AMY BENNETT WILLIAMS

AWILLIAMS@NEWS-PRESS.COM

The visuals do not match the soundtrack.

Picture a classic Cape Coral backyard, screened lanai opening onto a sapphire pool, potted plants and white plastic loungers.

But the music ringing out over the still water is pure Delta blues — smoky and raw; sometimes chugging, sometimes shimmying, sometimes soaring.

The bluesman isn't an old Mississipian who sold his soul to the devil; he's a 20-something tech guy who commutes to Naples to his I.T. support job at NewsBank.

His instrument is a surprise too, an old cigar box with a glued-on wooden neck and a few hardware store finds, yet the sounds 29-year-old Paul Clair wrings from his handmade slide guitar are anything but ordinary.

Clair's vision for his month-or-so-old business, FrogDog Guitars, is out of the ordinary as well: to sell handmade, one-of-a-kind guitars starting at $99 with a top price of $300.

He launched his start-up a few weeks ago with a post on reddit.com: "Live in SWFL? Can I interest you in a custom Cigar Box Guitar?"

The idea is "all about going back to the poor roots of the blues, and building guitars for the common man that has more heart and soul than money in their pocket."

And for people who've never played, his guitars make better entry-level instruments than store-bought, mass-produced started guitars, he says. For one thing, they're smaller and lighter, but perhaps more importantly, their open tuning means someone who's never played before can pick one up and create satisfyingly "real" sounding notes.

Like the music the California-born Clair plays, cigar box guitars are a rootsy tradition, dating to the early 20th century, when ingenuity pressed left-over materials into the service of folk music.

That's not to say you can't plug one of Clair's guitars into an amp and shred, as he shows a visitor on a recent morning in the spare bedroom of the Cape Coral house he shares with fiancé Kim Lewis and their sweet-faced, pit-mix, Ned, the original frog dog.

A 3-year-old rescue they adopted from the Gulf Coast Humane Society ("Poor guy had a heck of a story," Clair says. "He'd been kept on a 2-foot-long tie-down and the skin on his neck had grown into the collar"), they discovered Ned has an amusing posture when relaxing.

"He'd sit with his legs all splayed out just like a big fat-looking frog, and we'd say, 'Come on Frog Dog.' " The name just seemed to fit his quirky guitars too.

Though enjoying something of a renaissance in other parts of the country — there's an annual cigar box festival in Alabama and a small museum in Pennsylvania — cigar box guitars haven't yet caught on in a big way in Southwest Florida, where Clair and Lewis moved as Snowmageddon refugees from Maryland in 2010.

That puzzles him, but he's doing his best to change that.

"I would like to eventually get this to a point where I can get other people building or interested in playing," he says. "And I'd love to get a cigar box festival going. I don't know why this hasn't gotten more popular here. You've got a simple instrument that can be played by people who've always wanted to take up guitar and just want something to strum, or by an expert, and it sounds great either way."

He points out the many revered blues guitarists who had modest beginnings.

"Buddy Guy, R.L. Burnside, Son House — they weren't learning off of expensive instruments and they didn't become bluesmen by learning on a $10,000 guitar," he says. "Guitars have become heavily romanticized — you have to have the best quality wood and all this crazy stuff - but no, you just have to sound good."

Clair himself can't read music, he says, though he's been playing since he was a teen.

"Plus," he says, "you've got the box itself, which acts as a blank canvas."

That's another part of the appeal, Clair says: the instruments are entirely customizable with ink, paint or a decoupage process that transfers printed designs to the box.

"I'd love to get artists to put their work on these and make them really unique," he says.

Clair's craft is part of a growing movement, says Ben "C.B. Gitty" Baker of New Hampshire, an expert on the genre.

"All around the country – and around the world, really— over the past few years, the handmade, handcrafted movement has been growing. People like the idea of taking cast-off materials and reworking them to make a playable instrument," says Baker, who owns C.B. Gitty Crafter Supply, which sells materials for cigar box guitars and other instruments.

Clair got interested a few years ago when a friend's father began posting Facebook photos of his own cigar box guitar-building projects.

On a visit to West Palm Beach, Clair, his friend and his dad went to a concert by Ben Prestage. "Guy's phenomenal," Clair says, "builds all his own cigar boxes - and after the concert, they took me right to Home Depot and bought me what I needed. They were like, "Come on; we're going to show you how to do this."

Using a cigar box left over from a Jamaican vacation and the parts his friend and dad had gotten him, Clair built his first instrument.

Never mind that the self-described computer geek had never even taken a high school shop class, with his pals and the Internet on his side, he forged ahead.

Since then, he's bought a band saw and a work table, but the 15-or-so-hour process remains simple and the materials modest: bolts, sink drains, glue.

There's nothing secretive about Clair's method either. In fact, he'd like to share it.

"I'm a nerdy guy, so the approach I've always taken is open source," he says. "I'm just thinking of taking the plans and putting them on a website and saying, 'Hey, this is how I build them.' I would love more competition in this area — I think it'd be awesome."

Amy Bennett Williams' Field Notes videos are on The News-Press' tablet site at 8 p.m. Thursdays and on the Web at news-press.com Fridays. Read her column on A3 Thursdays

Paul Clair

•Age: 29

•Born: California

•Lives: Cape Coral

•Job: Information Technology help desk technician, NewsBank, Naples

•New business: FrogDog Guitars

•Family: Fiance, Kim Lewis, rescued pit mix, Ned — (the original Frog Dog)

•Musical influences: Buddy Guy, R.L. Burnside, Son House, the Black Label Society

• Motto: "Flawed to perfection"

About FrogDog Guitars

Paul Clair's handmade cigar box guitars start at $99 and range to $300, depending on fretting and custom artwork. After ordering, each one takes at least a month to build ("I still very much have a day job," he says.) See samples of his instruments at frogdogguitars.com (though the site's still in development; check for updates). His Facebook page is facebook.com/FrogDogGuitars