Anyone can make an instrument and play music on it.
That’s the premise of an international movement that uses found objects – most commonly wooden cigar boxes – to make guitars or other stringed instruments.
Take a used beer can, for example. When attached to the end of a long wooden pole and strung from end to end with a single wire, it becomes a canjo, capable of holding a rudimentary tune.
“It certainly gets me excited,” said Ben Baker, who crafts cigar box guitars and other instruments. “This thing I made can be used to make music and create art.”
New Hampshire is at the center of it all. C.B. Gitty Crafter Supply, based in Rochester, is the largest manufacturer of cigar box guitars and their parts in the country, maybe the world. Baker began the business in his basement less than a decade ago.
Now it’s blossomed from an online market that sells various guitar parts, to one that makes cigar box guitars, mandolins and ukuleles; publishes how-to guides for budding builders; and sells do-it-yourself kits to people who aren’t quite ready to construct their own instrument from scratch.
“Spreading the word that anyone anywhere can build their own instrument and make music on it is the most important thing,” Baker said. “It really brings it back to the roots of what music is, and why it’s important: anybody can do it.”
And Baker can certainly make music on a cigar box guitar. He frequently jams with his co-workers and friends, and posts the clips on YouTube for the company’s thousands of Facebook followers. Recently Baker gave the Monitor a tutorial.
Slipping a metal slide on his finger, he moved it up and down the cigar box guitar neck between frets to carry a tune, while strumming the three strings. Transitioning his slide between the third and fifth fret, Baker strummed out the familiar sounds of ZZ Top’s “La Grange.”
Baker grew up playing music, and he got his first guitar at age 13. But his music business began as a hobby in his basement, after his friends gave him a beer-can canjo in 2008.
Baker took to the internet to figure out how to make his own, and what he discovered was all kinds of information about cigar box guitars.
“I built my first, I built a few more, got to meeting some people who were also into it,” he said. The name C.B. Gitty is an just an abbreviation of cigar box guitar.
Cigar box guitars have been in use since the 1840s, Baker said, when people figured out they could shove a stick through the wooden box, put a tight string on it, and make it sound like a guitar.
The cigar box instruments grew out of necessity. In the early 1900s, when poor Americans couldn’t afford conventional instruments, they would make their own, Baker said.
“Some of the biggest names in blues all started on this sort of instrument,” he said, adding the cigar box guitars played a role in shaping the genre.
The instruments have caught on again recently. And Baker attributes their popularity to a rise in the do-it-yourself movement, and appreciation of simpler times.
“It is just wanting something different, something a little more primitive something with a little bit deeper feeling to it,” he said.
Baker formerly worked full-time as a software engineer. But after getting his first canjo, he began buying instrument parts and selling them wholesale to fund his growing interest making guitars.
The business grew from there, and now C.B. Gitty produces cigar box guitars, cigar box mandolins, canjos and a host of other instruments. The most popular instruments Baker sells include an electric cigar box guitar and an acoustic one known as the “two-cent Genny” – each one has a civil-war era two cent piece pushed into the headstock.
The C.B. Gitty workroom, located in a restored mill building, is lined with shelves full of differently branded cigar boxes. The flat ones are the best for guitar making, but C.B. Gitty finds a way to use them all.
The boxes – all made of wood – are expensive to produce, but are essentially worthless once the cigars inside sell.
Baker buys them wholesale. “In a way, it’s like a recycling program of sorts,” he said.
In the last few years, Baker transitioned to running C.B. Gitty full-time. The business now employs 14 people and brought in $1.5 million in sales last year. Running the company has limited Baker’s ability to build his own instruments, but he finished up a few recently, including an upright base made from a hodgepodge of items. The base’s resonator is an old metal washtub, part of a ladder is the neck and a child’s desk chair is the instrument stand.
To play it, Baker stands and plucks the instrument’s two strings with one hand, while moving his other hand up and down the neck between frets he has drawn on the fingerboard.
Right now, C.B. Gitty is a purely online business. Soon Baker plans to change that. He hopes to start a house band, open up a part of the office for live concerts and create a showroom for customers interested in looking at the finished products.
In the meantime, Baker has taken up livestreaming – letting fans into his world through his phone camera.
“That spark, that joy and excitement when you build your first one, or your thousandth one,” he said during a recent livestreamed interview, “you get it strung up and you hear what this thing you made can do, how it sounds, that excitement and that joy, for me it’s never gone away.”