Clinton--

Work with me on this. If a person retunes his strings to a different starting point and then forces his left hand through various Yogic contortions to return all those strings to a "normal" pitch by fretting them, what has he done? Eliminated the reason for alternate tunings. I mean, it you take an EADGBE guitar, tune it to FFFFFF and then fret it back to EADGBE, will you have uniqueness or exoticism worth the effort? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think not. I have played an open G guitar against a standard and the combo does sound fuller than two standards; all I was doing was pattern-pick-cum-melody-notes.

If you just want to get out of your colleague's pitch range, what's wrong with capoing up and playing in a different key? All the theory that takes is knowing that it's only one fret from B to C and from E to F, but otherwise it's two frets from one natural to the next.

[At age 56, I have finally gotten a hint that maybe guitarists and banjo players don't HAVE to make it hard on themselves.]

The nicest thing about this advice is, it's free.

Chicken Charlie