Traded my mechanic's old toolbox for a guitar and got schooled on value

I had this beat up Craftsman box from 1989, full of rusted sockets. Dude at a flea market in Nashville offered a 2003 Epiphone Les Paul for it. Thought I was robbing him blind. He asked if I ever actually tuned the guitar before playing. I said no, just picked it up and jammed. He showed me a free tuner app on his phone, took 2 minutes, and the whole thing sounded different. That's when I knew I'd been playing out of tune for years and didn't even notice. He got the toolbox, I got a guitar that actually works now. Anyone else find out a super basic fix changed how they swap? What'd you trade for it?

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2 Comments

the_rose2mo ago

Wait, you mean to tell me you spent YEARS playing a guitar that was out of tune and never noticed? That's wild to me. Like, I get it, I'm not a musician either, but I always thought the whole point was that if it sounds bad you fix it. You just thought that's how the song went? Man, that's like driving a car with a flat tire and just assuming the road got bumpy. I once traded a set of snow tires for a beat up amp that only made a crackling noise. Turns out I just needed to spray some contact cleaner on the volume knob. Took ten seconds, and suddenly it sounded like a real amp instead of a bag of popcorn. I felt like such a dummy, but not as bad as you, no offense.

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victor_carr542mo ago

So you're telling me you played guitar for years like it was a broken kazoo and just went with it? That's like me trading a running lawnmower for a bike with square wheels and thinking it was just a rough neighborhood.

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