Cigar Box Amplifier

This is my latest project: a cigar box amplifier.

A video is at the bottom of this post.

To be completely honest, I can’t tell you a lot about it. Electronics aren’t a strong suit of mine and I followed step by step directions to put it together. Here is a link. I had seen these before at a cigar box guitar festival but, though I thought they were cool, I didn’t really think about making one. However, months ago I somehow happened upon these instructions and figured why not give it a shot.

Some of you might laugh when you see the wiring and my gobs of solder, but hey, it works! The instructions said to plan on about 4 hours to put it together; I think it took me 10. It’s a neat little amp though. It uses a 4″ speaker and the controls are volume and gain. It’s powered by a 9V battery, or a wall adapter (which I haven’t tried yet), and is wired so that it turns on automatically when an instrument cable is plugged in.

It behaves somewhat like a tube amp in that it breaks up a bit as you turn up the volume. I’ve also found that it responds well to guitar volume adjustments. I leave the amp pretty well cranked now and just roll off the guitar volume when I want a cleaner sound (something I didn’t include in the video). I’ve also found it to sound a bit better with single coil pickups, but that’s probably a matter of personal preference.

Below is the aforementioned video. Nothing special, but enough to get the idea.

 

Thanks a lot for reading, happy playing!