This is sort of a small guitars question that growed. (1) Can you retune a small guitar down a few semitones, even though it is made for higher, to compensate for the size (obviously losing some of the sound quality)? (2) On a big guitar -- apart from open tunings -- do people out there have any experience in tuning the whole thing down (so that for instance standard E-E tuning would require a capo at 2 or 3rd fret or higher)? Is this bad for the guitar? Are there any things one should know? I ask this for two reasons -- one, I read an interview with Paul Simon where he talked about slacking his strings to outrageous levels from time to time; and two, my voice is in a different range from the guitar, and doing a lot of transpositions is difficult. This sounded like something like a solution, but I am too chicken to try -- for instance, can you tune with a capo on to make the tuning easier? Anyone have any words of wisdom on this?

Yours, Peter T.