I know there are a fair number of Cigar Box Guitar builders who don’t want to spend ages learning to play their builds, but just want a few tunes to illustrate how good their builds sound.
If you want to showcase your guitar’s sound to encourage people to buy your builds, here are my most important absolute beginner tips:
- Tune your instrument to open tuning.
- Learn some 1- finger power chords.
- Practice strumming to get a good rhythm
- Learn the fret positions of a simple minor pentatonic scale
Open Tuning
Most Cigar Box Guitars are tuned to open G, but not always. This means that the strings are tuned G D G. I like to tune to G3 D3 G2 if you are looking for partricular pitch information.
I have a couple of YouTube Videos about tuning which are shown at the bottom of the page and there are some helpful hints in my article Strings For Cigar Box Guitar : Hints and Tips For Absolute Beginner Builders
A clip on chromatic tuner is nearly always clipped onto my guitar headstock as this is by far the quickest way to check that my guitar is in tune, but you could use an old fashioned guitar pitch pipe if you like. Tune the middle string to the D, the highest string to the G and the lowest string to the G an octave below the top string.
My Snark clip-on tuner can be bought on Amazon and is quite inexpensive.
A guitar needs to be in tune to sound good so do check your tuning frequently. I mean before you play and again if you think that it may have slipped out of tune.
If you find that the fretted notes are not playing in tune when the guitar is in tune on the open strings, This is called an intonation problem and I have written an article that might help you to sort this out:
Guitar Tuning And Intonation Problems: How Can I Fix This?
Learn Some 1-Finger Power Chords
With the guitar in tune, you can learn some 1-finger power chords. These are a simplified way of playing chords that can stand in for major, minor and 7th chords and enable you to play the chords for practically any song using just a finger fretting across the three strings.
Your finger position will tell you which power chord you are playing:
| fret | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| power chord | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E | F | F#/Gb | G |
The One, Four and Five Chords: I, IV and V
Many songs are written using just the I, IV and V chords. These are the Roman numerals for 1, 4 and 5 and you will hear many players talking about the one, four and five chords.
As a bit of confusion this is not the same as the 1, 4 and 5 frets. so let’s have a quick look at what this means.
In the key of C, the notes of the scale are C D E F G A B C and the one, four and five chords of the key of C are C, F and G:
| C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
So for a song in C, looking at the table of fret positions in the paragraph above, we can see that we can usually play it with the 1-finger barre power chords at the 5th fret, 10th fret and open strings (or 12th fret) for C, F and G.
There is a slight complication that A minor will sometimes crop up in a song in C, but we can easily add that by playing the power chord on the 6th fret.
The Easiest Way To Play The Chords Of A Song In Open G Tuning
If we want to play a song or the 12-bar blues in open G tuning, the easiest way is to make the one or I chord the open G
| POWER CHORD | G | A | B | C | D | E | F# | G |
| NOTE OF THE SCALE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| FRET NUMBER | 0 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 12 |
The frets we need to play on are 0 or open strings for the G (the one chord), 5 for the C chord ( the four) and 7th fret for the D chord ( the five) The relative minor of G is E minor and that can be played on the 9th fret. Sometimes a song will have A minor ( the relative minor of C ) and this is played on the 2nd fret.
Learn To Strum Your Cigar Box Guitar
A lot of people forget that although the guitar is a tuned instrument, a lot of what makes it sound greta is the way it is used as a percussive instrument.
This is achieved by being a confident strummer when you are playing chords.
You can use a pick/plectrum or your fingers. It doesn’t really matter- whatever suits you. You will get more volume with a pick or plectrum and your fingers will not get so sore, but personally I often play without a pick.
The main think to remember is that you need to keep your strumming arm moving mostly by moving your wrist rather than your elbow. There are down and up strums and all kinds of strumming patterns you can experiment with.
I have written a few articles that will help you to get a good sound on the 1-finger power barre chords and to learn to strum well. I will put links to them at the bottom of the page.
Learn The G Minor Pentatonic Scale
This is a really good way of learning to play anything from the simplest melody to a very complicated riff. The scale contains just 5 notes and the pattern to play the lower octave across the bottom 2 strings is really easy to remember:
The upper octave can be played on the top string alone:
I have a whole article on minor pentatonic scales you can read if you’d like more information:
Minor Pentatonic Scales For 3-String Cigar Box Guitar
The Builders Blues: A Beginner Friendly Song For Beginners Who Don’t Want To Sound Like Beginners
To help you with these I am writing a series of tunes that will help you to learn these skills of strumming 1- finger power chords and playing simple melodies and this is the first of those pieces: The Builders Blues
A YouTube lesson of this original song written by me is here: