Not to the death...

Okay, so I was finally sitting down to get this show on the road. I walked across the room with my best rock star swagger and undid the dual zippers on the soft case of the acoustic Gibson knock off I got on clearence at Bed, Bath, and Beyond (don't judge me, dammit) and sat down to bust out a power ballad. I don't know why expected the thing to somehow be magically in tune after sitting in a corner for three months, being tossed in the back of a truck to move, and then sitting in a corner for another two months beside a door with a pretty serious draft...especially when you consider that it wasn't in tune before all of this. I expected, I suppose, that tuning elves had come around Christmas time and set it all up for me. I was wrong, and now I am planning a tactical assult on the homeland of the tuning elves, Nebraska.

I know the basics of tuning by ear, so I gave it a shot. It was going pretty well until I got to the high E string. Then, tragedy struck. Okay, maybe not tragedy in the classical sense. Okay, not tragedy in any sense. The string had borne the thosand insults of mine as best it could but when I ventured on insult it vowed revenge. Okay, it broke.

In short, my first run was primarily spent relearning how to tune by ear and doing a restring which are both valuable lessons in their own right. After the restring I checked my tuning. I was pretty impressed that I managed to tune all the strings to each other, however I managed to miss the key of "Rock" completely. I'm not even sure what key it is tuned in now, but strumming an open cord sets all the dogs in the neighborhood off and opened some kind of portal in to a dark, cold place...I think it's Nebraska.