Anyone who saw the funny little square-shaped guitars at Mikel Doktor’s booth stand at the Music is Art festival might have thought Doktor had created some unique, alien-type of instrument. However, ...

HUNTSVILLE, AL. - What is a cigar box guitar? Technically, it’s a discarded cigar box with a hole for a 1-inch-by-2-inch fretboard. A hodgepodge of random items. Perhaps with a leather cord attached ...

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) - It started as a search for a different sound. Kevin M. Kraft spent years unsatisfied with the instruments he had and was considering commissioning a custom-made guitar when he ...

It sounds raw. It doesn’t sound like a nice guitar when you pick it up and strum it. It sounds different, unrefined. “You’re talking about a stick with strings on it, and a box wrapped around a stick, ...

If WT Bryant isn’t working with his hands, he says his world just doesn’t feel right. It’s that maker spirit that’s led him to reimagine objects like the cigar box. For nearly four years, Bryant has ...

LIVERMORE — Ed Roudebush heard something different in a song that didn’t quite sound like a guitar, but wasn’t a banjo either. After some research, he found the cigar box guitar, and now months later ...

HUNTSVILLE, AL. - About five years ago, Bill Jehle decided to build the perfect electric guitar. Dissatisfied with all of his equipment, Jehle began to take note of certain features in his dozen or so ...

Ever played a cigar box guitar? The customarily homemade instrument follows the design of a regular guitar. But they traditionally use a cigar box as the resonator. Of course, creative musicians who ...

He works with the precision and concentration of a surgeon because, well, he is one. But in the basement workshop of Kirk Withrow’s Birmingham home, the stakes are much lower. The ear, nose and throat ...

Shane Speal, whose Snake Oil Band headlines the first New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival on Saturday, started out playing something with a little more firepower. “In the ’80s, I was a bass player ...

There isn’t much about the small house on an average street in a typical Royal Oak neighborhood that would make people think anything out of the ordinary is happening inside. But the cigar box guitars ...