Making a DIY cardboard box guitar

Another incredibly simple instrument to have a go at making at home this week. Today we have a box guitar!

Now you can make these guitars as fancy or as plain as you like. We opted for plain so we could get on with using them- the children couldn’t wait to use them! You can make necks for the out of kitchen roll tubes, or a long, thin box, but essentially they boil down to a cardboard box with some elastic bands around them. That is it!!

We opted for very plain white boxes as I had been sent a lovely Easter gift in the box. It was a great size for my little hands to hold onto as well. I found some different size elastic bands, some thinner than the others, and it so happened that mine were multi-coloured. We stretched the elastic bands to fit the box and I spaced them out on the box so they were roughly equally spaced. You could tape the elastic bands down but I chose not to.

It is a very quiet instrument, but by using different size and thickness elastic bands I could produce slightly different notes or sounds. If I’d had more sizes of elastic bands I could have produced more notes.

For no reason, other than that is what I found and was able to get on the box before one of my children excitedly grabbed it and took it off with them, one box had 4 and one had 5 elastic bands on. As you can see below my children loved them!

My son was so enamoured of his “guitar” that he showed his school friends in his zoom storytime/show and tell. I also had to take it off him before he went to sleep the other night as he had been singing his dinosaurs a lullaby with it.

My daughter found another use for it altogether when she finished her boogieing! I have no idea what the Paw Patrol has done to deserve it?

How does it work?

This instrument works on the same principles as a guitar, or any other plucked stringed instrument. When the string, or here the elastic band, is plucked, it vibrates over the space below it. Here it is the open part of the box, and in a guitar it would be the hole under the string. The vibrations make sound. You can change the sound made by using a different length or thickness elastic band. Shorter elastic bands are pulled more taut on the cardboard box and so they vibrate faster when plucked. The faster an elastic band vibrates, the higher pitch we hear and so different length bands produce higher or lower notes. It would be the same with different thickness of elastic bands with thicker bands vibrating more slowly, producing a lower note.