Undercrown Guitar

So I built a guitar. It's apparently — technically — a chordophone, but you know. A 'cigar-box chordophone' doesn't sound as cool.

Despite a childhood filled with guitars and siblings who play, they never clicked for me. I could never wrap my head around how everyone held all these chords in their mind. Why are all the strings offset by different amounts? How do I learn all the different chords and voicings? What do you mean 'other tunings'?!

My piano makes way more sense. I'll stick with that.

I learned, over this past 2022 holiday period about three-strings when my old man handed me one he gifted himself. The relative simplicity clicked for me. Sometimes you have to find the thing that gets you over the hump and for whatever reason, this funny little box guitar was just that.

They're usually open-tuned — G-D-G or E-B-E — powerchord tuning. This more sequential tuning, rather than the usual 'stagger' of a six-string, makes them easier to intuit coming from another instrument, and their widely-spaced strings make them far easier to attempt as a novice. After just a few minutes I'd worked out a couple of songs and was 'playing' better than I ever had when I seriously tried as a kid.

So I decided to make one. Never buy what you can spend twice the money making half as good, right? I've never worked wood before and I can't play guitar. What could possibly go wrong?

It took me two weekends, with about half the time being spent learning and attempting to shape the neck. I learned about a bunch of new muscles in the process, when they all awoke from decades-long slumbers screaming. The rest of the time was agonising over my tiny Dremel drill-press about where a nut hole should go or how deep to mill out the back of the lid for the potentiometers and praying I didn't go through it.

In the end, the final guitar is messy, rough around the edges, has a few dead frets at the high end and requires near-constant adjustment with a tiny allen key to stop it rattling.

But... it sounds awesome. It's low and grumbly and sometimes sputtery, like an old blues man getting out of bed.

It's not for everyone, but it's exactly what I wanted.