Robot guitars: self tuning, intonating etc..

[Jeff White]

And what does Nels Cline think of it?

***********************

Gibson Robot Guitar: Forever In Tune?



The Gibson Robot Guitar, first-run limited edition in blue silverburst with nitrocellulose finish, $2,499, at www.gibson.com.
Wilco guitarist Nels Cline puts the new self-tuning wonder through its paces.

By Thierry Peremarti

Guitarists often muse that one spends more time tuning one?s guitar than actually playing it. They might change their minds when they get a load of the new Gibson Robot Guitar. It?s a self-tuning instrument that Gibson says ?will change the guitar world forever.?

We asked Wilco guitarist Nels Cline (one of Rolling Stone?s ?Top 20 New Guitar Gods? and leader of the Nels Cline Singers?with, ahem, no singers) to take it for a spin around the studio.

The instrument features Gibson?s new Powertune System, which automatically tunes it to standard (440 hertz) or alternative tunings. All you have to do is pull up a knob, strum a string, wait for the LEDs to turn green, then push the knob back in. The string?s tuned.

So is it amazing? ?Hell, no,? says Cline after playing around with it for an hour. ?I wouldn?t recommend it?never, not in a million years.? But what did he really think? ?If you were on a gig and you?re trying to get a different tuning and you?re strumming, waiting for the lights to blink, you?d look like an idiot,? he says.

True, Cline didn?t study the 50-plus-page instruction manual, relying instead on the six-page excerpt provided by Gibson. Still, he found the instrument rather complicated for onstage performance. And what if you?re not a professional and you just want a really cool guitar? Perhaps. ?It?s a toy,? Cline says. ?A beautiful toy.?

[Patrick McAnulty]

And what does Nels Cline think of it?

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edit: Thanks!

[>Mojave_Gary<]

I watched the movie "I Robot" OK? that thing scares the hell out of me..

[curtiswyant]

So...does it just stay in tune all the time or can you fuck with it to do faux-pedal steel licks and stuff?

[norton]

I had the chance to monkey around with one of these the other day... A friend of a friend owns it..

It's super impressive... but while the machines are engaged the output of the guitar is switched off. So you can't do any "cool" tuning moves with it.

AND apparently manually twisting the tuners is a no-no too.

Very nice neck on the guitar. One of the cleanest nicest necks on a les paul i've ever seen... outside of a kalamazoo gibson. The finish is even goofier up close than in pictures.... Not quite metallic.. not quite metal flake ... just sort of blah.

It's a surprisingly light guitar too. Only slightlyl neck heavy... very slightly. THey must've hollowed out a ton of the body cavity.

It'll be really interesting to see what the next generation of this technology is like. The tuners are super impressive... and it does an excellent job of tuning - the guitar I played had an issue finding the proper pitch for the low 'E' string though..

I'll take one for $500. any day of the week.

Anyone selling?

[GooberNumber9]

It's super impressive... but while the machines are engaged the output of the guitar is switched off. So you can't do any "cool" tuning moves with it.

Weak.

AND apparently manually twisting the tuners is a no-no too.

Super-weak.

If I thought my biggest problem as a guitar player was having to suffer the laborious process of turning a knob, I could see myself as being vaguely interested. I'm wondering what their target market here is, one-handed guitarists? Somehow I suspect that I can tune my guitar in way that pleases me better than a robot can, seeing as how there's no such thing as perfect tuning.

Todd Wilcox

[ckeene]

I think for its intended audience it's a great idea.

Think about how awesome it would be to have one of those guitars if you like to shred along to tunes at home and you just did Shoot to Thrill and you're all set to play some old Van Halen and you're like "damn now I have to put this thing in e-flat" then you wanna rock out to Brown Sugar and have to pop it into Open G, then you wanna play some High on Fire and have to drop it down to C or whatever. What a pain in ass.

Until now!

[ryan668]

I actually like tuning my guitar. Sometimes I tune it open. Sometimes harmonics. Sometimes powerchords. Depends on the song. Can a robot do that. Not only the sheer stupidity of this guitar. But I also perhaps saw a danger in this guitar. The electronics are in the bridge. What if a sweat drop landed on the bridge and somehow gave you a jolt. I think I will get one and try to start a Gibson lawsuit.

[Jeff White]

I like the idea of having a half-dozen to a dozen guitars instead of one Robot Guitar in futuristic Silly Silver Robot Blueburst. I personally think that the technology *could* be cool down the line, but it is definitely not there yet.

I can't wait to walk into a Guitar Center and have a sales drone tell me how this guitar will change the face of rock and roll.

[Dan Phelps]

The original robotar:
http://transperformance.com/

[RefD]

The original robotar:
http://transperformance.com/

wait, didn't Jimmy Page use something very much like that built into a Les Paul when he did an album with David Coverdale?

