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In this post, you'll learn what to do if your preamp-powered cigar box guitar sounds muddy or distorted. Hi all! It's Shane Speal. Two weeks ago, I started having trouble with my main 3-stringer. It's a rod piezo-electrified build with a pre-amp that allows me to sculpt the CBG tones beautifully.But what I was experiencing were distorted tones and an overall crappy sound. I thought the problem was that the rod piezo lost contact with the box top.To improve contact with the …

Try this alternate Kalimba tuning for an authentic world music sound. Last week, I bought the  C. B. Gitty Kalimba/Thumb Piano Kit as a way to break-out from building stringed instruments for a while. I was looking for an instrument that I've never made before and something that I could add to my collection.  The kalimba (also known as a mbira or thumb piano) is an African idiophone that has its roots in the Congo and Zimbabwe. I like them because they deliver serious w …

Learning to play slide on your 3-string cigar box guitar can be hard.But not with Shane Speal's cigar box guitar lessons.Here's 4-part video lesson series from Shane Speal, the King of the Cigar Box Guitar. In it, Shane takes you on a ride from knee-slappin' country licks to sinister murder ballads, giving you the best advice, in the simplest terms, on how to play slide CBG.As with all his videos, each lesson is turbo-charged with his high-energy personality.Add to that his uncanny knack fo …

"You ever get bored playing the same things over and over again on your 3-string cigar box guitar?" asks the King of cigar box guitars, Shane Speal.Shane has been cranking out a ton of videos over the past few months, among which are loads of insanely useful and creative lessons.In one of those lessons, Shane says that before cigar box guitars enjoyed a surge in popularity, there wasn't a standard tuning such as the G-D-g tuning used today.Much like the Wild West days of early America, the early …

This is what happens when Shane messes around at work! He stumbles across a Lionel Richie classic. LOL!!! Tune your 4-string cigar box guitar to Open G (G-D-G-B) and play along to Easy Like Sunday Morning. Make sure to sing the "AHH AHH AHHs," too! …