Breaking Stuff

So I have broken a few things in my lifetime. Some have caused me personal injury, others were a source of personal anger management errr relaxation therapy, some things were meant to be broken, and other things were not.

These are a few stories about the ‘nots.’

This idea came to me today as I have broken my capo for my guitar. For those of you playing the home game; a capo is a piece of metal that goes on the strings of the guitar to alter the sound that the strings make. It is commonly used to make playing songs easier instead of having to use difficult to maintain finger positions. A capo is basically spring loaded and I broke the spring. Now the spring is a solid piece of metal that, although under a great deal of stress, should not break easily. The broken off part would probably require a tetanus shot if I poked you with it. Now … Guitar playing lends itself to strong hands, more notably so when you learn to play bar chords (one of the reasons to get a capo). But I didn’t think I was THAT strong. This resulted in me going to guitar center and picking up a new one, but I did have a solid 20 minutes of shock trying to figure out what in the world just happened.

A memorial service will be held for the capo at a latter date…

The earlier memory was back a few years when I was playing in a high school youth band. Now … guitar strings break all the time, I don’t break them all that often, but when I do they are more of an annoyance than anything else. It is such a common occurrence that volumes of jokes have been written about the 4th string down from the top. However, in the high school band I didn’t know how to play guitar … just bass guitar. Now I didn’t break the smallest string on my bass, I broke the largest. This string (I just looked on my current bass) is about the same thickness as my capo spring. Luckily this was in practice so that I could just go barrow the pastor’s and play for the rest of the evening, but I received many jokes about the 4th string down and many comments of fearfulness that I could crush someone with my thumb. That and our acoustic guitar player would always break strings so it was his turn to get some of the sass out of his system. It was ok, he still breaks strings on a monthly basis.

I feel like I should have more funny stories about this … but nope. As it is my hands are going to have be registered as lethal weapons to musical equipment. Mothers, do you know where your pianos are?