A Note on Guitars

This post is nothing but a shameless brag. At the beginning of our program, Elizabeth – one of my friends from the class below mine – discovered and took under her wing an acoustic guitar in the students’ common room. The strings were all getting a little worn, so she took it to a local music store and had all of them changed. Ever since then, the guitar was a popular addition to our daily lives, and I soon formed a habit of practicing a little every single day. Besides a few exercises plucking individual strings in high school, I was never taught how to play the guitar properly, but over the summer I figured out how to play a few songs and how to – at least in theory – play most of the important chords.

Anyway, the other day I was tuning the whole guitar for the first time when I learned a very valuable lesson. After tuning the lowest three strings, I moved onto the next, not realising that as I was turning the machine head and plucking the fourth string, I was actually tightening the high E. Well, long story short, I snapped a string that lashed back across my hand and gave me a little bruise – thank goodness it was not my eye.

Elizabeth was out shopping, but she helped direct me to a music shop where I could buy a string. Somehow it did not occur to me to take the guitar with me, so I simply bought a high E, came back, and was then confronted with my complete ignorance as to the changing of guitar strings. Here comes the unabashed boast though. I remembered that someone’s manicure set had been lying in the assorted rubbish on the desk at the side of the wall. Using the scissors, I disposed of the rest of the string, and using the tweezers, I pulled out the plastic plug at the end. The most difficult part was wrapping the new string around the capstan, but tweezers are surprisingly good for moulding thin metal strings so that they stay in place. After about half an hour, I emerged victorious. 

Me resting after half an hour of stringing the guitar