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

Transcend Blues License Plate Cigar Box Guitar Jam + My Sculpture Wonderland

I took my Transcend license plate guitar with me to the close of my art exhibition "Potential Energy" and got to play in the gallery surrounded by my ceramic sculptures at the Appalachian Center for Craft. I only had room to bring my 25 year old tape player that I hacked into a guitar amp, so the sound is very lo-fi & gritty. It was a blast playing in that setting! The gitty has an oak neck & fingerboard that I fretted. It has very low action - really I should raise it a bit for slide or just use it for chords. There's a Snake Oil humbucker & a disc piezo under the plate with dual volume controls. I've got electric strings on it with G D G B tuning here. Thanks for listening! If you'd like to see a tour of my sculptures in the gallery I have another video showing that here: https://youtu.be/F15f86Fstyo

12 members like this

Get Embed Code

Tags:

You need to be a member of Cigar Box Nation to add comments!

Join Cigar Box Nation

Comment by Nancy kat on July 1, 2016 at 6:47am: Nice art work Janis!!! Good playing+ sound from that tape player~~~Meeowww^..^

Comment by Janis Wilson Hughes on July 1, 2016 at 3:10am: Here's the little radio/tape deck I was playing through. I hacked into the tape head, so you set it to cassette and press play for it to work. :D

Comment by Janis Wilson Hughes on July 1, 2016 at 3:04am: Wes, Dave, Unc, Blue, & Norbert - first off Thanks! Y'all are awesome! I appreciate the nice words on the gitty tone and on my artwork. :)

That little radio is pretty sweet. The previous owners left it in the garage of the first home I owned. I used to use the radio when working out there, but for about 10 years it's sat idle. When I discovered the you can hack a radio/tape player into a guitar amp, I immediately dug this up and tried it. It was really very easy! I did a more modern (but still 15 years old) boom box too that has a much fuller sound but not as much crunch. That one's a lot heavier - might as well use a small amp. I'll post a picture of this little radio in a bit.

Dave, it's nice that you said smooth slide. For this build, it's my personal license plate I got 12 years ago. Just retired the car, and had to build an LPG with it. I didn't want to cut through for a PUP for obvious reasons, so decided to try the mag PUP under the plate technique. It works, but the signal was very low. So I added a piezo disc too with independent volume control. It has a very unique sound for my builds. Anyway, to get enough output for the little radio I have to use a lot of volume from the piezo, and that can get really zingy and noisy with the slide. It took a fair amount of effort to keep it as smooth as I could compared to playing through a different rig.

Comment by Cause the Blue rat on June 30, 2016 at 3:38pm: AWESOME SOUND! Cool surroundings. Totally cool

I no longer have links to the article. But it talked about how the Rolling Stones used the distorted sound of a guitar being played through a cassette deck because it had a really cool distortion. The article listed all the songs they recored using this same cassette deck.