Gibson Robot Guitar
Here is an unsurprisingly cheesy demo video of the potentially interesting Gibson Robot Guitar. It tunes itself. Fortunately for me (and Sonic Youth), you can switch it to manual tuning. Just about the only thing I can do on a guitar is tune it. And play the opening chords to Ziggy Stardust. Oh yeah, and the bassline to Bela Lugosi's Dead. Retail price for the Robot Guitar is $2499. Link to YouTube video, Link to Gibson Robot Guitar (Thanks, Dave Gill!)
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The tone is in the tuners.
As a banjo player I find this extremely interesting.
Of course, trying to get a banjo into perfect tune may cause the robot to start smoking and blow up, like on Star Trek.
Since the LEDs tell you when it's tuned, they should have made it mute when you pull out the knob. Nothing worse than listening to someone tune.
Actually this would be amazing for the Sonic Youth crowd. You can get new sounds using weird tunings, but as a musician, you're punished for trying when you play live. You would have to either have 6 guitars, all in different tunings, or retune between every song.
This would allow you to have those programmed as presets (I'm assuming) and just hit a button between songs. Sweet.
This makes me want to try to pick up guitar again. Long ago, I tried real hard to play, but though I could get the fingering right (with some practice), I'm tone deaf enough to be completely unable to tune.
#5: While perfect pitch is uncommon, most people have relative pitch and if you're playing/learning guitar, relative tuning of the guitar should be sufficient.
@Hexatron (#4), that's a cool thought. I've seen Sonic Youth in concert and Thurston Moore has a huge array of guitars lined up all tuned differently. I see that the robot guitar has quite a few tunings as presets but I'm not sure if it can store custom presets.
Man, I sure hope it doesn't make that godawful noise every time you need to tune.
This is such an awesome guitar...I believe Jeff Martin, formerly of The Tea Party has one of these now. If you have ever tried learning any of The Tea Party's tunes, you will quickly find out that not many of them are in a standard tuning...and Jeff Martin has to change guitars constantly during concerts to accommodate the various tunings he uses.
Nice...prettty...and computer geeky!
ttyl
I don't think the point of this guitar is so that people who find it hard to tune a guitar perfectly can play it, thats what electronic tuners are for. The really great thing about this guitar is to be able to switch between tunings very fast in a live setting. To switch from an open tuning such as DADGAD back to standard tuning can be done by the touch of a button.
Also the guitar helps you set up the intonation by telling you how many quarter turn adjustments are needed for each string at the bridge.
Having said all that, its a lot of money for something that is basically a helper but looks so nasty. I think the money would be better invested in a Les Paul without the gadgetry!
I'd rather my robotic guitar played itself. Jeremy Boyle's robotic guitar (and drums) kicks out the jams.
http://www.jeremyboyle.com/
my guitar center spies tell me that this thing is incredible, works like a charm, and is selling like gangbusters. also it does allow custom tunings. this may sound like some sort of whoring, but i've seriously heard nothing but good things about this system.
why don't people like the sound of tuning? To me it means something good is about to happen.
Cool product, yet I have to agree with Bob that a proper robotic guitar should do ALL the work, including smash itself at the end of a set. I feel compelled to mention the criminally underrated robot band Captured! By Robots. GTRBOT666 probably even shags groupies backstage.
http://capturedbyrobots.com/
I'm such an idiot. I drew this up in detail around 15 years ago, thought about getting a patent and making them.... i still have it all drawn out on an old piece of paper here.
Well, I can't wait to get one, I'm dying to play music and see how the guitar sounds while it changes to alternativ tunings WHILE I play it. Sweet.
Gibson can go screw. They decided that 2008 is the year they'd rather go for the I-can't-tune market than sell anything for southpaws.
how does it work?
@Beastmouth. What, this isn't available in a left-handed version? Damn.
@Darran: Beginning in January, Gibson USA no longer offers any guitars in a left-handed model.
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mechfish@2: as the joke goes: how long does it take to tune a banjo? No-one knows.
I was thinking that this guitar would be a boon to Sonic Youth and their shaggy ilk, but if you actually look at their guitar boxes on stage, and more to the point see the things that are done to them, well, you wouldn't. Damn thing probably costs as much as their touring set-up altogether.
I can't understand why Gibson are saying this is a world first. Transperformance (http://transperformance.com) have had a system similar to this out since the early 1990's.
Bah.
The Robot Guitar as Beginner's Instrument: If you can't tune a guitar, even with the help of the myriad electronic tuners available already, you shouldn't be spending $2k on a new instrument, you should be spending it on lessons.
