What a haul!!!

Habitat for Humanity is organizing a Memorial Day shindig in Pittsboro, NC... and I've agreed to play a set of cigar box guitar music...

And teach a workshop on building cigar box guitars.

But, whoops... I'm pretty much out of cigar boxes.

So Rebekah and I headed off today and found our way to K&S Tobacco on NC-55 in Cary, NC and lo and behold, they had a bunch of cigar boxes.

I picked out the 17 in the picture above... total price $10. Wow!

While there, we stopped at the nearby Home Depot and picked up some dowels to use for the necks. Now I'm all set for the workshop.

A Simple Cigarbox Harp

I was at a show the other night and got to talking to an elementary school art teacher there. She was interested in how she might apply what I was doing with instrument building to a project for her class.



So, I suggested wrapping 5 rubber bands around a cardboard cigarbox and sliding a pencil under them for a bridge. Putting the pencil at an angle gives each rubber band "string" a different pitch.

My original plan called for two pencil bridges, but when I sat down to actually build a proof-of-concept model, it turned out that only one was needed.

And it sounds pretty good: Click here to hear it.