Premium Volume and Tone Pickup Harness for Cigar Box Guitars

For years in the cigar box guitar movement, people in the know have been saying that it really wasn't feasible to have a passive tone control in a piezo circuit for cigar box guitars. It turns out, it IS feasible, and now we've done it!

This listing is for a pre-wired harness that you can use to add both a volume and a tone control to your cigar box guitar. We offer a range of options for this harness, ranging from just the pre-wired potentiometers, for wiring into your own piezo and jack, and also fully pre-wired with disk piezo and jack soldered on and ready to install. (If you choose the "pots only" version, just wire the INPUT lead to your disk piezo, and the OUTPUT lead to your jack, drill holes to mount the pot shafts, and you'll be ready to go!)

It took a lot of testing and experimentation to find just the right combination of components to give a nice, audible tone control to a disk piezo circuit. The circuit works in the same way as standard electric guitar tone circuits - by shunting more or less of the signal through a capacitor, more or less of the high-end treble is "rolled off" to ground. This lets you adjust how much treble sound reaches the amp. Rolling off at least some of the highest trebles can really help tame a disk piezo, making it less "scratch", "tinny" and feedback-prone. 

Here is a video giving you an idea of how this tone control sounds:

Here is a short video that shows you the basic steps of how to install the harness (with the mounting plate option):

For more information about CBG wiring, piezo usage, soldering and other how-to articles, click on the “Cigar Box Guitar How-To” link in the menu bar at the top of this page. You can also visit http://www.CigarBoxNation.com for lots of great information about all things related to cigar box guitars and other homemade instruments.