Now for something completely different – in praise of the one-string guitar

…for children, that is. It has the great advantage that you don’t have to tune it. Or rather, an adult doesn’t have to tune it, even if they could. The kid, in my case a six year old grandson, quite a long time ago now, can play a simple tune on the one string. Most important of all, they can play-act with the thing.

which is what it is all about, really.

What you need is some sort of reasonably resonant wooden box – I can’t remember what had come in the particular box that gave me the idea all those years ago. It didn’t have a back, but that didn’t seem to matter, although it would have been a simple matter to cut a piece of thin ply to fit and glue it on. Cutting the sound hole must have been more difficult. I suppose I marked the centre and scribed a circle with a pair of compasses and then cut it out with the old fret saw I used to make jigsaws with for his mother and her sister a generation earlier, not to mention for the school fete. Then smooth off with sandpaper of course. Then make the neck out of a two lengths of thinnish batten, glued on with PVA, one to the surface of the box, and the other glued to it and butting up to the body.

The winding mechanism was a bit trickier, because it has to be stiff enough to stop it just unwinding all the time. I solved that by making the diameter that the string wound round a bit smaller than the diameter that went through the blocks on each side, so that the string exerted less twist on the peg. I remember being pleased when that worked.

I haven’t mentioned that he helped me with all this, as he had helped me with a simple sailing boat and a space ship on previous visits. I know lots of other grandpas who have had a wonderful time doing this sort of thing.

And there we had it, the one-string guitar.