Don Rickert Musical Instruments(tm)

Cigar Box Fiddles

In an earlier post, I noted an observed trend having to do with musical instruments made from cigar boxes. The part of the trend that we are keenly interested in is cigar box fiddles. These instruments have a history going back at least 150 years. The 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 popular among soldiers during the American Civil War, as well as Irish immigrants and Cajuns of modest means. Also popular among the Irish fiddlers were instruments made from ham tins.

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:

http://www.fiddlerwoman.com/id91.htm

http://www.geocities.com/cigarboxguitar/all_about.html

When Don Rickert Research & Design (then Wiederholt & Rickert Partners, LLC), was condisering entering the musical instrument business (under the V-Gear(tm) brand), 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, I built a cigar box fiddle, based on the following three primary criteria:

1. It had to have all of the critical ergonomic dimensions of a violin (distance from nut to bridge, nut to endpin, etc.)
2. 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.
3. It had to sound good, rather than just "interesting" (i.e. horrible).

The results of this initial effort are shown here (click on the the thumbnail for a larger view):

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!

Trends: Neo DIY, Ethnography and Cigar Box Musical Instruments

There are three trends that we are paying careful attention to these days:

1. The new DIY (stands for ''do it yourself'), as exempified by Make Magazine: 20,000 people attended the recent 'Makers Faire', sponsored by Make (www.makezine.com). If you don't understand the need for an adult-sized tree-to-tree zip line or a soda bottle water rocket that travels hundreds of feet, you may not be interested. Note: See Brad's posting on this blog on the Make Magazine phenomenon.
2. Ethnography: A recent article in Business Week (www.businessweek.com) calls it the "new core competency" (we already knew that!). Thanks for an attendee at a recent lecture I gave with Jay Heisler of UPS on Ethnography in the Front End of New Product Development (you can download it from this site.) for this tip. We'll be posting several summaries on several related Business Week articles on New Product Ethnography & Design ASAP.
3. Musical instruments made from cigar boxes (who knows why, but we're in!): Google 'cigar box guitar' for instance and you will see what we are talking about. Note: be careful about signing up for the Cigar Box Cigar listserve--you will get more interesting stuff from brilliant eccentric inventor/tinkerers than you can even imagine.

Stay tuned for plans for building a cigar box fiddle that actually sounds good on this blog. We're almost finished...really!!

DR