Peruvian Nights and Jamaican Days

'TARS

No, not Beatrice's one homeless guy. Guitars. As in, I need another one. Possibly 2 more. At least one of which wouldn't break my heart if it was electric.

The problem is this: I kind of like playing Old 97's tunes. But the 97's play with their guitars tuned down a step. Fine. So I did this. But now I find myself wanting, sometimes, to play some Alejandro Escovedo - deeply satisfying - especially something like Wave, which is simple, but makes it almost sound like I kind of know what I'm doing. Besides, Old 97's songs without percussion are kinda lame, except the obvious ones - 'Adelaide,' 'Going, Going, Gone,' 'Salome,' 'Valium Waltz,' and 'Question.' But, I really don't have the finger-pickin' abilities, nor the thumb coordination, to do justice to 'Question, so it's probably not worth having my guitar all detuned for the ability to play like 5 songs.

I know, I know, I could use a capo. That would require having a decent capo. The one I have now is one of those ridiculous ones that is basically an elastic strap with a rubber-encased metal bar that fastens around the guitar. But..they never work...not tight enough to keep from having serious buzzing issues, which are problematic on my Harmony whenever I capo. Don't be dis'n Harmonys, though - that's what Blind Blake played. Although, perhaps they made a better product back then...

Speaking of capos, I noticed Kreg Viesselman was doing this interesting thing where for a few songs he capo'd all but the low E, I believe at the 3rd fret, but a girl's head was in the way, so I couldn't be sure. The effect was that he was kinda his own bass player. Of course, that's not something that my Spandex Wonder capo allows.

Secondly, I am not one of those people who can just twist away and have a guitar re-tuned in 20 seconds. It takes me closer to 20 minutes. So it ain't like I wanna just go back and forth all the time. I always tuned by ear up to about a year ago, but could never get it quite perfect, so I downloaded Chromatia, which is a sharewarish chromatic tuner emulator program-like thing. It works OK. But...It does that annoying thing like WinZip where everytime you start it up, it starts counting up the days you've had it without paying for it, except that it counts waaaaaaaaay slower than WinZip. I have to start it and then go do something else for about 10 minutes while it counts. Oh...but, I can't miss the actual startup by much, because it usually takes me about 5 minutes to tune with it, and the trial version only allows you to tune for 10 minutes at a time before it shuts down and you have to start the whole ridiculous process again. Anyway, if I'm going to detune a whole step, and then go back up, it requires some real hard thinking on my part (did I mention I'm a terrible musician?)

So. In conclusion, I need the following:

1) An extra guitar, preferably not a Harmony brand, and if it happens to require electricity, that's fine
2) A decent capo (i.e. one that doesn't involve elastic)
3) A guitar tuner
4) A harmonica (OK, this has nothing to do with my guitar issues, but it's something I've always wanted, and never had)

-m