Slashdot Mirror
Self-Tuning Electric Guitar
avirrey writes "The Technology Review has an interesting article on a Gibson Self-Tuning Guitar. Purist argue that you shouldn't need a guitar that self-tunes. Others argue that this will allow an artist to change tuning with one 'favorite' guitar, instead of having to swap out between songs." Ok I know what I think- freakin' sweet. Only technology will guarantee my sucking on the electric will at least be reasonably in-tune suckiness. Dear Gibson, Slashdot really needs to review your guitar. We'll need several review units and we lost your return address.
"...Know what I think- freakin' sweet. Only technology will guarantee my sucking on the electric will at least be reasonably in-tune suckiness. Dear Gibson, Slashdot really needs to review your guitar. We'll need several review units and we lost your return address..."
Yeah, and since slashdot is made by its community, we will need 900,000 test units =o) (sorry 900000+ id noobs =oP no testing for you)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
As a software engineer, the one thing I hate about playing the guitar is that every time I pick it up I have to tune it, otherwise I won't get the same results as I did last time I sat down to strum. Is a little determinism too much to ask?
How we know is more important than what we know.
What's wrong with something like the Korg CA30 electronic tuner? You don't need a good ear to tune this way.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm a fan of elitism of any sort, whether it be server monkeys in charge of making sure I clean out my email, or tuning monkeys who think that they're somehow better people for doing things themselves. Keep it coming!
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Eddie Van Halen could have used one of these in Greensboro the other night. Do they still self-tune if you bang the headstock against the stage a few times?
It's a tribute to the greatness of the band that even with an out-of-tune guitar for the last few songs, it was still the best concert any band has ever put on, ever.
ResidntGeek
...I don't really see what the huge deal is. Most guitars are tuned with an electric tuner these days anyways. I don't have to jiggle the pins myself? Sure, why not?
A few things I want to be sure of, though:
* I can "tune" the guitar arbitrarily. If I want to tune to 438 instead of 440, that needs to be allowed. If I want to tune everything down a half step, that needs to be possible without fighting or complaint. If I want open D, same notion.
* The guitar needs to be locked in a tuning. One thing you do NOT want is the guitar trying to retune itself while you're playing. This will create awkward sounds, and will also have disasterous results if you try and bend a note or (god help you) play slide.
I guess this sounds cool, though frankly this isn't enough of a big deal for me for me to pay terribly much extra for it. It saves hassle, but it's usually "once a session" hassle.
They've been available for years now.
That said -- it's nothing novel, nothing revolutionary. The same skill is needed to play anything on it reasonably. These kinds of things usually aren't the sort of additions you'd like to have on a guitar anyway (for example, whammy bars really try the strings' tensions; in the long run - you can expect a guitar to have a much shorter life than its counter-whammy-barless-guitar) -- the traditional thing is fine, thank you very much.
Sounds good to me, as long as it does standard and drop-d. The one question I have is do the system allow you to output the piezo pickups as well, or are the solely reserved for tuning?
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
It takes me (and most other guitarists) a few seconds to tune a guitar.
It's a pleasant, harmless little ritual, and somewhat calming before you play a gig.
This is a silly and expensive gizmo, IMO.
Azural - instrumentals
Seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. It might have been useful if it was able to tune-on-demand, to alleviate the pauses between songs during a show, but it doesn't. You still have to stop, flip the switch, and let it do its "auto-tune" thing. So it's really only good for those who are too lazy to adjust their own tuning. And three-thousand bucks just for that is a waste.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
... at least I hope it is anyways. I've grown quite dependent of tuning electronically, which I'm trying to steer away from, but this is a MUST HAVE for anyone who performs live. Nothing is more embarrassing that your strings detuning a performance. And I don't play on cheap equipment.
I agree that this looks like a super-neato piece of kit, but I would be willing to bet it will have trouble selling because: 1. It's one more thing that might break on stage. 2. Guitarist love tradition and tend to resist change. How long has the Les Paul been in production in its current form? Something like 60 years. The most revered amps are point-to-point wired vacuum tube models. Most people who are willing to drop this kind of coin on guitar gear would probably go for some aged custom model before they went for this. I'm not saying it's not useful, just that I would be surprised by significant commercial success.
This is really nice in the fact that wailing on an electric can take it out of tune pretty quickly, so it could get annoying re-tuning all the time, and, as stated above, you could probably switch to "drop D" tuning much faster. On the down side some people (not me) have perfect pitch, and if this doesn't match them exactly, it could drive them insane, fast!
[/war] "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
I thought about designing a self-tuning instrument once, but for piano, where the tuning process is a lot more painful. It would consist of basically a high speed camera and a strobe light that could be tuned to any frequency. For each piano pitch, it would hit the string, start the strobe, and compare the position on consecutive beats like a strobotuner, adjusting until it wasn't moving. Either that or just use a much faster high speed camera and skip the strobe light. The point is that by using optics instead of resonance, you could accurately discern an individual string's fundamental frequency without the need to stop down the remaining strings. Kind of what they did with piezo pickups, but a heck of a lot closer together. :-)
The whole thing could be built into a block that snapped down onto the three pins on a given model of piano and took advantage of the fact that there's more than one of them so that it wouldn't have to mount to anything else. With the single bass strings, you'd have to tune them by hand, but they're the easy strings.
Never built it. Never cared enough, never had time, never thought it would sell, etc.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You were supposed to tell them that you lost the return address AFTER we had received the Gui-tars! NOT before!
All I want is an amp that goes up to 11.
This sig is false.
Cool. Does it run Linux?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I first saw one of these back in '98. Pretty old news. It was sweet though. The one I got a chance to play with was on a strat body.
And Gibson isn't innovating anything. Transperformance built their tuning system well before Gibson had this "idea".
If they have Gibson self-paying loans...
I'm thinking this won't really be that useful for switching between tunings on stage. When you change tunings, the pressure on the neck changes, causing the strings to fall out of tune. Unless you have an exceptionally stable neck, it usually takes a couple of passes before the strings hold the new tuning. This system will reduce the time spent actually tuning the strings, but I doubt it'll speed the process up all that much.
Also, I have a tendency to whack controls while I'm playing. I shudder to think would would happen if the tuning system got activated accidentally mid-song.
It's every guitar player's nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song--and discover that your guitar is out of tune.
Excuse me? Firstly, this hardly qualifies as a nightmare. Secondly, any guitarist who steps on stage without having checked the tuning is either incredibly sloppy or is sufficiently rich and famous that he has roadies to check this stuff for him (and whose jobs depend on this 'nightmare' scenario never happening).
Much more likely is breaking a string. I can sort-of see the point of auto-tuning the remaining strings because it's a royal pain retuning a guitar to account for the change in tension after a string has broken. But still, when I shell out lots of cash for an instrument it's to get a superior sound, not to buy some fancy piece of technology (which will probably break just when I need it).
For the touring musician who uses a lot of different tunings, that's all this system is going to appeal to, so that he could get rid of a few guitars. I could tune from Standard to a DADDAD tuning in less than a minute that's for sure, and that's without practice at trying to go fast; so even if you did use a few different tunings and you were playings shows, it wouldn't be so bad to make your audience wait a ~30 seconds between songs for you to switch tunings once in a while. And if you're not playing serious shows, this is useless: spend the 30 seconds tuning.
I saw a previous poster write that everytime he goes to pick up his guitar it's out of tune. Your guitar should be able to hold tune for a long time if you know how to tune properly and it has good components. It's much more fun to play a high quality guitar that reacts the way you want it to. Spend the extra cash and buy a nice guitar, even if just for hobby playing. Unless you're using certain tremolo systems, then you might have tuning problems which I don't really know about because I don't have much experience with trems.
And the one problem I can see with this automatic tuning system is that it may not get things just right. Anyone who plays a lot knows that to make your guitar hold tune perfectly through a song where you hit those strings fairly hard, that you have to spin your pegs the right way when you're brining it into tune. This tuning system might get them strings onto the proper notes spot on, but it sure won't be programmed to spin the pegs that special way which you only learn from experience.
Purists? it's an electric guitar. The instrument is the personification of innovation, and players of that instrument should be the embodiment of the innovators.
Atleast that's how it should be. Obviously, not the case.
