The "Big Easy" 1-Hour Cigar Box Guitar Kit

It was back in the 1890’s when a group of New Orleans street urchins cobbled together cigar box guitars, wine box basses, kazoos and other instruments to form the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band.

Lead by “Stale Bread” Lacomb, this fierce act performed on the streets all over the Big Easy, playing rau-cous music unheard of before. Professional musicians not only adopted their wild style to create jazz music, but some even stole the band’s name at one point! 

The Big Easy Cigar Box Guitar is a kit dedicated to the earliest DIY instrument builders in America’s rich music history. It’s a big easy kit to build that will propel your playing back to the days of the Big Easy.

Laisses les bons temps rouler...Let the good times roll! 

The Big Easy Cigar Box Guitar Kit is exactly that: It’s a full-size cigar box guitar kit that is easy enough to build on your kitchen table with a single screwdriver.

This kit contains all of the parts you need to complete your cigar box guitar

• the box
• neck
• hardware
• strings
• guitar slide
• full instruction book with How to Play the Blues lessons!

Everything is pre-drilled and pre-marked, so that all you have to do is put in the screws, tap in the string ferrules, string it up and start playing.

It really is that easy!

The Big Easy is available fully-fretted or unfretted for slide play

For the unfretted version we have pre-marked the hardwood neck with drawn fret lines to a 25-inch scale.  We have also pre-notched the neck for the threaded rod nut, as well as the location of the special "Flying bridge".

The fully fretted-neck version is also built to a 25-inch scale and uses a zero-fret nut for superior playability, especially for fingers that have never before played a guitar.

This kit builds the traditional "stick on top" cigar box guitar in the style of mountain dulcimers, where the neck rests on top of the box instead of running through it.  The result is a nice, loud CBG tuned with the popular "Open G" tuning of G D G, which is what most of the Youtube how-to-play video presenters use.

Learn how to play your Big Easy guitar

Once you've finished building your guitar, you'll want to learn how to play it. 

For that purpose, you'll find the largest selection of cigar box guitar songbooks available here at C. B. Gitty.

In addition, we also have the most comprehensive and eye-catching chord charts and posters around.

And, of course, we have an enormous and growing library of  lessons and downloadable cigar box guitar song sheets, all totally free in our knowledge-base, CigarBoxGuitar.com. 

With all these resources, you'll be playing your cigar box guitar in no time!

About the Kit Add-on Options:

Adding a Digital Tuner - If you are new to musical instruments, you probably don't have a digital tuner. These are handy little devices that you clip onto the headstock of your guitar, and when you pluck a string it tells you what the tuning is. This guitar is meant to be tuned to G, D, G, so getting it to those exact pitches is made a LOT easier if you have a digital tuner. These tuners can also be used to tune most other instruments, including standard store-bought guitars, ukuleles, etc., so it is a useful thing to have if you intend to get further into music.

Adding a Songbook - The Big Easy cigar box guitar kit comes with a sampling of songs from our Cigar Box Guitar Songbook Vol. 1.  Add on the full songbook and get all the songs!

Kit contents include:

• One hardwood neck, pre-drilled , marked and prepped with all the necessary holes. The neck included with the fretted kit version has a 1/4-inch fretboard pre-mounted to the top of the neck.
• One cigar box drilled with mounting holes and sound holes. Please note: box style may vary slightly from these pictures, but assembly steps will be the same.
• Three open-gear tuners
• Three tuner bushings
• Six #1 x 5/16-inch Phillips-head tuner mounting screws
• Six brass eyelet string ferrules
• Two 3/4-inch washer-head lath screws for box mounting
• One "Flying Bridge" cigar box guitar bridge
• Four #6 x 1/2-inch brass Phillips-head string retainer screws (unfretted kit version only)
• One 1 1/2-inch threaded rod cigar box guitar nut (unfretted kit version only)
• Three guitar strings based on our Blues Blaster guitar string set.