Author Archives: BettyW

Some Things to Know When Changing Acoustic Guitar Strings

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I recently bought a used acoustic bass guitar. The strings on it were fine, but I wanted a different kind (flat-wound, coated, recommended as better for an acoustic). They duly arrived, and last weekend I decided to change to them.

I had never previously changed guitar strings, but had seen it done before (Pete in The Gobshites used to go through several a night at a 3-set gig). I looked at a few instruction pages on the web and it seemed pretty straightforward. I began by loosening the E string, removing it from the tuning machine, and…

could not get the corresponding bridge peg to come out!

I wrestled with it, looked up more info, found someone who had had the problem with my bass model, tried what they were told – loosen the next string in order to put a hand into the guitar and push the peg from underneath… still not going anywhere. Finally got it out with Joann pushing it from below while I worked on levering it carefully with a wrench. Did that again for the A string next to it. While I might have had better leverage if I’d had a string winder with a peg puller, these bass pegs were a lot thicker than 6-string guitar pegs, and I’d read that it may not have fit.

I moved on to putting on the new E string, but now the peg kept popping up as I tuned it up :-(

I went back to the web (I had shut down everything while a thunderstorm came through) and found a very helpful video, in which at 1:30 the presenter describes the correct way to mount the string with the bridge peg – basically put the string’s ball end into the hole, put the peg in loosely, then pull up on the string so that the ball is not under the end of the peg, but higher up on the side of the peg. The peg then keeps the ball from being able to exit the hole both are in, but the string ball is not pulling up on the peg itself.

And then my mind reversed this information: to remove the peg, I should not be trying to pull up the string… I should try to push the string down so that the peg is not running up against the ball as I try to pull it up!

Once I had this epiphany I was able to remove the remaining two strings’ pegs by myself with little difficulty!

Perhaps there are instructions somewhere that detail this trick, but none of the ones I found gave any time to removing the old strings – though I suspect that this is not as much of an issue for regular guitars, whose strings and pegs are both much thinner than those of my acoustic bass guitar.

 

Cold Brewed Iced (or Hot) Coffee

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It’s been close to 100°F for the past couple days, so rather than use my trusty AeroPress to make hot coffee for mid-morning at work (this needs its own post to document the tweaks I use) I made a batch of cold brewed coffee.

Hot brewing heats up the oils and can result in a much more acidic taste that gets bitter as it ages – so unless you plan to drink it immediately over ice, making a large pot of hot coffee then chilling is not going to be great the next day.

Cold brewing is a great alternative to making hot coffee and then cooling it, as long as you remember to start your batch about 24 hours before you want it to drink. Soaking the grounds releases flavors without becoming bitter, and the resulting beverage can be refrigerated for several days without deteriorating in taste.

You can buy many fancy and expensive special devices for cold brewing, but all you really need is a large jar (e.g., a 32 oz mason jar) and something to strain the grounds through, which can be a paper coffee filter lining a mesh strainer.

My recipe:

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BCC is your contacts’ best friend

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So much of our modern communications technology gets dumped in our laps without instructions other than USE ME! Oh, there’s usually a “help” button on it somewhere – but honestly, how many of you click that, or if you did quickly gave up because it wanted you to  view a bunch of slides/verbiage and your eyes quickly glazed over?

Thus it’s no wonder that you may be accidentally annoying your friends, as well as exposing them and many strangers to spam address collectors and hackers if you don’t know about using BCC.

BCC = “Blind Carbon Copy” (forget that anyone under ~25 may never have seen carbon paper used!). BCC is one of the fields available in the header when you are composing an email (in some applications you may need to expand the header to find it). Any addresses you put into the BCC field will be delivered normally… BUT… unlke using the TO or CC fields,  the recipient will not see any other addresses you put into BCC – hence “blind.”

When sending email to many people, if they do not already know each other (e.g., people who subscribe to your newsletter or who want to be kept informed about your band’s gigs) you do NOT want to send your message in such a way that they all can see each others’ addresses, for several reasons:

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Are you the host or the presenter?

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I’m listening to the recording of an on-line presentation of a well-known author by a life coach with whom I’m not familiar. She lost me in the 1st five minutes – first by continuing to jabber on while ostensibly introducing the author (and cutting the latter off as she tried to respond), then controlling the interview (which was billed as a “presentation” but the author  was allowed little independence) with reams of prepared questions. I could tell that the author caught on to the situation immediately and fell back on just answering the questions… which by the way have little to do with the stated focus of the project.
I don’t think I’ll bother with the other dozen “presenters” based on this sample, since I’m not interested in hearing this one woman’s controlling chatter.
If your purpose is to learn things from a person, listen more than talk.