Doctor Oakroot

Why Homemade Instruments?

I've been building my own instruments since I was a kid. The one to the left there was inspired by a chinese instrument I saw in a museum on one of our summer family trips when I was a young teenager.

All the wood parts were carved from a limb we pruned from a mullberry tree that grew next to our garage. Originally strung with three nylon guitar strings, it currently has two bass guitar strings (from an experiment a couple of years ago).

So, I was inspired by actual instruments - usually exotic stuff that I couldn't buy.

I was also inspired by the imagined primitive man who first bit on the end of his hunting bow in order to use his own skull as a resonator when he plucked the string. And not just that early man, but I think it has been the practice through most of history (and pre-history) that musicians made their own instruments. The professional luthier is a modern invention ("modern" in the large scheme of things extending back to the late medieval period). Or where there have been luthiers in earlier periods, the practice lasted only a while...

Then there was Harry Parch - a friend and composition student turned me on to him in high school. Parch built his own instruments - supposedly because he used a unique 43 note scale and couldn't hit all the notes on conventional instruments... but Parch's scale was really a smoke screen. The real reason for Parch's homemade instruments is that he saw music as grand theatre and the players as priests and priestesses to the muse. He needed special grand instruments to pull it off. (One reason I say his scale was a smoke screen is that his instruments took hours to tune and rarely stayed in tune till the end of the performance, so he wasn't playing in that scale anyway.)

So, I have this gut feeling that a musician should build his own tools as much as possible. And doing so allows me to incorporate Parch's ideal of music as theatre and prayer. And, inevitably, I have given up my production manufactured guitars in favor of harder to play, but more satisfying homemade guitars.

Diddley Bow

The diddley bow is the one-string instrument on which the blues were born. That's a Mississippi Delta name. Here in North Carolina it was called "one-string".

One afternoon, I decided to throw together an instrument using available materials. The sound box is the cardboard box my Alesis Nanocompressor (a piece of studio equipment) came in. The neck is a dowel I happened to have on hand. Originally, the string was a piece of nylon twine and the bridge was an empty plastic pill bottle.

The string was tensioned by the old fashioned diddley bow method: the string was tied on as tight as possible and then the bridge was slid into place, further tightening it.

With that string and setup, I used it primarily as a bass.

Later, I wanted to try some traditional diddley bow blues. I modified the instrument, adding an electric guitar "D" string, a different bridge - a piece of mystery wood, and a new tuning system.

Diddley JO

Diddley JO? What the heck is that?

Well the short answer is a cross between a diddley bow and a banjo. It's an instrument I created on a whim, but found it to be a really cool addition to my show.

The Cyclops

For my first cigarbox guitar, I built this nylon six string fretless. I had intended this guitar for fingered fretless play, but made the bridge a little too high. With nylon strings it is playable with fingers - which is good because I finger a lot of notes even when I'm playing slide, but, now I tune it in open D and use it primarily for slide tunes.

The Goblin

I attended and performed at the The First Annual Cigar Box Guitar Fest in 2004... and it seems like everyone had a cigarbox guitar with a stock electric guitar neck on it. So I came home and made one too :o)

Recording: Here With You from the Love & Death CD. Love & Death itself was written on this guitar, but I liked the sound better on the Six String Slider so that was used in the recording.

Live: I'm still fighting with the pickup (a Radio Shack mini-speaker) - at the moment it sounds pretty good, except that it's distant and quiet. But when I get this fixed I expect this to be my main live standard tuning axe - meaning it will play about half the show.