I think I might've actually arrived here by searching for "super cheap dobro".
Anyway gosh, what a neat site. My interest in making a CBG stems from my need to make instruments to explore alternate tunings. A few years ago I happened-upon-slash-reinvented what is apparently called the Bohlen Pierce scale. At that time I built a flimsy suitcase-harp thing (tuned using Altoids-can bridges) and also wrote a simple synthesizer program. Since then I've been making mainly electronic music - by which I mean, computer-composed, computer-generated, without so much as a MIDI keyboard involved physically. But looking back, most of the tunes I care about were thought up while toying around on something physical.
I started searching for lap steel guitar stuff because, lacking physical frets, that's a class of instrument very easy to modify to a different fretting. Building a cigar-box version is a very appealing alternative, though.
Has anyone else messed around with alternative fret setups? Seems like CBG's would be an ideal instrument for that sort of experimentation.
I won't try to explain Bohlen-Pierce here as that's done better elsewhere online... suffice it to say it's what almost anyone invents if they decide to ignore the octave and search for good scales which don't include it. (It's based on the "tritave" instead, tripling the frequency instead of doubling.) More importantly here's what it sounds like: link, link, link (this third one's a guitar, so, that's what BP guitar sounds like), link. I've also attached one of my own pieces.
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