How to play Guitar by David [Jad] Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It's incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That's all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that's pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you'd still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it's your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn't have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It's your guitar and you're the one playing it. It's completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don't tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they're all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don't depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn't matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn't matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I've never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you'd feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn't to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
I like good tuners as opposed to bad ones, but I don't ever want a guitar where I don't have to tune. It helps you with hearing music and picking out notes better, plus I prefer the challenge of having to do something different in a song if it comes detuned. Forces creativity.
the Political Inquirer
Usually the only time I need to tune without a tuner is while drinking, usually at a bonfire or party, and although I've gotten good at it (I like to party), this would certainly help :-)
(Half)Joking aside, this is actually a pretty interesting concept. I don't know how popular it will be with good guitar players, but from a technical standpoint its kind of cool. Personally, tuning by ear with a piano or otherwise accurate gauge is excellent practice despite seeming rather mundane with advancing technology. I suppose you could say that about most technological advances these days.
I still love my acoustic.
Lets hack that Gibson and become guitar heros...
Weight. Noise. Power requirements. Mechanical complexity.
No thanks.
How about just a good Floyd Rose? A good FR implementation can keep a guitar in tune for weeks at a time, even with lots of bends (including the trem) and heavy palm-muted thrashing. The Edge-Pro or whatever it is on my Ibanez makes it trivial to get quickly back in tune as strings stretch - the fine-tuning knobs on the trem only take a slight turn to get right back to the right pitch. IIRC Ibanez guitars even in the $400-$500 range come with pretty good Floyd Rose tremolos.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
In America, self-tuning guitar tunes itself. In Soviet Russia, self-tuning guitar is tuned by you!
Michael Manring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Manring uses a custom Zon Bass Guitar http://www.zonguitars.com/zonguitars/hyperbass.html. Below each tuning knob is a lever which can de-tune a string with just the flip of the switch. No fancy pickups, electronics etc. Sure if he needs to tune beforehand, he does it the old fashioned way (by ear, tuner etc..), but while playing he detunes in a flash. You can find him pretty easily on youtube http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Michael+Manring&search=Search
Never need retuning ( well, not *never* but if you have one, youll understand )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
To me, this self-tuning guitar is to guitarists what script kiddies are to hackers, no? And I sure as hell would bet that Jimi Hendrix wouldn't sound like how he did if this type of thing was around.
I don't know about you, but the minute "out-of-tune-ness" and things of that nature is what makes a musical performance sound more human. Similar analogy: quantizing and how that makes things so.. robotic..
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
More parts to go flying off when I smash it on stage.
Have gnu, will travel.
It should be understood that this device does not provide continuous tuning as you play [which, if you think about it, would probably be impossible to implement and annoying to the player].
This technology simply allows you to place the guitar into a 'tune mode' having selected a particular tuning scheme, strum all the strings at once, and let the automated tuning pegs tighten or loosen your strings to match that scheme. According to the Tronical website, it may have up to 8 seconds to go from one tuning to another.
This is pretty much equivalent to using an electronic tuner, plucking one string at a time, watching the needle on the tuner, turning the peggs, replucking the string to check if the needle is now centered, repeating if necessary, and then moving on to the next string. Some argue that any use of electronic tuners is 'cheating' but most people are fine with that. Anyone who's fine with electronic tuners should be fine with this - tuning based on watching the needle is as ucnreative and deterministic as tuning using this device, so no purity is lost.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
Jimmy Page has been using a similar guitar made by Transperformance ("The Performer") for years. Check out this article: http://www.guitarsite.com/newsletters/991206/9.shtml Gizmag (http://www.gizmag.com/go/4951/) reports that: "Other celebrity owners of the guitar include Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead), Kenny Loggins, Peter Buck (REM), Eddie VanHalen (VanHalen), Pete Townshend (The Who) and technology afficiando Paul Allen (Microsoft, LINK)." And "The transperformance guitar has been in existence for 16 years". Here's the link to the manufacturer: http://transperformance.com/perform/index2.htm C'mon slashdot, you can do better!
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The Gibson Pure Audio 500GB Hard Drive
The Signature Series Les Paul Standard 1GB Flash Drive
The Les Paul Standard Flash Drive
and finally...a mirror copy of this??
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
what if you want to tune for alternate scales?
Gibson is quickly becoming the Harley-Davidson of guitars- decent quality (not great), overpriced products that sell more on the image than anything else. This might sell well to the weekend rockstars who have more money than they know what to do with, but Joe Sixpack won't be able to afford it for himself, and definitely not for his kid.
meh. I've been fairly apathetic towards Gibson ever since they decided lefties are available only through the custom shop. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, there are large numbers of better guitars available.
J.
Captcha is "creaming". I'm not.
