Rickert & Ringholz Musical Instruments
Several years ago we observed a trend having to do with musical instruments made from cigar boxes. Most of the the activity has to do with cigar box guitars, but fiddles and other instruments as well. The part of the trend that we are keenly interested in is cigar box fiddles.
Cigar box fiddles have a history going back at least 150 years. The Spanish "Cedar" (not really cedar, but a hardwood that smells like cedar) cigar box was introduced in the 1840s, and there were plenty of discarded ones around by the 1850s. There is pretty good evidence that home made cigar box fiddles were common among soldiers during the American Civil War, as shown in the drawing here from the period:
Today, some brave souls have tried their hand at building such instruments and have written about the challenges. They are a lot harder to build than one might think, at least if you want something that is playable. For example, see:
When Don Rickert Research & Design was considering entering the musical instrument business, we ended up designing and building lots new violin/fiddle concepts that did not pan out when testing with people besides ourselves (i.e. consumer research). Just for fun, we built a cigar box fiddle, based on the following three primary criteria:
- It had to have all of the critical ergonomic dimensions of a violin (distance from nut to bridge, nut to endpin, etc.)
- It had to be capable of being played under the chin rather than resting on the arm. This was to meet the needs of modern fiddlers who hold their fiddle like violinists.
- It had to sound good, rather than just "interesting" (i.e. horrible).
The results of this initial effort are shown here:
We took the cigar box fiddle along with us to the 2006 Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention (it's actually in Alabama at Athen's State University), where we were field testing several other early prototypes of a travel/practice violin and and octave violin...everybody wanted to see and hear the cigar box fiddle!
We have some sound samples of the cigar box fiddles actually being played on our blog.
