TGIF #511

Each Friday, I send an email to my team here at Microsoft. This one was about the frustration and wonder about designing for the frontier.

It is always the high G string that breaks on my 12-string guitar. Always. It breaks when I look at it, it breaks while playing, it breaks while tuning. I’ve had this guitar for, well a long time, and it’s not the only guitar I own but let me tell you it is the only string I’ve ever broken. I can whale on my other guitars, I can accidentally tune them up a full step because I suck at tuning guitars and they are here for it. I kid you not, I buy that damn string in bulk, I’ve tried every string manufacturer known to man, same thing, bang, hey my finger is bleeding, or in one case my cheek, dig around for another string. For two years I just pretended I played an 11-string guitar. Then I went through a few years of just tuning the whole thing a half step low and using a capo, which worked, but what a pain. Capo on a 12 is hard, and tuning a 12 string is hard anyway and more with a capo, but at least I broke fewer strings. And don’t come at me with do you have a burr, or is there a rough spot, there isn’t. I took the guitar in a year or so ago for a full workup, done by a master and I will tell you it came back beautiful and he swore up and down that there were no problems with the high G other than the fact that it was a high G string, light gauge, unwound, and you know.

I think I got maybe three months before it broke. And let me tell you, if I haven’t already, a 12-string is a PAIN to tune, at least for me, and when the freaking high G breaks, and it ALWAYS breaks, it throws the entire thing out of tune and getting the string back on there doesn’t fix that, so you have to tune it, and then of course, the G being new is stretchy so you have a few weeks of constantly trying to keep it in tune while not, you know, breaking the string again.

Sunday this week, all I wanted to do was sit on my porch and play the 12-string for a bit. It was out of tune, just a smidge, so there I was working my way down, two low E in tune, two A in tune, two D in tune, high G pow and it was gone. Hey I’ve got others so instead of practicing playing, I get the old string off, and it wasn’t very old honestly and the new one on and very very carefully starting inching up, this one broke while it was still G flat, the next string I put on broke before that and yes I still had a few more but I just put that guitar down and called my brother and blamed him for this, because he’s good with guitars and why wasn’t he in my house fixing this dang thing which he promised to do in the near future, so for the present I’m either going back to playing an 11-string or just sticking with my standard guitar, I’ve not decided which just yet. It is sitting there on its stand, 11 strings staring at me.

It was in college, I had a guitar but wandered into a guitar store and picked up this one and played it a bit, and I had no money, but wow. It just felt so good I bought it, figuring who needs food anyway. And then, after a month of selling my plasma, I bought the case that should have come with it, which, by the way, the handle broke off just the other day which means I probs need to go to a luggage store or something to repair which seems like a theme with this thing. Between this and my Voigtlander camera it is like I am inviting things into my life just to cause me frustration. Why on God’s green earth would two of the four lenses made for this camera focus one way, and the other two completely differently, especially given the cost of developing film these days, and yes I know there are places I can rent darkroom time but it’s been a bit since I’ve done this so I have to take a class first, which is on my agenda but for the nonce I rely on a small lab in Seattle and they are great but honestly could be just a bit faster. Learning is aided by rapid feedback, which is not 7 working days, if you catch my drift.

Why then. Why. I have other choices. I have other cameras, other guitars.

It is this – when the guitar is tuned and I play it well, it rings. It sings, it dances. I sound like a far better player than I am, just like in that guitar store all those years ago, I want to play. The camera, I have the pictures my dad took with it when my Mom and Dad were dating, and I have pictures I took of her last weekend, same camera, different lens. In both cases, the fragility is a feature, not a bug – designers pushing the envelope and willing to put up with failure, to get just a bit closer to perfection. That freaking fragile G is what makes the guitar sound great, the odd focus mechanism is what allows for a short and light 100mm lens.

TGIF! The edge, the frontier, the push for improbable, it is our goal, yes things will break there, but also…magical wonderful things exist there as well.

fxs