Real musical instruments are made of real materials like wood, metal, or nylon. As temperature and humidity change, the shape and flexibility of the parts are going to change, and the parts that are held by friction may also move. And the accoustics of the places you're playing will all be different, and the people you're playing with will have different skills and different instruments, and of course if people are singing their voices aren't super-consistent even if they can carry a tune, and sometimes your fingers or mind are more flexible than other times. And if you move your instrument around it'll also be affected by that. So go with the flow, listen to the sounds around you and adapt. (Oh, and bring an electronic tuner - they really do help unless you're one of those people with really good ears who can do it all with a tuning fork.)
I recently opened my baritone uke bag and found that the thing had exploded - must have overheated in the car or something, because the strings had pulled the bridge off the body. That's a bit more extreme than the usual environmental changes in instruments, but it's reasonably large and I'd bought it for $20 on eBay. Glued the bridge back on, and it's sounding a little dull but the strings may need a bit of time to readjust.
If you don't like all this analog behaviour, get yourself an electronic instrument. Or go with something semi-digital, like a horn with valves. The brass'll still change a bit with temperature, and your wind may vary with humidity as well as tiredness, and a small-mouthpiece instrument like a French horn is a lot less forgiving than a baritone horn or tuba. Or get yourself a slide trombone, where you're always going to have to move your the slide to the right distance to get just the right pitch...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is a good idea, but ONLY if it tunes to drop D. I have wayyyy too much angst to play in standard tuning.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
...I think that this is a wonderful tool for those who really do not have the ear to tune. I have been to too many (albeit local) shows where the bands just could not tune themselves. It annoyed the hell out of me.
That being said, I think this device has very little place in the professional world. Tuning is not merely a ritual that we go through, it trains one's ears to listen. As someone who wants to create music, one has to be able to hear the difference between being in tune or being some 15 cents off. People who can't tune usually create the worst music out there these days. I would go so far as to say, people who write music that cannot tune things themselves usually cannot hear why their music sounds so poor.
The sad thing is that this seems to fly for popular music these days. People don't actually have to sound go, they just have to look good and be able to sing on stage...Oh wait, I forgot that Ashlee Simpson was popular!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
When you need to be in tune with the band's piano? Or drums?
And how would a guitarist develop an ear for pitch if he never has to tune his own instrument?Most guitarists can tune by ear in a matter of a few minutes, if not seconds. A guitarist who can't tune his own guitar by ear is akin to a programmer who can't write his own makefile. Sure, they exist, somewhere, but nobody wants to admit it.
Besides, if you don't have an ear for proper pitch, how do you bend notes?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Either of those have outgrown traditional tunings, and can ad -lib very many strange unconventional tunings. Jandak may not tune at all, but has done a LOT of stuff
..........FULL STOP.
http://www.gibson.com/DigitalGuitarNew/gibsonDigital.html
yes, let's all say it together, "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these..."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...is best part of my gig (according to the crowd)!
Cripes! When I was a kid I was told my by guitar instructor that I couldn't play guitar because I couldn't tune one. Fucking moron. I still would have liked to learn to play - not being able to tune a guitar doesn't mean one isn't musically inclined or capable of playing.
Because a guitar has frets, it must be tuned slightly differently depending on the (predominant) key of the song being played. (I'm referring to the standard EADGBE tuning, not specialized tunings such as the "G" tuning DGDGBD.)
For example, to my ear, the 1st (E) and 2nd (B) strings should be slightly flatter when playing a song in the key of E, and slightly sharper when playing a song in the key of D.
This issue is the same as occurs for keyboard instruments ("equal temperament"). For string instruments without frets (e.g., a violin), the player compensates with slightly altered finger placement ("just intonation"). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning/.
you can't play a guitar.
You just hold it, it reads your mind and plays what you want flawlessly! Seriously though, I have been playing guitar for 18 years. I play jazz, progressive rock, blues, folk, just about everything but country. Tuning your instrument is just part of playing the instrument. Once you start to provide innovation to make learning how to become proficient at a particular trade trivial, it de-values the trade. Mastering an instrument is almost on the same order as a personal quest. It isn't about achieving the goal as much as it is about the journey to get there. Music is about discovery and personal fulfillment not about using technology to make things easier.
I always have to wonder about this line of thinking. This type of technology is probably created by the same type of people that create automated scripts to farm exp and gold in MMO's. If you're not even going to sit down to enjoy what you're doing, why invest any time and money into it at all?
