2010s/2023 Electric Cigar Box Dombra

My friend Phil gifted me a slightly-horrendous cigar box guitar some years back with all of the "blues dog" trappings. It had copper frets glued into grooves in the "fretboard" surface. This is that instrument but transformed into something a little more practical and also impractical.

I've done a few "fairytale" shows with Bald Mountain Theater and my buddy Ethan (director). The shows come together very quickly and feature folk tales from around the world -- one year it was Ireland, another it was Czechia, other years it has been Japan and Russia. This year I got "drafted" into the production to supply the music and it was "Tales of the Steppes" -- and most of them are Kazakh stories.

I knew I wanted to keep instrumentation relatively simple this year because there are a lot of cues to highlight and things move fast on stage. I liked the idea of trying to do a lot with a little and the Kazakh national instrument -- the dombra, a 2-string, gut/nylon-strung instrument similar in style to saz, bouzouki, and tamburitza-family instruments, but played more in the fashion of a balalaika-meet-saz -- seemed like it would be a natural thing to try to ape, save that I didn't have anything like it on hand when the show started.

The night before the first practices ensued, I took this cigar box guitar off the wall where it had been hanging, planed the fretboard and refretted it with actual jumbo frets, removed 2 tuners, yanked-off the bluesy emblems, installed and wired-up a mini-humbucker hidden under a P90 cover, fit a tailpiece and rubber bridge, and strung it up with 2 strings (42w and 26w) tuned GD low to high. This gets a lower-pitched, nylon-ish-sounding (shorter sustain and plunkier), approximation of a dombra vibe.

Because it's electric, it also meant that I could put it through my pedal chain to get bass sounds (octave pedal), fantasy magic sounds (an Earthquaker Astral Destiny), and various other effects for certain scenes, but retain a bit of flavor. Is it at all a traditional dombra? Absolutely not... but a Stratocaster is pretty far from a classical guitar, too, for that matter. And... it's fun!

If you'd like a peek at the show, I actually recorded a couple of the performances: