We build custom early 20th Century style cigar box fiddles. We have the experience to create a nice playing and good-sounding instrument from just about any type of box (except cardboard). The listed price of $900 is only an average. Your instrument may be less or it may be greater. Most custom instruments tend to be on the higher end of the price scale.. You can expect to pay between $1,000 and $1,500, depending on how difficult your dream cigar box fiddle is for us to build. Don't like the price--build your own!

Email us at don@DonRickertDesign.com to start the conversation about what you want.

To get an idea of what our custom instruments sound like, use the YouTube player below. This player contains 5 videos. You will figure out how to move from one video to another by moving the cursor around on the video player window.

We can use a box that you have found in some cases; otherwise we will find a suitable box. It is very difficult to find a cigar box with right dimensions for making a fiddle.
Unless you really want an instrument with a terrible sound, we will always replace the cigar box top with musical instrument grade wood, steam the label off of the old top and re-apply it to the new top
Your custom cigar box fiddle can be made for 'on the arm' style or 'under the chin' style playing. It can be fit with any type of tuner imaginable, from standard violin pegs to geared banjo tuners. We generally have to design and make a custom length neck in order to get the neck geometry right. This is because cigar boxes are almost never the same length as a regular fiddle; therefore, you can't just put a regular violin neck on them.
For those who will be using one of these fiddles for stage use, we are experts at 'stealth' installation of pickups, internal pre-amps and so forth. An example would be the fiddle we built for Jason "Rev. Snake" Johnson of the The Prodigal String Band. Their MySpace site (http://www.myspace.com/theprodigalstringband). Two videos of Rev. Snake playing his electric cigar box fiddle are including among the videos above.

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