DIY Music Fun: New Cutting Board Guitar

Here’s my simplest and cheapest instrument project yet, my old cutting board cut to fit the neck of a flea market, 3-string, fretless, cigar box guitar kit I had.

I needed to cut off at least a third of the board to fit the scavenged neck I bought cheap, $25 usd maybe.

I can easily hot glue this piezo pickup to the board: and as easily remove it when it sounds weak and thin. Still cogitating on placement of the output jack.

The factory cardboard kit’s mediocre piezo pickup, with poor tone, and its fake authenticy led me to reduce it to components, using the neck here.

Cut up many a vegetable and meat on this board.

In fact, I think I’ve already got enough parts to build the whole thing, new strings and all.

I stocked up on cheap $5 Chinese electric guitar strings for the cigar box axe builds at Dennis’s Liberty Loan pawnshop, supply chain and inflation issues coming soon.

This will be my 1st traditional cigar box guitar with only 3 strings and without frets. Though I may add frets later.

I’ll try it tuned open for slide playing. I’ll need to find a metal slide, maybe I’ll use a 3/4 inch chrome socket.

It’s set up high so I might need to inset the neck into the bottom of the cutting board, like I’ll need to inset the magnetic pickup into the top of it after I ditch the piezo pickup.

Never had success with fretless or slide guitar but hope springs eternal.

I will cut the pickup cavity with a chisel, I’m guessing, because I sold the router I inherited since it scared me like chisels do not.

I’m easily spooked by things I have no knowledge of. Like pressure cooking before I learned how.

I’ll need to check online for conventional 3-string CG box guitar open tuning. And for string height when playing slide style.

Perfect fit on tuner sockets and tiny screw holes, no drilling needed for the standard guitar machine tuning heads I already had in my bin.

I’ll probably give up on slide playing quickly because it will sound ghastly. And then I’ll standard tune it to E, A, D. And play my same old I-IV-V 12-bar blues progressions on it.

Found these machine heads and tiny screws in my parts bin, close to matching.

I play what I call cigar box piccolo basses through bass guitar amps, which makes it even more evident that bass runs and turnarounds are about all I know how to play, even at the high guitar octave. But if it makes me happy.

Here’s the machine bolt the kit supplied as a nut. It should work. I can adjust string height a bit with different size bolts, if needed.

I’ll try the salvaged kit piezo pickup first but I doubt it’ll have enough volume or very good tone compared to a magnetic pickup, in my experience.

I’ll try this clip-on piezo pickup as well, but since it was designed for use with an acoustic guitar I suspect it won’t prove suitable for solid body application.

I’ll cut out a recess on top of the cutting board to install the salvaged straight coil magnetic guitar pickup.

I won’t use this bridge but I’ll mark the saddle locations because this bridge is correctly located.

I have lots of varnish so imagine the cutting board shining with a nice satin finish, when I finish the chiseling and gouging, drilling and screwing.

Unless noted, all text, images, audio, and video by todgermanica.com.

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