5. Special Instructions for Garagitarists:

• Burn your G.I.T. certificate and change your name. In fact, you may want to pay for an elective lobotomy to erase the musical rules you've spent a lifetime committing to memory. You can't afford to let anyone find out your devotion to Howlin' Wolf isn't genuine.
• Sell your custom Gibson or Fender on E-Bay and buy a shitty, old, hobby-shop customized guitar that has lots of funky switches and knobs but won't stay in tune. Don't worry; the dissonance created by your wailing & whacking will only add to your raw authenticity.
• Never change your strings - only replace the ones that break.
• Buy the heaviest gauge strings available and store your guitar in a cool/hot/cool/hot & damp/dry/damp/dry place; there's nothing more authentically garage than rusted strings that are set a quarter-inch off a curved fretboard - except, perhaps, the black mold growing on your speaker cabinet.
• Dump your Line 6 Pod and anything that doesn't have tubes, springs or knobs. Whatever's left should be basted with cheap, bottled beer (like Falstaff) and stored in cotton-fiber insulation dust to mimic that genuine Detroit garage-look (Cottonwood seeds work especially well if in-season).
• Now that you're freshly lobotomized and you've finally flushed the sound of Creed and Nickelback out of your head, buy a stack of old blues LP's and a record player (remember the rule: springs, knobs and tubes - there are no lasers in the garage!). Lock yourself in and play the records at full volume until you've learned all three chords, all three licks and the minor-pentatonic scale; you haven't mastered it until you can play them badly without blushing.