From: Tara, night_of_light@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: For the guitarists on the list...a complication...
Date: 2/28/2002 5:43:20 PM
To: seance@lists.no-fi.com


I want to thank all the guitarists who have replied to my post.  I'm a 
little dismayed, though, that most of you seem to think that acoustic 
guitar is what to start on and I'll tell you why.  When I was thirteen and 
I wanted to be Lita Ford, I got a Fender Strat copy and a little practice 
amp for Christmas and a how-to video featuring a Britney Fox-wannabe 
explaining that playing guitar was easy, easy, easy unless you were brain 
dead, brain dead, brain dead.  Guess what, folks!  I struck out.  Bar 
chords.  That's what did it.  I know.  It's like dropping out of school in 
kindergarten.  I couldn't get my kooky double-jointed fingers to stay 
straight and press down, and I wound up deadening strings with my sub-par 
bar when they should have been ringing out.  (Isn't it harder to push down 
the strings on an acoustic?)  Oh, I got inventive.  I thought maybe I 
needed a more girly string gauge.  Instead of removing the nifty little 
cover on the back of the body to change the strings, I proceeded to unscrew 
the whatsit where the strings come out, tremolo arm and all.  I figured out 
what I had done wrong after I had reattached the whatsit.  After that, the 
guitar just didn't sound right and wouldn't stay in tune.  I was too 
embarassed to take it to a guitar shop for someone to fix and I wound up 
selling it and the practice amp for way too little money.  Isn't it harder 
to push down the strings on an acoustic?
I hope that age might deter such ridiculous mistakes, and certainly the 
generous help I've been offered by list members makes me feel 
comforted.  Are any of you who play stringed instruments 
double-jointed?  Do you know of the woes of which I speak and of ways to 
circumnavigate them?  Will I ever be Lita Ford?  (As she was in 88-89, not 
now; I don't want any kids!)

Freaky Styley,
Tara



"Good afternoon, madam.  We're the Frooney Green Eyewash men.  Have you, by 
any chance, got ten bottles of Frooney Green Eyewash in your house?...Oh, 
what a pity.  Cause if you had and could answer a simple question, you'd 
have won a beautiful silver tea service and a night on the town with Alfred 
Hitchcock..." -- George Spiggott, Bedazzled


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