Culled from a Gibson Guitars press release.
Gibson Guitar, the world’s
premier musical instrument manufacturer and leader in music technology
announced today the limited availability of the world’s first guitar with
robotic technology, the Gibson Robot Guitar1. The Gibson Robot Guitar eliminates tuning problems for guitarists. It
automatically tunes to standard A440 tuning.
2. It also allows players to access six commonly used altered tuning
presets at the push of a button. These tunings were used on many well
know hit songs, giving players easy access for the very first time.
3. The Gibson Robot Guitar allows the guitar to be intonated in seconds
after string changes, truss rod adjustments or change in weather
conditions.
4. Finally, with the locking tuner, single string changes or changing the
entire set of strings are an automated breeze.Since the dawn of the instrument, musicians have come to accept the
guitar’s imperfections and lack of tonal precision as necessary evils. Guitar
players without guitar techs have shied away from the use of alternate tuning
due to the time and difficulty require to tune and retune the guitar. The
result is the guitar player and the music listener often suffers out of tune
instruments. In the studio, or at home, imprecise intonation throws the guitar
in and out of tune, up and down the neck, as the instrument requires tweaking
with each season and at times with each string change.
Not bad Gibson. Now, if you could make one that would load up the P.A. and drive the drummer home then, you would have something.
Related posts
Tags: Gibson Robot Guitar
Martin Moon wrote,
Have you seen the video of it in action? This is a link to it. http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/gibson-gets-official-with-the-self-tuning-robot-guitar/
I wonder how much it will add to the cost!
I wonder how useful this feature really is.
Seems like most guitar players I know are already masters at tuning a guitar.
Link | November 14th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Pribek wrote,
It will be pricey, Martin. A Les Paul Standard starts at around 2 grand these days.
It appears to me that the most useful feature would be the ability to instantly go to another tuning while on-stage.
Currently, I use two guitars for gigs. One in standard tuning and one tuned to G that I use for slide stuff. Just doing that adds a surprising amount of time to my set up before a gig.
In a perfect world, I would carry two more guitars tuned to A and E. However, it is costly and time consuming and would not be worth the hassle unless I was playing large shows.
So, that would be nice as far as functionality but, I would have some doubts about the reliability of all those servo motors required to run this thing especially putting the guitar through the paces on-stage.
Link | November 14th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Lucas wrote,
I also carry an extra guitar in open G. It’s enough of a drag that I play less music which needs it. …it’s hard enough to find practice time, and the open G songs have one extra hurdle.
So if this takes off maybe people will end up using open tunings as a more mainstream thing.
Link | December 9th, 2007 at 8:23 pm