string (D' on the top string above):


D Blues Scale

Again see how the Blues Scale is made up of the Minor Pentatonic and has the additional (greynotes below) from the Major Scale that can be used in a blues song. As well, the Blues Notes in this scale is the G#/Ab.

And finally, our D Blues Scale, which again, like the G Blues Scale, has a lot of notes. Remember that the grey notes are from the D Major Scale and are there for embellishment when they sound good. If they don't sound good drop them. That's what I was taught.


Note:
Here is the legend for my diagrams.

Cigar Box Guitar: Open G Tuning for 3 String CBG

I am starting a new series of posts where I share information about Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) playing. Be that tunings, scale diagrams, classic riffs I pickup, or other such information that may help you learn to play CBG as well.

I know I pick up a lot of information from YouTube videos but I also like to have some of the information I use for practice written down so I can refer to it as I am learning a new tuning, scale, or riff.  I plan to post these on a regular basis (aiming for one a week at the moment) as I work on learning to play the CBG.

Based on the information in this post I experimented with the G Blues Scale on the 2nd and 3rd frets of my Open G tuned CBG and came up with this little riff:


Ok, let's get to it. This week, I will cover the Open G tuning for a 3-string CBG, using the tuning G D G' (from lowest to highest pitch).

So, what is an Open tuning? Well, they are neat in that when you strum all the strings you are playing a chord. In the case of Open G you are playing a G chord.

Now why is this useful? For a slide guitar player this means that you can easily play chords as a barre chord across all the strings. Meaning, you can play chords without having to finger the strings.

Now, to make things more interesting you will want to do some fingering of the strings but in the case of the fret diagram below, you can make reference to the top string (highest pitch) G'. If you strum all 3 strings open, that is no slide or fingers on any strings, you are playing a G.

Fretboard layout for Open G tuning (G D G')

Next put a slide on or make a barre chord across the 3 strings at the 2nd fret. Play that and you just played an A chord. And so on like so:

• 4th fret = B chord
• 5th fret = C chord
• 7th fret = D chord
• 9th fret = E chord
• 10th fret = F chord
• 12th fret = G chord (back to the G chord and we repeat).

So, for a slide player, open tunings are an easy way to play chords without needing to finger complex chord shapes. As a CBG player, I plan to play mostly open tunings since I like to use a slide.

A note on my diagrams:

G Major Scale
Let's start with the G Major Scale on the 3 string Open G tuning. This will be useful later for our G Blues Scale. So let's have a look at it on it's own.

Ok, well that is what the scale looks like but what does it sound like? Here I am doing a run up the notes on the high G' string (the one on the top in the diagram) on my CBG.

G Minor Pentatonic Scale
Next, as we build on our scales and work towards a Blues Scale we will look at the G Minor Pentatonic Scale. This scale is built on by the Blues Scale so you can get into improvisation which is close to a blues scale with just this scale.

Again, what does this sound like? More Blues to me than the Major that is for sure. The Minor scale is also described as sounding sad.


G Blues Scale
A blues scale is a little harder to nail down. The "Blues Scale" is actually several different scales depending on the style of music you are playing and personal preference. So I am going to pick one and show that.

I am using the Minor Pentatonic Scale with the addition of 2 Blues Notes and the additional notes from the Major Scale highlighted in grey (more about those in a moment).

And lastly, our Blues scale we are working with. Again on the top G' string above. Now this one is a little weirder due to the extra blues note and the grey Major Scale notes. More about that after the "scale" since it is less a scale as it is a palette of notes to work with. To hear the number of notes used on the single string, I went faster on the descending scale so you can hear the almost continuous half tones used in blues. There are few notes that are not used in the Blues as you can see above.



A thing to note about the Blues Scale is that it is alright to experiment and add in Major Scale notes as well. Depending on the the given key you are playing in, the addition of some major notes will work, but others may not. Hence, to open your options you can try adding in major scale notes as well. If it sounds good then it is good. Else, don't use the additional notes.

