I thought I would share this story with you just to let you know that there are still people around who believe in giving kids a love of music through free guitar lessons.
“On Saturday, the second annual Little Kids Rock workshop was held at Thomas Marsh Middle School, giving teachers a crash course on how to instruct children in music. The curriculum focused on improvisation, composition and performance, said David Wish, founder and executive director of Little Kids Rock, who visited the workshop.
The workshop was attended by 60 teachers, who will carry the curriculum back to about 50 schools, said Jane Didear, partnership coordinator for the Dallas school district. Any full-time teacher with music experience can apply to take part in the program, according to the Little Kids Rock Web site.
Mr. Wish said the program also will be delivering 600 guitars and 300 keyboards to the district to lend to students.
“We really believe that the children and educators in Dallas need and deserve this support,” he said.
The program is designed to transform children’s lives through music.”
The cigar box guitar is an instrument that has fascinated many guitar players, mainly in relation to whether they are real musical instruments. Many people who have learnt how to make a cigar box guitar have done so simply to give their children something to amuse themselves with but the truth is they can make serious music. The origin of the cigar box guitar is in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when there were many people seeking to express themselves through music but could not afford to but real musical instruments. The use of homemade musical instruments like the cigar box guitar had a resurgence in the years of The Great Depression.
The need for improvised musical instruments led to the proliferation of jug bands which gave people the opportunity to play melodies and generate rhythm for dancing using homemade instruments. So musical gatherings featuring washtubs, spoons and kazoos became commonplace in communities all over America. Gourds with guitar necks attached originally provided the basis of homemade guitars but as cigars began to be shipped in small boxes and the boxes were left lying around the house, sooner or later somebody had to try them out as resonators for guitars. The neck for your average cigar box guitar was often a broom handle with one or two strings attached.
If you want to make your own cigar box guitar you will need some basic tools: a box cutter or pocket knife, a hacksaw, a drill, some fine and coarse grade sandpaper. The raw materials for making your guitar are: a cigar box, a one inch by two inch piece of lightweight soft wood (poplar is a good choice), a dozen one inch nails, wood glue, some wood stain and an applicator. To tune your cigar box guitar just buy three tuning pegs from your local musical instruments store. Their are plans available from expert cigar box guitar makers, in fact there is even a Yahoo Group you can join.
Once you have made your three string cigar box guitar you have several options for tuning. These tunings are from bass to treble: A E A, G D G, A E G.
Many guitar legends are supposed to have played cigar box guitars but not many are talking openly about it. Here is an unverified list of reputed cigar box guitar players who have made names for themselves using conventional instruments: Rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, jazz guitarist George Benson, epitome of refinement Ted Nugent plus other noted musicians like BB King and Jimi Hendrix.
There are also guitarists who make and play their cigar box guitars as their sole musical outlet. One cigar box guitar mover and shaker is Shane Speal, the curator of the National Cigar Box Guitar Museum in York, PA. Shane is archiving cigar box guitar history. He has found the earliest known plans for a cigar box banjo (circa 1870), unearthed etchings of Civil War Soldiers playing cigar the box fiddle and owns a genuine dated and signed cigar box violin from 1899.
John Lowe, a musician and bookstore owner from Memphis who makes electric cigar box guitars called Lowebows. They are made from two oak dowel rods, a wooden cigar box, three guitar strings and a bass string. You play Lowebow with a slide. Lowe’s repertoire has everything from Johnny Cash to Iggy Pop. You can find him busking on Beale Street.
Hand made cigar box guitar by Here is a video of some awesome cigar box guitar playing on a homemade 6-string electric cigar box guitar:
Today I am featuring a star whose career as a guitar hero began in the late nineteen fifties and ended with the advent of the British groups in the sixties. Duane Eddy was a guitar player who started playing at age five, who developed a style that was unique. He loved picking single note tunes on the bass strings down near the bridge. He teamed up with a local disc jockey named Lee Hazlewood who later became a famous record producer, to churn out ten albums and thirty-four singles with fifteen in the top forty between 1958 and 1965, selling a total of one hundred million records. Duane Eddy and Lee Hazlewood formularized their music by mixing Eddy playing his single-note melodies on a Chet Atkins Gretsch 6120 hollowbody and bending the bass strings through a mix of echo, whammy bar and tremolo. This became the sound of the nineteen fifties rev heads in cowboy hats and it made Duane Eddy the best selling rock and roll instrumentalist ever.
Duane Eddy’s most lasting hits are probably Peter Gunn and Shazam! which you can find him playing if you do a search on YouTube but I have picked a very tasty clip called Three-thirty Blues:
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The info in this book strictly applies to steel string
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