#1 resource for Cigar Box Guitars, Free Plans, How-To, Parts & More!

The Great CBG Survey of 2016

So, I was messing around with creating surveys through Google Forms and thought it might be fun and informative to make a questionnaire for the CBG community to get an idea of what everyone is doing out there. Just some basic questions about what you're building, playing, buying and selling, and how you're tuning.

I wasn't able to embed the form here, so here's the link:

There's no login required and no personal information is collected. You'll be able to see the results of the survey when you're done and I will update this post with results as we go. I'll also provide the raw data to anyone in spreadsheet form if you're interested in analyzing further. This could be useful information for builders and sellers or anyone who is curious.

So if you're like me and have wondered if GDG is really the king of all tunings, whether 3 strings are more popular than 4, or what kind of pickups most people use, take a few minutes to fill out the form. The more responses the better, so share the link and hopefully we can answer some of these burning question!

RESULTS:

UPDATED 1/18/16: Thanks for the participation everyone! We received 85 responses in the first week. I'm going to leave the polls open going forward so go ahead and take the survey if you haven't already. For those who have taken it, here's a link that should take you to the summary of responses.

CBG Survey Responses

Here's the link to the Google Sheet through 1/18/16: (No login required - you should be able to view and download in whatever format you'd like)

Current Results Spreadsheet

7 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by turtlehead on January 12, 2016 at 2:59pm

Good call Blues Frog. That's going on the list.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Stuart Baldwin on January 12, 2016 at 12:44pm

I started building CBGs to try something different. Turns out I'm mostly the same as the rest of you!

Must try harder to be different!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sean on January 13, 2016 at 8:02am

E: Bourbon and homemade Sweet (slightly blended with black) Green Tea; or with Sun Drop, Coke or Jarritos chaser.

(never had a drink making a CBG. Dremel and drinking sounds bad. Playing a CBG post-drink is another matter!)

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Blues Frog on January 13, 2016 at 1:06pm

I too drink those in that order. I start with coffee, then switch to tea. Late at night I drink Bourbon. Drink enough of it, and it acts as the morphine.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jim Morris on January 12, 2016 at 4:28pm

I answered all questions as honestly as I could. (I'm snowed in and had a couple drinks) Man, I didn't even know about some of those tunings!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by SlowHound on January 12, 2016 at 5:43pm

Answered everything.

Besides tunings (never heard most) the two "how many have you built?" and "How many do you build a

year?" won't match. I've built 50ish but 35 of those were in the first year of four. Only built two last year.

Also, the one about "what's your playing/music style?" (or something like that) I checked a few but also wrote in Easy Listening.

Started with three but I'm a fretless four guy.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Uncle John on January 13, 2016 at 12:53am

Interesting. But one thing. The number of strings we most often play. Some of us go through phases. For a long time it was 3 for me and now it is 4 and just recently throwing in some one.

If you need any help, I took a Statistics class in college. For about an hour. I also took Calculus for about an hour. Well, maybe I am not the guy to help. But if you need grocery store math, I am a whiz. Truly, if you do need help, get somebody from Alabama. They got 4 A's and a B.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by turtlehead on January 15, 2016 at 8:21am

We're almost to 60 responses - doing pretty good I'd say! With the number of views this thread has right now, I'd say we're getting around 20-25% response rate. I'm going to leave it open ended for now and see what happens. Probably should put it up on Facebook too...

I figured there would be some overlap or missing pieces like you say Slow and LOL UJ - hopefully this will give us a decent overview though and we can have more detailed questions in the future.

One thing I was wondering about was what kind of sample size would be needed to get the best results. As of right now, there are 14,850 members of this site and 5,940 on the Facebook group. I'm sure there's plenty of overlap and also plenty of CBGers who aren't online. How many CBGers do you think there are in the world?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Grandpa on January 16, 2016 at 4:18pm

Thanks for putting up the survey, turtlehead. I hope the compilation is helpful to the community. I saw a lot of tunings I have not used, or even knew about, so I have some exploration open to me. Knowledge is good. I've gotten a little complacent with my builds of late, so this information will help stir the creative pot. Thanks again.