...there's only so much

sometimes things are outside of your control

last night myself and karl were two wiseguys. pitching up at a local pub to tout our particular brand of acoustic noodles. i had prepared effectively for the evening. i had typed up lyrics, created my file in song order and added a couple of extras at the end just in case. i'd worked ahead and got all the gear packed and down out of the studio to the car. i'd had a busy day so i factored in a twenty minute snooze before leaving.

at the venue i'd thought it through. move microphone to where karl will be. move second microphone into place. check height. get guitar out of case and place in stand safely. erect music stand and place to right. take pedal board from case and position right. plug in. tune guitar. all perfect to this point.

tune E string. tuner on pedal board shows F#. interesting. tuning peg may have been knocked. tune A string. tuner shows B. interesting. exactly a tone too high like the last string. it's a cold night. has the cold effected the guitar. tune D string. wow. tuner shows E. now you would think at this point i would have sussed that the tuner was showing correctly tuned strings a tone high. you would think. but my tuner has never gone wrong. so i retuned.  the whole guitar now a tone lower. start playing. feels and sounds strange. start singing. something not right.

what you can't account for is that there is only so much preparation you can do. and no amount of preparation would have prepared me for what appears to have been a button in the tuner being caught and setting the tuner to tune to e flat! it gets even more bizarre when i figure out the button combination required to return the tuner to tune to E. how on earth that happened is beyond preparing for.

sometimes things happen that are outside our experience. that has never happened to me before so i blindly proceeded trusting that the tuner was right and that all of my instincts that there was something wrong counted for nothing. we rely on the things around us rather than relying on ourselves and sometimes it goes wrong. after several poor song performances and attempts to get the tuning technology to work for me i tuned the guitar myself....by ear... and off we went everything was fine.

the moral
trust yourself