We'll make great pets
Gibson's self-tuning guitar uses an entirely different technology from the Line6 Variax. Both can give you alternate tunings with the press of a button, but only the Gibson physically changes string tension to tune an out-of-tune guitar.
With the line6, you have to get the guitar into tune through normal means, and then the guitar's internal software will shift the pitch of the strings a predetermined amount to make it sound as if the guitar is in an alternate tuning (there's a great tutorial here on how to do this with a Line6 Variax guitar and the Workbench software which comes with certain Line6 hardware, or can be purchased separately.)
The Gibson, on the other hand, uses little motors to change the tension of the strings. So if you bump the tuners of the Gibson against a microphone stand, throwing the guitar out of tune, all you have to do is turn the guitar volume down so no one hears what you are doing, strum all the strings, and pull the knob to tell the guitar to tune itself. With a Variax, you'd have to tune by ear or with an electronic tuner in this circumstance.
I could see Line6 eventually offering a self-tuning bridge, giving the best of both worlds - infinite choices of virtual pickups, bodies, and scale lengths, alternate tunings at the touch of a button, as well as the ability to get the instrument into tune with itself with the touch of a button. I'm drooling just thinking about it.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
This would be useful if it would tune to different keys. Since the third is slightly off (15 cents if I remember right), tuning it to the exact note doesn't give you the perfect major third. It would be nice to be able to tell it "Key of G" and have it tune the B down, then tell it "Key of E" and have it tune the B back up.
All my guitars hold tuning pretty well. In fact, any well-maintained guitar with a quality bridge and tuners should hold it's tuning. If not, something is wrong. Sure, fresh strings will stretch a bit but they stabilize within a day or two at the most. This gimmick just doesn't appeal to me. After 20+ years of playing, tuning is a non-issue. You just do it and move on; it only takes a minute and it helps tune your ears as much as the instrument.
The technology here looks cool but I'm not sure how useful it will really be to those who can justify what a guitar with this feature will cost. This feature will be most coveted by beginners and it will be hard to justify the price when competing against a $99 chinese-made Strat rip-off. Besides, when first begining I feel the ear needs to learn to hear the intonation of the instrument. This is a critical part of learning a new instrument. Tuning teaches the ear to listen for intonation. Once one develops enough, tuning is no longer an obstacle and becomes a critical and integral part of warming up.
All though it is awesome that a big name guitar manufacturer is push them now:)
This may be new for Gibson, but Transperformance has been doing this for a while. Jimmy Page is a fan.
http://www.transperformance.com/
Heh, you want something that's a real bitch to tune, get a harmonica.
It's a delicate process involving emery paper, jewelers files, modeling knives, tiny screwdrivers, beeswax and tape. You slip up, you need a new harmonica.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You know, you could probably strap a cinder block to a Les Paul and most people wouldn't notice.... yet plenty of people play them.
Guess that shoots the "Weight" part of your equation.
The rest of them can be turned off if something goes wrong.
Sounds like a great way to get in and out of DADGAD etc to me.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
If your machine heads, wood and workmanship are good your guitar rarely goes out of tune. My gibson les paul and strat almost never go out of tune unless I freak with multiple 1.5-2 step bends and go mad with the strat whammy. I sort of like the tuning ritual before a jam session, it brings me closer with the guitar and puts me in touch with it. However this would be a good solution to beginners.
I Tune my guitars only when i put on new string, stretch them up a bit and tune again, after that i barely touch the machine heads, unless 'number one son' has been playing while i wasn't around (he thinks i can't tell). This thingie might be good when you do a lot of gigs and your instrument goes through a lot of temperature changes, other than that i think it's wasted on your average Jimmy wannabe.
You never catch me alive
My friend recently got a Variax modeling guitar and I got to play it the other day. It looks like a really basic electric, but it has individual pickups for each string and a really realistic synth computer inside that models all kinds of guitars and other stringed instruments. And this ain't no crappy MIDI guitar, it responds naturally to bends, harmonics, etc. It can also do on-the-fly alternate tunings, but without actually changing the physical tuning! It feels so weird playing an electric guitar with a whammy bar and the sound of a banjo coming out.
Then he set it up running into a pitch tracker outputting a sine wave, fed into a Marshal stack simulator. Try to beat that signal path!
As I tell any one just learning guitar, get yourself a guitar tuner. The only thing worse then listening to a beginner play guitar, is listening to a beginner play an out of tune guitar.
but does it play linux?!