Try the three scales on an CBG tuned to Open G. You should hear the brightness of the Major Scale, the sadness of the Minor Pentatonic, and the blues sound in the Blues Scale. Admittedly you'll want to limit your Blues Scale playing to less notes but you have more to work with here.

Happy experimenting with scales on your CBG.

Note: I am not a music theory expert. I am putting this together for my own learning and as such I thought I would share. If you see a mistake then by all means contact me and let me know.

Alternate Tunings for Guitar

With the addition of the Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) to my guitar collection (it's small, only 3 so far). I have been exploring alternate tunings for the CBG. Open tunings on the CBG work well since you can play whole chords using the 3 strings and a barre chord or slide, easily.

Before the CBG I experimented with some alternate tunings for other songs. Is particular I have used Open-D tuning (D-A-D-F#-A-D) to learn and play Taj Mahal's Country Blues #1:


Go check out the full original here: Taj Mahal - Country Blues #1

I then did some experimenting with that tuning to come up with this original work:


With the addition of slide playing and my research into the Blues and Delta Blues I have been introduced to more alternate tunings. The 3-string CBG limits you again with the 3 strings so open tunings become the course of the day.

Here are some really great resources I have found for alternate tunings:

• Wikipedia: Guitar Tunings
• Warren Allen's Encyclopedia of Alternate Guitar Tunings
• This is an invaluable resource of tunings, who uses them, representative songs, and the various versions of the tunings that are used. A great read for anyone researching new tunings.
• William A. Sethares: Alternate Tuning Guide
• On this page, there is a link to his paper as a PDF covering alternate tunings. This is another one you want to download and keep. This has a ton of great guitar music theory and alternate tuning information. Here is the direct link to Alternate Tuning Guide PDF.

I wish I had found the Alternate Tuning Guide earlier. It covers a lot of the material I work out myself. Here's an example of my fretboard drawings with chord diagrams:

Only way to remember stuff is to
write it down I find.

Here is how I approach a new tuning when I want to learn it:

• Draw out a fret board.
• Map out the notes for each fret.
• If I am trying to learn a specific scale, like D Major on an Open D tuning, I highlight the notes in the scale and where they lay on the fret board. In general I will draw a fret board with just this mapping to make learning it easier.
• Then I practice the scale on each string up the string and then back. For each string I am interesting in learning. I do these sets for about 5 minutes at a time, each day as I am learning the new tuning.

I hope that helps you figure out how to use alternate tunings yourself.

Now I am off to practice Open-G on the CBG.

Placing Your Cigar Box Guitar Frets

The cool thing with Cigar Box Guitars is that they are custom. There are no rules is the motto and as such if you wing some of your implementation (like I did) you end up with a custom instrument and then some.

I had been playing the guitar for 2 days when I decided it is time to add some frets and the Piezo pickups. The Frets so that it is easier for the kids (and myself) to learn on this guitar. The Piezo pickups so I have a lo-fi electric guitar I can jack into my amp.

I measured from my nut to my bridge and I came up with 676 millimetres. Of that only 510 millimetres are usable for the frets. How do I figure out the fretting for this?

This is where Stewart MacDonald comes in. He has some handy informational pages on stringed instrument construction and one of those is a Fret Calculator.

Here were the calculations it gave me for my setup:

Image: http://www.stewmac.com/

From this I placed test measurements to see if the generated fret placements work well. Once I tested the locations and made a few adjustments for slide versus chord playing I marked the frets with a black marker and square.

Then some fret markers and additional fret markers along the top of the neck to help the boys find the frets without needing to turn the guitar up to see the frets.

Volia, custom frets without physical frets to make slide playing easier. Note that with medium strings this makes playing the first 3 frets difficult with chords since there is no fret to use to push the string against. So, this may limit my ability to play chords in this region. If it turns into a problem I may add a physical fret to the first 3 frets to compensate for that issue.

Adding Piezo Pickups to a Cigar Box Guitar

I have mentioned the Piezo Pickups in the post about Frets and I have posted a test using the pickups.

