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Reduced feedback. Deeper bass response. And no more "quack!" I was complaining about certain tonal problems with piezo pickups when the idea for this standalone pre-amp came to me. It's deceptively simple... a $17 acoustic guitar pre-amp with a hacked input becomes a great EQ and signal boost. And it's all housed in a cigar box!Hear the Demo First of all, here's how it sounds... I built this prototype in less than one hour.  Here's how to do it:Parts NeededC. B. Gitty Pre-Am …

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 …

Reduced feedback. Deeper bass response. And no more "quack," now in an even smaller package! Hi all, it's Shane Speal. A couple years ago, I created a simple hack that allowed you to turn a C. B. Gitty pre-amp into a standalone unit. These plans became so popular, they were included in my upcoming book,  Making a Poor Man's Guitars (Fox Chapel Publishing, October 2018). Just recently, I was perusing an craft store when I discovered some cute, little wooden …

When I first started performing live with my cigar box guitar in 1995, I would shove a tie-tack microphone into the sound hole to amplify it. It was just a cheap $20 mic from Radio Shack that was originally intended to clip on a speaker’s tie or collar when giving seminars.  I was nervously playing coffee-shop gigs at the time, and the mic was good enough for the job at hand. Picture above: Performing with a tie-tack mic in my original Macanudo, Rehoboth Autumn Jazz Fest, …