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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Cigar boxes may have intrigued you - dovetailed wood versions that seemed so wonderfully crafted, and perhaps overbuilt, to their purpose. The subject may be gaining currency as relations thaw between ...

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 ...

Who can forget the homemade musical instruments they made as children – the rubber band guitars, shakers with beans, or the simple wax paper over a comb kazoos? But homemade instruments aren’t just a ...

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 ...