Guitar straps are one-size-fits-all via buckle adjustments, but make sure you get a couple of strap locks rather than depending on the knob thingees on the guitar staying in the strap slot by themselves.

I picked up a cheap mic stand yesterday. It's effectively just a telescoping pole with a weighted base and threaded ends. I wish it was just a little bit taller so I could put it behind my monitor and have the mic hang down over the front, but for now it's just off to the rear side pointing towards the user. It seems to function.

The sound is annoyingly lagged over USB, but if I plug head phones directly into the headphone jack on the mic then it sounds awesome. I think I might well have been happier with a regular mic and USB adapter, as Johan suggested, but I think I can live with this for now.

Since I have a "professional" mic I figured there must exist guitar tuning software, which might have spared me the trouble and minor expense of a physical tuner, so I went looking online. I found a freeware program from what looked like a legitimate company, signed installer and everything. It offered an extra program during the installer for editing audio and I got drawn in so I agreed to install it. When I realized it was unlicensed and I'd have to pay (as expected), I went to uninstall it, only to find that AVG recognized the uninstaller program as a trojan.

It also installed a shell extension, which was never mentioned anywhere in the installer, hijacking at least one file type association completely unrelated to audio. I'll probably take advantage of this to format and reinstall all OSes (I still have Fedora 15 installed, and I think 17 is only months away).

Anyway, I gave up on the software tuner and picked up a $20 digital tuner today that looks like it'll be way more convenient anyway. Clips directly on to the guitar, with a nice bright color LCD display. I also bought 5 guitar picks, despite not really knowing whether I'll be picking or not. Purely by coincidence the tuner and picks are all Fender branded. So that's neat, I guess (since the guitar is too).

I've done a little bit of singing and rapping, but nothing really turned out good enough to share ... I was hoping to record something I was satisfied with so I could upload something here for you to make fun of, but so far I haven't had a good day. It's entirely possible that I never do and normally don't have a recording to look back on, but I digress. One thing I'd like to figure out is how I can listen to the music and the microphone simultaneously without having the music recorded (or at least, without the original artist's singing overpowering my own). What I've currently been doing is playing music on my home stereo with the volume moderate and plugging head phones into my mic, then sitting just in front of the speakers. It's not great though. Perhaps I can buy an earbud or something that I can plug into the mic and wear underneath my head phones. Then play the songs through my head phones with the volume louder (with the volume low, while concentrating on my singing, I found that I was often forgetting and screwing up the lyrics...).

Any requests?

For playing guitar I'd advise you to practice both picking with a plectrum and your fingers from the very start. This will make finger picking seem a lot less than magic.

If you can tune them relative to each other by ear, then that is good enough when playing by yourself. And that's easy to do by just holding down the fifth (or fourth) fret and then playing the next (higher) string.

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So as you can see, the fifth fret of the low-E is the same A that the next string is. If they don't match, then it's out of tune, and it will sound terrible.

Learn to tune the guitar the way Matthew suggested. It will help you understand how the guitar "works". The only thing a tuner will do for you at this stage is to make it take longer to gain certain skills.

Yes.

Doesn't the latest Allegro support recording from mic? You could probably easily make your own decent guitar tuning application by combining that with something like http://www.fftw.org/ .

I made an "oscilloscope" many years ago that could synchronize wave cycles by testing when a sound wave exceeded a certain point, that could be used to implement a tuner by comparing the intervals between these tests succeeding w/o FFTs.

[EDIT]

Before all the electronic stuff came along, they were tuning to the oboe, assuming it didn't go out of tune. Of course humidity and air pressure would affect that slightly.

I don't think Bambam's going on tour just yet.

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For tuning, do yourself a favor a get one of these:

{"name":"Korg-AW-2-G-Clip-On-Tuner_large.jpg","src":"http:\/\/static.allegro.cc\/image\/cache\/d\/a\/da7db1aaccdf4df534a1260454fb5224.jpg","w":331,"h":440,"tn":"http:\/\/static.allegro.cc\/image\/cache\/d\/a\/da7db1aaccdf4df534a1260454fb5224"}

They are cheap.

As strings are tightened/loosened they bow the neck slightly and throw the others off, you just have to keep retuning. Keeping it in tune will help avoid this, since no major changes will occur.

[EDIT]

If you have a tremolo bar, you need to loosen the springs to it, and block it up where the center of travel is, then tune the strings, then tighten the springs just enough to take the pressure off the block.

Don't scare bambam away.