Rickert and Ringholz Musical Instruments: Custom Electric Cigar Box Fiddle for the Prodigal String Band

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When Jason "Reverend Snake" Johnson, a repeat customer who already plays some out there stuff on one of our baritone fiddles, called to see if we could build him a really tricked-out electric cigar box fiddle, we were delighted. As it turns out, this was one difficult thing to build...everything from the extra long neck to turning a regular "Don Thomas" cigar box into a structure that could take the string tension without imploding (lots of carbon fiber and epoxy resin), to the internal active electronics...what look like wooden dowels to the right of the bridge are gain and tone controls.

Man, it was worth it. The fiddle actually sounds really good acoustically, but is a wicked beast, sort of like a fiddle version of Bo Diddley's guitar, when plugged into an amp. We expect to see some YouTube videos of this fiddle soon, but in the mean time, you can see these bad boys of Old Time, The Prodigal String Band on their MySpace site (http://www.myspace.com/theprodigalstringband).

Click on any of the thumbnail images below to see a full-size version.