The Self-Tuning Guitar

CowboyRobot writes "With the TransPerformance Performer you push a button to activate a mechanical re-tensioning of the strings to any of a few hundred tunings, 'accurate to within 2 cents over the entire tuning range', in a couple of seconds. They can even refit your existing guitar. There's a long audio interview with Jimmy Page on the site. It's funny to hear him speak."

Comments

Even more fabulous

[jaf]

It's being done with pianos:
See this New Scientist article

Re:Even more fabulous

[micromoog]

This isn't just for correcting tuning. The real boon for guitarists is not the ability to correct tuning quickly (that's actually really easy), but to change to alternate tunings quickly. There are many alternate tunings that take advantage of resonance between different open strings for very interesting sounds, but are not suitable for general-purpose use like the "standard" tuning because the intervals are too awkward.

Alternate tunings are not very widely used today, mainly because it's such a pain in the ass to retune a whole guitar. Some company back in the 80s made a guitar bridge where you could flip switches at the base of each string to change its tuning . . . I think it worked fairly well, but was not widely used. There's also a tuning key that just drops the low E down to D with the flip of a switch . . . that one got used a fair bit.

Re:Even more fabulous

[Golias]

Give that man a cigar!

Alternate tunings is exactly why this is huge for guitarists.

I would never put a device like this on my piano, because manual tuning only needs to be done twice a year, and any professioinal piano tuner worth his wage is also going to check all the pads and maintain the action of the keys for me.

But when I play guitar with my garage band, I mostly play in standard tuning, but switch to open-G for a lot of slide-blues songs. Currently, I do this by having two guitars, so an autotuner that can quickly switch like this is easilly worth the price of a second guitar to somebody like me.

Re:Even more fabulous

[essiescreet]

Well, cam tuners have been around for banjos for awhile. You set 2 stops, and voila! Listen to some Earl Scruggs (Earl's breakdown, Flint Hill Special, Randy Lynn Rag, and more) and you'll hear them used during a song for the effect.

This is sort of like the bridge, and they can also allow you to quickly retune from the Open-G to Open-D tuning.

Bill Keith (http://www.beaconbanjo.com) makes some, and I have a set on my banjo and they're awsome!

Jimmy Page

[debilo]

For those who don't know, Jimmy Page was the guitarist for Led Zeppelin. While he doesn't have the best technique when it comes to playing the guitar, he really really does have a grasp of melodies. He's a genius, you'd better listen to that guy. :)

Re:tuning

[NorthWoodsman]

100 cents = 1 half-step = the smallest pitch distance on a piano

Cannot tune by machine alone

[bodland]

Each guitar has it's quirks. Depending on the intonation the "b" string on a guitar needs to be tuned manytimes slightly flat to allow chords to ring true.

The human ear has a problem with "b". Even though the tuner may say it is perfectly in tune a simple "D" chord will sound awful.

Compensating bridges make up for this intonation problem but it is still not exact.

Automatic tuners may look cool but will go the way of locking nuts. Remember those locking nuts and big ass whammy bars forced on us by Eddie VanHalen in the 80's?

Re:vocalists

[Bohnanza]

Believe it or not, Autotune already exists! This product is the sole reason people like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake can be called "singers"

Re:Kind of interesting

[cozziewozzie]

I can understand maybe with people just starting out in learning the guitar, but with someone that knows how to tune a guitar, and having a guitar that stays in tune (ie, don't buy cheap crap), is important. But learning to tune the guitar by ear is part of the learning process.

The tuning of your guitar depends on many factors, and only one of them is the quality of the guitar. For example:

- How often and how hard you bend
- How hard you bang your guitar while you play (blues vs. punk)
- The gauge of the strings
- How fresh/old the strings are
- Use a tremolo/whammy bar? Things go way out of tune with those.
- Retune your guitar often for alternate tunings? This can also affect the stability of the strings
- Alternative playing methods, a la Sonic Youth (playing with drumsticks etc)

For some people, it is easy to stay in tune. For others, tuning between each song is a must, even with really good equipment.

Re:I can't wait...

[dasmegabyte]

Uh, cars are self tuning now.

"Tuning" on a car, as in a "tune up," refers to the adjustment of the fuel and ignition systems to provide maximum efficiency. On mechanical cars, this meant adjusting the carburetor, adjusting the timing, adjusting the ignition points and condensor, etc.

All of these parts are computer controlled, and have been since fuel injection became popular around, well, some time between 1980 and 1990. It's even more efficient that way. And the computer is auto-adjusting -- it senses microscopic knocks and adjusts the mix on the fly. When a computer part fails, it fails obviously, unlike the gradual loss of power you face with a carburetor. I had my Ignition Control Module go on me two weeks ago and it was OBVIOUS...one cylinder just stopped firing (ouch).

So yeah, cars are self tuning. In fact, anybody in the past 10 years who's sold you a "tune up" either did nothing at all to your car, or checked a lot of other things that had nothing to do with what we called a "tune up" before the 80s.

Alternate Tunings

[The Famous Brett Wat]

Pianos can take alternate tunings too, you know, and you sure as heck don't want to be re-tuning a piano manually in mid-performance. Although not all the following are intended for piano-like instruments, the Korg TR-Rack synth module (for which I have the manual at hand) can be configured for the following tunings: Equal Temprament (the standard tuning, where every note differs from the adjacent semitone by a factor of the twelfth root of two), Pure Major, Pure Minor, Arabic, Pythagorean, Werckmeister III, Kirnberger III (mainly for harpsichords), Slendro (Indonesian gamelean scale of five notes), Pelog (Indonesian gamelean scale of seven notes), Stretch, and a couple of user-programmable settings.

