Introducing the Southbound String Company - the first string brand focused on Cigar Box Guitars

This week at C. B. Gitty we are officially launching a new brand of instrument strings specifically focused on Cigar Box Guitars and the handmade/homemade music movement: The Southbound String Company. 

This is the first brand of strings dedicated to these unique handcrafted instruments, and it is the culmination of years of careful testing, experimenting, trial and error to find what combinations of strings work best for these "non-standard" instrumental creations we love so much. 

All of the strings we offer under this brand name are MADE IN THE USA, which is why we chose a railroad theme for this brand. The railroads played such a large role in the history of the United States, and we thought that evoking railroad imagery for this line of American-made strings was very fitting.

Under the Southbound String Company brand, we will continue offering the sets of cigar box guitar strings that we have been selling for the past few years, rebranded and in new more professional-looking packaging. So if you have gotten used to a particular set of our strings, don't worry - you can still get them! Product numbers are staying the same, so reordering should be easy. We will be tweaking the string sizes slightly in some of the existing string sets, based on what we have learned in house and heard from customers about what works best.

But this new brand launch is not just about putting a new packaging face on what we have already been doing - that is just phase one! We have many exciting plans for this brand, some of which have already begun to appear. Here are just a few of the things we will be doing:

• Introducing new string sets based on customer requests. In the very near future we will be offering a greatly expanded line of string sets, including various flavors of the popular "Open Blues" tunings: GDG, DAD, EBE, etc. Four-string sets, along with some more exotic tunings (such as Shane Speal's favorice the "G Minor" 4-string tuning) are also being looked at.
• Building a library of informational and how-to articles on strings and tunings. This is actually already underway over at www.CigarBoxGuitar.com. If you haven't checked out the latest articles on strings and tunings in the knowledgebase there, you need to!
• Streamlining and improving our listings of strings, to make it easier to find what you are looking for. Trying to find the exact string set you want from a screen full of similar-looking listings can be frustrating. We are working on ways to make it much easier to find exactly what you are looking for. Written guides to help walk you through our string offerings are also in the works.
• Expanded offerings of strings for other instruments. Nylon strings for classical guitar-style builds, ukulele strings, loop-end strings, special packs for mountain dulcimers, banjos, lap steels and more... we are always listening to what our customer ask for and thinking about what we can offer. 
• Expanding our bulk pack offerings. We know serious builders like to buy in bulk, so we are working on expanding our CBG string bulk pack offerings. Look for 12-packs of all of our sets, as well as 25-packs of the best sellers.
• Expanding our line of bulk individual string sizes. Although our bulk string offerings (ie, 12-packs of a single string size) are staying under the C. B. Gitty brand name, we will be working hard on fleshing out the size and winding types we carry. We'll soon have every size of Phosphor Bronze strings from .020" to .056" in .002" increments, and we will be doing the same with nickel-wound electric guitar strings as well. Stocking this many different strings is a pretty big inventory and capital commitment, but we are dedicated to being a "big player" in the retail strings market!

I am proud, happy and excited to be announcing the Southbound String Company. There is a lot of work yet to do, but we look forward to it. There are good things to come!