I could totally use one of these, tbh.

The downside to owning guitars, especially in places where the weather has notable temperature and humidity changes, is that they can go quite out of tune very quickly. Every six months or so I need to retune them.  And I’ve been playing them for long enough that I can tell when they’re just a bit off.  It’s not fun when you’re strumming a few chords and that one string is painfully flat.

One of the other downsides is having to restring them now and again.  I’ll be honest, I don’t restring nearly as often as I should.  I haven’t restrung my acoustic bass probably since I bought the thing, so the strings had lost their sheen as well as their resonance quite some time ago.  I spent Sunday putting new ones on it, and let me tell you, it’s one hell of an awkward process.  I’m used to restringing my electrics, which are easy to do.  Acoustics are a bit tougher, because you’re not only working around a bigger body while you’re winding the string around the tuning peg mechanism, but you’re feeding the other end through a hole in the bridge and holding it there with a plastic peg that you hope won’t come flying out into your eye.

Anyway…once the new strings are on and secured, there’s the few weeks where the guitar sounds all too trebley and twangy.  Or worse, when you’re in the middle of playing and the string slips just a little bit from its tuning peg or its bridge, and you jump back in case that G ends up flying loose and lacerating you.

But once everything settles and you get used to it all, everything is just fine.