EDIT: actually, it turns out he used exactly that.

[shedshrine]

Just updating this thread

Thanks to Mike Rivers:
My 2012 Winter NAMM Show Report


Antares, the folks who brought us Auto-Tune, for better or worse, have partnered
with Parker and Peavey to produce an automatic tuning electric guitar that?s all
electronic and based on Antares? pitch shifting technology, It consists of a small
DSP board implementing the Auto-Tune process, which can be built into an
electric guitar. Strum across the open strings, press a button, and the processor
spits out each string in tune regardless of the physical tuning.
The processor uses a polyphonic acoustic
pickup so each string gets its own Auto-Tune
processing. The output of the pickup itself
doesn?t sound very much like what you?d
expect from a guitar that looks like one of the
models that was shown with the automatic
tuning setup, so the processor also includes
guitar modeling which turns the crummy
pickup sound into something that sounds like it came from a guitar pickup. With
the Peavey guitar that I played with, switching between the Auto-Tuned output
and the pickup made very little difference in what I heard coming out of the
amplifier. The technology allows for several models, so not only does your guitar
stay in perfect tune, but it can sound like a variety of guitars. But what about
bends and playing with a slide? It?s smart enough to figure that out. The Solid-
Tune Intonation System constantly monitors the pitch of every note played and
makes corrections to intonation but ignores bends and vibrato. You needn?t stick
to standard tuning, either. You can tell it to put out any note for any open string,
so you can program in your favorite off-brand tuning. You can also fool it for a
quick tuning change by having a string fretted when you press the ?tune it?
button. For example, if you fret the 6th string at the second fret and tell it to tune,
it will think that?s an E. Un-fret the string and it drops to a D and stays there until
you tell the guitar to re-tune. If it works as well as I saw in a quick demo, it's really
amazing. No, they don?t have an acoustic model (yet) nor is it available (yet) to
install on a guitar that you own, so the $3500 to $6000 price range depending on
the guitar and options might slow you down a bit, but, hey, Auto-Tune was
expensive when it was just a hardware box, and now it?s practically a give-away.
http://guitar.auto-tune.com/index.shtml







Comments:

Oh for pete's sake just make a guitar that plays itself and we can all get on with our lives. How lazy can you get!

flibb - January 19, 2012 @ 09:43 pm PST
Auto-tune, yeah! How could we just live without it before? It's a failed concept, IMHO, guitarist in last 100 years had no problem tuning their guitars and performing amazing things. Totaly unneccessary, to say the least...

?????? ????????? - January 20, 2012 @ 03:32 am PST
Love it. Nothing worse than an out of tune performance or wonky set of strings. Effects?...Sure, but warm or cold, nothing beats the crystal clear concert tuning of a well made guitar with a perfect set of strings.

Mirmillion - January 20, 2012 @ 06:52 am PST
I saw a video demonstration of the Peavey guitar on PremierGuitar.com at the NAM show, and I must say; I was very impressed. I've been playing guitar for 26 years and have played in many situations where this technology would have been extremely useful, especially when there are temperature and/or humidity changes from one venue to the next, and your guitar just wont stay in tune. I may just pick one of these up and give it at try.

[mscottweber]

I had a music theory/composition professor in 08 or 09 who had one of the Gibson Robots. He had spent the previous summer touring the US with a new music ensemble, so I could see it coming in handy for that. He most likely had to go through a ton of different oddball tunings, probably with little to no time to tune inbetween. The fall after his tour, he brought it into class and I played it a little bit. I didn't mess around with any of the "robot" features, but as a guitar, it played terribly.

[Jim Williams]

Any semi working guitarist will have spare instruments. If they use alternate tunings, they will also have spares for that too.

I've never seen a case in which a pro player had or wanted to sacrafice all their guitars so they can use just one.

This is a simple gimmick. Sales will prove this out.

The main flaw that they can't work out is string tension. Any alternate tunings will change that and it won't be right. Flabby wound strings? High tension stretched steel strings?

My stuff is very sensitive to tension, the entire guitar is set up around that, if it changes, the entire instrument is out of wack. Does it change the intonation too? That is also going to change. Then you have your truss rod going out of wack and then your fingerboard bends up or down too.

What a dumb idea!

Gibson ought to make a robot golf club, one that hit's the ball straight. They would sell millions of those...

[shedshrine]

With Gibson buying out Tascam, I was looking for a pic to post showing how an electronics firm and a guitar company might combine their strengths.
This was something I came across. Kind of iPad meets one of those old Roland (Casio?) midi controller jobbies. Interesting concept, a completely different beast altogether to the conventional, unrecognizable to callous fingered string benders. Basically a 24 fret synth.

http://www.misadigital.com/kitara.html