1/4" Jack Installed

But how did I record that? Well, Garageband on the Mac, but how did I get it into the Mac? I am using a Rocksmith cable to plug my guitar into the Mac but before we can do that we need something to plug into. This is where the pickups come in. In my case I am using a Piezo Pickup which is a crude microphone.

The Piezo Pickup is actually a Piezo Buzzer (Transducer) that costs about $1.50 at RadioShack. The guide I used to add my pickup can be found at CigarBoxGuitars.com article on Piezo Transducers.

Some tips I have picked up along the way and plan to implement.

• The piezo pickup will pick up background noise (turning your CBG into a lousy mic).
• The piezo pickup, due to the above, will cause feedback loops so playing in front of your amp or with a loud amp will be bad!
• To fix this, put the Piezo pickup in double sided tape that has some foam between the tape sides. Then tape this "padded" pickup into the CBG. This should reduce the feedback.
• Also, you might need to experiment with pickup location and amp placement.

One of the things you have to do to hook this up is some basic soldering. I am not a soldering master by any stretch of the imagination. I am sure I would fail solder 101 but I was able to do a quick soldering job to put my parts together and electrify my CBG. I find it amazing that so little is required to create a lo-fi pickup.

Lo-fi/High Feedback Simplicity

One thing about the lo-fi piezo pickup route is that feedback has been a problem. The pickup turns the CBG into a cheap/bad mic that you can sing into (as my son tried). It also means any touch, smack, knock of the CBG is going to get picked up and sent to the amp.

That is the state of affairs with my CBG at the moment so I went searching and found an article over at Cigar Box Guitar Parts that has a good refresher on the types of piezo pickups, feedback problems, and placement. Based on that and some forum posts I read, I plan to try the double sided trick I listed above.

Compared to an off the shelf $45+ acoustic pickup with integrated cord, I think the lo-fi option is just fine as long as you setup to play with your amp so you are not causing feedback. And the additional options with using your CBG to do some percussion is an added bonus ;-)

Building a Cigar Box Guitar

While researching my Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) I came across many sources of information. Here is a list of the ones that I used for building the guitar, minus pickups. I will post about pickups later.

The main guide I used was over at Cigar Box Guitars and their How to Build a Cigar Box Guitar tutorial. I found this had the main information I needed to build my guitar. This is the guide I used to build my CBG.

Another good resource was at Cigar Box 101 which includes a downloadable PDF of notes taken while Michael Glenn built his CBG.

The short notes for building a CBG are:

• There are no rules!
• There are lots of resources for how to build a CBG.

For an idea of how beautiful these guitars can get look no further than Soul Cat Guitars, found at the Pike Place Market in Seattle, WA. The owner, Dean Moller, creates amazing looking guitars, ukes, and amps.

For my guitar, I winged it on a ton of details. I wanted to see what it would sound like ASAP so I did not get fancy and was able to put it together with a minimum of tools. For the openings in the body of the cigar box I just traced out a pattern and then used a dremel with a cutting bit to cut out the designs. They are not symmetrical but I don't care, it's unique.

One thing about my guitar, you know it is hand made. Nothing fancy going on here.

Headstock is shaped due to a split in the wood, not by design.

The photo above shows my headstock which I had to trim down on one side not by original design. I was trying to line up my tuning nuts like someone suggested and then ran into a split in the wood as I put one of the nuts in. I grabbed the circular saw, chopped off the split, and then drilled a new tuning nut hole. I then sanded this down to ge the design above. I then had to put a screw in to act as a string guide since the alignment of my tuning nuts were off and the 3rd/top one had it's string colliding with the other 2 nuts.

So, even though I planned some things out, I ran into issues which resulted in unique "design" decisions for my guitar. That's one thing I love about this guitar. It did not come out as I planned but it still looks good and is fun to play.

The building of this guitar was a very Agile process. The building of it was very agile, in software speak. I ran into issues I tuned the headstock. I got the bare minimum put together and I stringed it up to test that it played ok. That worked so I took it apart and put in pickups and sanded down the neck so it felt good in the hands. I played it again and the neck was still not perfect so I sanded it more.

