OK, I need help from my guitar-playing friends - hopefully one of you will have the answer for this.
Lots of detail here, because I don't know what's relevant and what's not: About 10-12 years ago, I bought one of those Walmart super-cheap guitar and amp combos, then I never got around to learning to play it, devoting my time to learning ukulele instead. Today I remembered I still had that guitar down in the basement, and I realized that if I took off the 1st and 6th strings, then tuned the middle strings to G-C-E-A (from low to high), I would have converted this guitar into an electric ukulele. So I tried it. While I was at it, I moved the peg for the guitar strap to the other side so I could play it left-handed. I also ground 2 extra slots in the nut, so that the strings stayed the same distance apart for the entire length of the neck (like I'm used to on the ukulele). I put on the strings and tuned them with a digital tuner that I know to be accurate. The open strings were all tuned correctly, but any chord I fingered sounded wrong. So I fingered an F chord and played each note, looking at the tuner. On a ukulele, this has 3 open notes: G, C, and A, and 1 fretted note, F (1st fret on the E string). The G, C, and A were right, the F was sharp. Thinking that my changing the path of the strings might have changed their length relative to the placement of the frets enough that it might be throwing the fretted notes off, I tried putting one of the strings through the original slots so that it was the proper length. The open string was fine, but each fretted note was sharp. Oddly, each fretted was sharp by a different amount.
At this point, I've put it aside in hopes that one of you sees what's going on here. I see three possibilities:
There's something wrong in how I'm pressing on the strings, and if I learn the right way, everything will be right.
There's something wrong with the guitar that can be adjusted to make the notes come out right.
There's something wrong with the guitar that's just a side effect of "cheap guitar" and it's really not fixable. (Or at least, not fixable without massive amounts of time and effort.)
Ideas?