We're making another trip from Chicago to our neighbor to the east, Michigan, in a couple of weeks. The band will hit the Jackson Blues Festival stage at 9:30pm on Friday, June 6 at the Jackson County Airport (a.k.a. Reynolds Airfield).

Jackson is a small town, just off Interstate 94, about 35 miles west of Ann Arbor. It's birthplace of the republican party and superbowl coach, Tony Dungy.

The fest includes outstanding national acts like Duke Tumatoe, Chris Beard, Harmonica Shah and Mike Espy, plus many more. Three days of blues, blues, blues!

Hope to see y'all there!

--blue dave

This post is for you guitarists out there. After all these years -- decades actually -- I finally learned how to use my electronic tuner pedals.

Trouble in Tunerland

I don't know about you, but I've always had trouble getting my pedal tuners to lock in with my Strat. Especially the lower strings.

I strike the string, the tuner thinks a bit, and then flashes the string it thinks I'm playing. Nope. So I keep plucking, and usually, after several plucks, I see the correct string number pop up.

After agreeing on the string, sometimes the tuner freaks out a bit, calling the string way sharp, or flitting back and forth between extremes.

Pedals Tested

I've had a few different tuning pedals. The Boss TU-2 is my main one, but I also have a recent Planet Waves PW-CT-04, a Fender PT-100, and Fender PT-10.

The Answer Comes from Understanding Tuning Nightmares

Then I read about Jack Endino's website, Guitar Tuning Nightmares Explained, in a recent guitar magazine (sorry can't remember which).

And it's really simple.

• Switch to the neck pickup.
• Turn the tone all the way down.
• Pluck the string right over the 12th fret.

Worked like a charm. I got lazy a couple of times and didn't follow the instructions, which led to the standard tuner nonsense I related above.

So I'm a convert.

Try it out. And if you'd like to peek under the hood and understand why this works, check out the Tuning Nightmares website.

--blue dave