Now I have a smooth, nice to hold, custom guitar.

Why a Cigar Box Guitar?

I came across Hollowbelly and had to know more about his guitar (based on the track Shotgun). That got me searching around and reading that a Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) is exactly what it sounds like. A guitar made with a cigar box as the body.

Now, as anyone who follows me knows, this has been an ongoing project for the past week or so. I started to write this post before I got so deep into the CBG but then enthusiasm got the better of me and I built one. So, here is some rationale for Why a Cigar Box Guitar?

These homemade instruments can be traced back to 1840, the first illustration is from an copyright in 1876, and the first published plans for how to make your own were seen in an 1884 publication by the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. The plans would later make it into the 1890 edition of American Boy's Handy Book.

Here's where things start to get interesting. These homemade instruments were instrumental in the creation of jug bands and blues. For myself, blues is the heart of rock and roll and something I keep trying to learn more of. A cursory look into playing the modern 3 string Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) shows that many blues licks originated on these instruments.

Speaking of number of strings, Keith Richards even once stated that there was no need for the 6th string on a guitar. Here is a great interview answer about using 5 strings:



As Keith mentions in this, when you are limited to a 5 string open tuning you have only 3 notes to work with. The CBG is the precursor to this and the players had to find ways to do more with less on their guitar.

So, a lot of the early blues can be traced back to these "limited" instruments that forced their players to become more creative to work around the limitations. Very cool stuff for a guitar player.

When I started to read up on this I thought, well heck, I have to make one of these. So that is what I just did. Here is a pic of the new guitar.

Just finished my first Cigar Box Guitar! pic.twitter.com/gcToXNz7jh
— Mark Thistle (@mthistle) May 3, 2014

So, that's the start of my Cigar Box Guitar journey. I plan to make a 2nd so that my two boys can each have one. Which means I need to make a 3rd for me. My youngest also wants a Ukulele, so why not a Cigar Box Uke! This is getting out of hand as you can see.

I have more posts planned on this subject, so hang on while I bring you along for a trip down the Cigar Box Guitar rabbit hole.

Playing a Fretless Cigar Box Guitar

Here are my thoughts after my first hour of playing around with my new Cigar Box Guitar.

• It really helps/makes you learn to hear the notes with your ear.
• With time and practice I think this will help me learn to play by ear better.
• Goodness, if you thought playing medium or heavy strings on a guitar are hard, try a fretless guitar with the strings raised higher.
• The first 3 frets or so are almost impossible to hold down.
• This is good for slide playing but very hard for holding down chords.
• If you tune to g-b-e then your three strings are the 3 highest strings on a standard tuned guitar meaning you know the chord shapes that fit those strings.
• This is neat but due to the difficulty holding down the strings I did not like playing this as much.
• Open-G is g-b-d and I found this to sound nicer when strumming the 3 strings and using a slide it was much easier to play stuff that sounded decent.
• It is louder as an acoustic than I expected.
• Going to be great when I hook in some lo-fi Piezo Pickups and add it to an amp but even without it is good.

With a little work I was able to modify Taj Mahal's Country Blues #1 on the fly and come up with something ok sounding. I already posted that: Cigar Box Country Blues

I do plan to add frets with a marker (no raised frets) and some fret indicators along the side to help myself and the boys hit the notes faster. It's also nice that you can adjust the feel of the guitar. You can sand down the back to make it feel just right for playing (It needs more work).

Besides that, playing this has been a joy. I am like a little kid, beaming as I twang away at my new toy making a racket!

Cigar box guitar Country Blues

Cigar box guitar Country Blues

Not great but this is a rough draft of Taj Mahal's Country Blues #1 done on my new cigar box guitar. I took the main idea of the song and applied it to the 3 string guitar as opposed to the 6 string I normally play this on.

Tuning of this rendition is in Open-G but originally it is in Open-D (which I normally play it in).