Pragmatically speaking, there are (as far as I'm aware) alternate tunings for pianos, organs, and harpichords which relate to specific musical periods, such as the baroque. Thus, for truly faithful reproduction, you may want to tune to the Werckmeister III scale for performing some baroque pieces. Not to mention the different "pure" tunings for all the major and minor keys.

Re:Alternate Tunings

[Golias]

For almost anything baroque or later, you want to use a tempered scale, so 99.99999% of the pianos out there are tuned to a tempered scale and left there.

Some modern works might call for alternate tuning, I'll leave it to music critics to argue over whether that's being done as a cheap gimmick or not, but otherwise just about all non-tempered keyboard music comes from an era before pianos. If you are enough of a purist to play a re-tuned piano when playing a pre-Bach work, you are probably enough of a purist to play it on a period instrument.

Besides, modern listeners have grown acustomed to the tempered scale. Playing in a "pure" tuning will only impress a handful of snobs.

Re:Alternate Tunings

[selfsimilar]

AHEM. Your "tempered" scale is the "equally tempered" scale and it's actually only recently (in the history of music) come into vogue. There's a great book called "Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization" by Stuart Isacoff. Basically Bach's Well Tempered Klavier is written for "well" tempered pianos, not "equal" (aka modern) temperament. And there are a ton of great keyboard works from that era which call for specific differently tempered tunings.

That said, you're right, most modern music is written for equal temperament. But if pianos were easier to tune to alternate temperaments I'm sure many composers would take advantage of that. Sure some might use it as a gimmick, but most serious piano composers are above gimmicks. And while I like John Cage and other modern radicals, it's not his kind of music that I think would benefit most from a piano that could quickly switch to alternate tunings, but the less experimental modern composers. Keyboard music didn't end when Mozart died.

Tips

[blackmonday]

Guitar tuning has a lot to do with the nut (save the jokes...). This is the piece of plastic, bone or graphite on the end of the fretboard that holds the strings in place before they hit the tuning machines. Most guitars that won't tune aren't so bad because of the tuning keys, it's that the nut is not cut properly for the size strings you're using. If they don't sit right, they won't stay in tune, simple as that. Oh, and STRETCH those strings when they're new! Search google, its very simple and your new strings will behave very nicely after a stretch, because you get the kinks out.

Also, there's a handheld tuner that you can buy that physically turns the peg for you, all you do is pluck the string. I'm surprised no one's mentioned it yet, it's been around for over 10 years. The difference is that it only does one string at a time, and you hve to physically hold it in place while you tune.

In the long run, tuning a guitar is not rocket science and keeping your nut in good shape and having a decent set of tuners (even ones on a cheap Fender Squire are pretty good nowadays) will keep you playing alright. This invention is pretty cool for a wow value, but it's like using an Abrahms tank to kill a mosquito. I play several guitars with old-school Bigsby tremolos and I don't have any tuning problems.

Not true ... tuning is part science, part art

[cagle_.25]

tuning, as it turns out, is inherently flawed. This occurs because of the "Pythagorean comma": essentially, the combination of a perfect fifth + a perfect fourth leads to an imperfect octave. Hence, there are actually multiple different ways to tune instruments, each of which makes sense in its own way. One example is "Well-Tempering" (as in Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier), which places priority on tuning keys near C. Chords like C, G, etc. played on a Well-Tempered scale sound particularly in tune, whereas chords like F# sound less well-tuned.

The most common scheme today is "Equal Tempering", in which every half-step is a multiple of 2^(1/12) above its neighbor. In this scheme, C# and Db (for example) are considered the same note, whereas in other schemes, they are not. The upside of this is that all keys sound equally "in tune"; the downside is that no key sounds perfectly in tune.

Historical note: some early Klaviers had seperate keys for sharps and flats, since those notes were not considered to be the same.

So, the "science" part of tuning is what you see in the autotuner. The "art" part is tuning the instrument to make the music sound like you hear it in your head.

Bottom line: if a guitarist tunes all of its open strings to a piano, it will not sound "in tune" to the guitarist. Of course, an autotuner can presumably be customized to taste.

Very Cool

[Java Ape]

This would be an excellent tool for the professional musician. I'm a moderatly skilled guitarist and perform small gigs on the side for giggles and pocket change -- usually on a twelve string acoustic.

IMHO the posts about "ruining the musicians ear" are bogus. If you RTFA you'll see that this gizmo allows the scales to be tempered to suit the musicians taste. You want to modulate the B-string a few hertz flat -- go ahead, that's what a tempered scale is. Besides, you develop a good ear by playing a well-tuned instrument, not by compensating mentally for a discordant mess.

I have a reasonably good ear, and use harmonics when "ear tuning" because they're more accurate than the fret placement (and less subject to the rising tone problems caused by fretting the previous string, which raises it's tone slightly). I'm at least as good as the cheap electronic tuners, but not as good as the higher-end needle-guage based units. Based on the price of this unit, I'm betting it uses a pretty high quality tuner - far better than most guitarists ear! Having strings 1 hertz off doesn't make much difference on a six-string played with high distortion at a rock concert. But on a twelve string, even a small difference between paired strings leads to an unpleasant audible "beating". The same thing happens with classical guitars, where it becomes annoying (usually when lower strings are fretted above the twelvth fret, and sound out of sync with a supposedly identical note played on a higher string).

So, this unit is faster than a human, more accurate than a human, allows complete control over scale tempering, and stores a couple of hundred alternate tunings. It's got me beat hands down, and I suspect that's why professionals are paying nearly 4g to get one!