The Robot Guitar as Boon for Users of Alternate Tunings:
A good guitarist should be able to switch tunings between songs without any fuss (especially with a fixed-bridge instrument like the Les Paul), and any gigging guitarist worth his/her salt knows to bring a backup guitar anyway, so you should have at least 2 guitars onstage already.
One of the reasons that professional guitarists have different guitars for different tunings is because you want an instrument whose tone and response matches the tuning you put it in. Playing in a drop tuning like DADGAD requires the guitar to resonate at lower frequencies than when playing in standard tuning.
/curmudgeon
Believe me, if you can play the bass line of Bela Lugosi's dead, you can play the guitar too :). Same thing as te bass while Pete's singing, else, a lot of delay, chorus & distorsion, and you're on ;).
1. Lefties: just remove the tuners and put them on the other sides, and play the righty restrung as a lefty like you've always done (hmmmm. . . this might not work, as the tuners will be backwards now, and won't know which way to go. . . or will they?)-- if this thing tells you how to adjust intonation too then you're all set (of course the knobs will still be in the way, and you might actually have to remove the bridge and move it by hand at least a little). Or you can just re-learn to play a right-handed-strung guitar lefty, like Albert King and Otis Rush did, with the higher pitched strings up top.
2. The only real benefit for this guitar is for stage use, instead of switching guitars for certain songs, but even then its benefits are minimal-- a pro guitarist will always have another guitar handy because you're not going to fix a broken string in the middle of a song. Beginners or intermediates should learn to tune using a TUNING FORK-- it's good ear training (and if you're tone-deaf. . . well, don't expect to ever get good enough to play professionally, unless you can teach yourself to recognize at least relative pitch, OK?)
3. The banjo may or may-not be the devil's instrument, but you can get the tuning of it as close to perfect as a guitars if you know how to adjust the bridge well (use a half-moon bridge, or just file down the straight bridge at the G and B to adjust string length). FACT-- all guitars (except certain specially designed models that have the fan-shaped frets) are partially out of tune at all times, they are TEMPERED TUNING instruments. Even the fanciest guitar will have notes that don't match-- try it: play some octaves in different parts of the fretboard.
4. There is/was a device on ebay that I used to see that did the tuning for you. You attached it to each tuning peg, strummed the string, and it listened and tuned for you *(I think that's what's mentioned above on a previous post). The funny thing about the description on ebay was that they guy got a quote from a "professional" musician who said "I've never been able to tune my guitar"-- we used to laugh about that.
As someone who owns a Les Paul, I suppose I'd be the first to notice that they killed one of my tone knobs.
The musician snob in me recoils -- learn to tune the damn thing yourself, you lazy slob! (am reminded of Keith Richard saying he learned how to play by playing bits of Chuck Berry records over and over until he could copy them. What if you don't have the patience to do that, he was asked. Then you don't have the patience to be a guitar player, came the answer)
but maybe more important -- isn't that sticking a lot of unnecessary moving parts on an elegantly simple design? Lots of little motors and things that are going to break and need fixing?
@ #17 I read somewhere that the tuner "hears" the frequency of, let's say the B string" and then it calculates the direction and degree of tuning required. That information is sent through the same string (at a much higher, I assume inaudible frequency) to the servo on the tuning key in question and the correction is applied.
@ 17, I found the article in my History:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19462/page1/
-grunt-
another approach;
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3143-hotwired-piano-tunes-itself.html
@29
have you ever yelled "Reveeeen"?
Here's one example of where the self-tuning guitar would be completely useless. Music by Nick Harper (son of Roy Harper):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzOP80_uDZ8
@32
actually-- it would still work with Nick Harper's music as long as he didn't use the auto-tuner, OR he could strum an open chord, then change the tuning knob on the guitar so it went to a different tuning as he played, doing the work for him. (I think Harper's technique originated with banjo player Earl Scruggs, who utilized it on the tune "Flint Hill Special", in fact those straight-through tuners Harper is using in the video are like the tuners you can buy for banjo-- they can be set to de-tune to specific notes, and there's another British guitarist who uses them to great effect, and whose name slips my mind).
The one musician I can think of for whom this guitar would be truly useless is Jandek, who (according to his scant interviews), tunes the guitar to however he feels like, with no regard to pitch-- when it sounds OK, he plays.
This is definitely really cool.
It is so easy to skip over songs with alternate tunings because its just a pain in the butt to tune and tune back for one song.
And keeping your guitar in tune religiously between songs is something no one does but can make a world of difference (especially when the whole bands been drinking all night).
But the intonation calibration is the icing on the cake.
The question is how good a guitar is it - and how durable are all these fancy motors and electronics?