GAH

Last night I sat down to play a little Sea Monkey and had a wonderful time except that at least two of my strings weren't holding their tune very well. I've been procrastinating changing strings for a while because of the whole floating bridge thing. I was being a pansy. But when I got to the point where I couldn't even play for a half hour, I realized it was time to just get it over with.

The string changing went swimmingly, but there is nothing so swimy that I can't sink it. And so it was that I broke my 4th string while tuning. Because I am insane and not trusting my brain and my tuner (although to be fair, my tuner sometimes blurts out random notes that are nowhere near where the last reading was on the same string with only slight peg adjustment). But then, and this is really the best part of today's tale of woe, I think I somehow stripped the gears on the 3rd string peg, because it won't wind back up. So now it also looks like I'll be replacing a tuner in addition to the one string.

Strings 1, 2, and 5 sound great, though. And because I swapped out one string at a time, I managed to keep the bridge more or less where it always was. Partial success, partial fail. I'm off to see if i can find just one peg.

I repeat: GAH.

oh, and maintenance notes, so I don't forget

Last night as I checked Sea Monkey's tuning, I was a bit alarmed that the fourth string suddenly got a lot deeper after I hit it. It went from in perfect tune to . . . well, farther and farther from perfect tune. I tightened the screw on the tuning peg, which had worked itself loose, and string four was back in action. And I tightened up the other screws on the other pegs just to be sure they're all happy. Planetary tuners FTW. :)

But that reminded me that Sea Monkey's head tension is a little off, so I need to get me a banjo bracket wrench. And while I'm at it, I may as well get some new strings. I can probably wait on changing them out (and that will be a special day, since changing banjo strings is more complicated than changing guitar strings), but it would be good to have them handy for when I work up the nerve. We've had new strings for the ukulele since July and I still haven't overcome my fear of epic fail enough to change those out. Of course, the uke is mostly a toy for Gaz, who doesn't care all that much if she's missing a string. In fact, she insists on keeping the uke so out of tune that the strings are quite slack.