Futuro Fanned Fret CBG

Here was a challenge! Many months before this project was started Devin had scrawled out a design for a headless cigar box guitar on a scrap piece of paper over dinner one evening.  Thinking that these guitars looked "futuristic," he set aside a Futuro cigar box with the intentions of building it.  The project was pushed to the side for other ones, but after having met Erin Coburn and seeing her headless fanned fret guitar Devin was determined to make this build a reality! (And increase the complexity 10 fold...)

Something we NEVER do is bluprint things before building... we have a tendancy to just wing it!  But between the multiple scale length fanned frets and the hidden tuners, the design needed to be sketched out before we cut any wood.  

To further complicate things, Devin wanted to give this guitar a wide selection of pickup options.  Ultimately, he decided on doing three different pickups. A single coil "5 dollar make it holler" pickup from MGB, an MGB flat humbucker as well as a piezo pickup on the inside of the box gives this little CBG a whole host of unique sounding options... wiring all of these pickups to work together was a beast!

Two three way selector switches, a volume and tone for the magnetic pups and a volume for the piezo allows the player to isolate any of the three pickups to be played alone, or the ability to blend all or some of the pickups together! 

Hidden inside the box is also the "headstock." Each of the four strings goes through the lid of the box and into the tuners.  This means that the box must be opened to tune or change the strings.  A mechanical reverb spring has also been added inside the box so that it can be adjusted, replaced, or removed if so desired.

All in all this was a fascinatingly complex build and gave Devin a run for his money a few times.  Some slight errors are present but unless you know what you are looking for they are relatively benign.  We are unsure that the fanned fret design really adds anything to the playability or tone of the guitar, but it sure does look cool!