h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

there's the damage received when playing an old acoustic round a campfire at... say... a festival and everybody is fedup with your 2 hour drunken rendition of american pie/stairway to heaven/smells like teen spirit/any bob dylan and are now trying to wrap the guitar neck around yours.

Very true

I'll add it to the Entry.



Danny B.

People who cut off the excess string at the tuning peg are effectively leaving themselves with at least two needle-sharp points sticking out of the pegs, maybe more. These can and do draw blood, given even a quarter of a chance - I speak from painful experience. Also, they can cut up your gig bag. Solution: coil up the excess instead, so that the sharp end has a bit of give in it. Or just leave them long and dangly and jingly, though even that has its hazards...

I endorse your remarks about potential eye injuries. Always, but always, tilt the guitar away from you when tuning. That way, the annoying git who insists on crowding up in front of you and watching to see how you do it gets the eyeful instead if a string breaks.

I'm a 'cut-the-ends-off' man, myself. The eye injury in the article came about as a direct result of not cutting the ends off

I'll add your advice on tuning to the article

Now here's an advice from a friend of mine: If you have a little brother/sister in the house, be sure to hang the guitar high up, don't put it on a stand on the floor where it's easily accessible...
This friend of mine did not, his little brother found the guitar, and tuned it masterfully (i.e. he tightened all of the strings up to the breaking point, but managed to stop just before the strings broke), and left all the tuning-knobs nicely straight and symmetrical. The stage was set for me and my friend to come home, and him showing me his new electric guitar, which he carefully removed from its stand, took a pick out of his own back pocket, sat down with the guitar across his lap, and gave it an experimental strum, at this point nearly all the strings broke and slapped into the back of his hand...
ugh... I don't even want to think about what happened to his brother when I had left.