Moody Blues was a British band of the 1960s - 70s that created wondrous sound, using techniques that were new to the time. They made an album called 'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour'. My dad had once mentioned a similar saying 'Every Good Boy Does Fine'(?), and explained that it was a mnemonic device, the first letter of each word being the note of a line of the treble clef of western written music.

I don't know a whole lot about guitar strings. They do change over the decades, and here I am mumbling about this and that. In learning to play guitar in the mid 1980s, for some reason I could not hold on to the popular mnemonic saying at that time for tuning guitar strings. So I made up my own: Every April Ducks Go Back East.

Guitar strings are interesting. Electric guitars, classical guitars, and acoustic guitars use variations of metal and nylon strings. The bass strings tend to be heavier; the higher pitched strings lighter in weight and smaller in circumference. But the materials and specifics evolve across time. And if all the strings were the same material and circumference, one could still tune them to the desired pitches.

There is something so fascinating about the fretboard, the surface of the neck of the guitar where the strings abide. There is this intersection between the geometry of the half-step dividing lines (ie, the varying distance between the frets), the qualities and tautness of the strings, and the sounds that emerge that make for both visual and auditory fascination and satisfaction. There is the physics of different aspects of the instrument and of sound. With some guitars, the location of the frets is precisely and systematically closer together as they approach the soundhole. With some guitars, this is not so. It's not as obviously logical as one might think, and some people adjust these properties in creative ways that might keep a mathematician and a musician awake at night.