String tension / gauge also plays a role in intonation. The open string may sound true, but it will only be in proper tune for the tuning the bridge is set for. If they come out with a self-adjusting tune-o-matic bridge, I will buy one in a heartbeat. (personal bias: I play Jacksons.)
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
I love modeling stuff. Everyone should sell their crappy old analog gear and go buy it. Dump all that dusty junk at once, especially on Craigslist in Minneapolis. Make sure you accept the first offer that comes along, even if it seems pretty low. It'll pay off, there's a big sale at Guitar Center RIGHT NOW. Those things don't last forever- and I should know- I'm on their mailing list
...and guess how many amp models that plexi has? One. Onboard effects? ZERO. That's right, there are 0 possible amp-effect combinations! Don't see that in the ads do you? Nearly any modeling solution is literally infinitely better.
Modeling is clearly the future. How often do you have to replace the vacuum tubes in your DAW or your pod? That's right, never. That's called progress.
Real Marshall stacks require additional power outlets and an extra cable for every speaker cabinet you want to connect them to
Oh, and you'll be looking for a long time for a pong easter egg on the Marshall. There isn't one.
In all seriousness... real nerds build their own synthesizers, plug electrified banjos into them, and then feed them into good old fashioned 0 MHz Marshall Plexis (though I prefer class A personally).
Sorry to hear about your bari uke. I started playing a bari uke about 15 years ago, and now I play the uke, and acoustic and electric guitar. But like my mom, whose ukulele I started with, I hold the old nylon 4-string in a particular sort of regard. Good luck to you and yours in the future.
A toilet that sucks the crap out of you so that you save the effort?
Brian Wilson (I think, I can't source it) said tuners killed rock music as it's easier to strum an in tune guitar than it is to tune a guitar - way easier for a beginner. But if you can't tune with your ear, your ear doesn't get trained. Donald Fagen (I'm pretty sure, sourced it once but too lazy to look now) said that Pro Tools and digital pitch were has dumbed down pop music. You see, just intonation isn't true intonation, small variations in the pitch give sweeter, or sour - blends, as desired. Listen to the difference between vocal groups pre 1980 and post 1990. The true blend is the voices intermingling, the great harmony bands of the rock and soul decades. That's where you get Pet Sounds, What's Goin On, Lambert Hendrix and Ross. Throw some vocals in and pitch them all in Pro Tools, you get Seal. I've heard digital engineers talking about pitching Abbey Road, about Harrison flat at the end. Good thing the music business is finished.
So get your auto tune guitar boys. No one's gonna want to hear you play.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I thought you could already do this by buying a Ramones tablature book.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
what took them 10 years to develop I protoyped in less than one for my thesis - http://innovexpo.itee.uq.edu.au/2001/projects/s369495/index.html
Yes, that's what we need, MORE triangle!
damaged by dogma
Allright... not as good as a Gibson
;-)
But at least the Epiphone price/quality ratio is on par.
You get about 3/4th of the quality of a Gibson for 1/4th of the price
I paid 500 euro for an Epi Les Paul Standard ebony. And that's a verrry nice guitar for that kind of money.
Before calculators, there were slide rules and pencil and paper. I remember people saying that by making arithmetic too easy, your mind doesn't get trained and mathematics would suffer. Same with automatic tuning, if you are a good musician, your ear doesn't friggin' need to get trained by tuning a guitar - no more than a good mathematician needs to do multiplication tables to train for advanced number theory. The mediocrity in music that you hear today is because you have mediocre players that are being promoted due to things other than musical talent not because they've never tuned a guitar...
we can hack the Gibson!
They were apparently the first band to tour with this kit. I saw them back in January. My, the guitar was a sweet matt silver colour.
The announcement on the Therion site is here:
http://www.megatherion.com/News/Kliffoth/33.xhtml
Pictures of Christofer Johnsson's guitar with this tech are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjforster/370188703/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjforster/370187179/
Unfortunately, I've never played one to see how well this all works...and I'm a bit partial to Schecter guitars.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
"Dear Gibson, Slashdot really needs to review your guitar. We'll need several review units and we lost your return address."
That's a great way to get them to send you a review unit... NOT!
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
This Gibson tuning system has been around since the 80s.
It is improving(alt.tunings,bend sensing etc.).
It is expensive and changes tone.(remove wood for room and sound changes)
Don't expect Les Paul to sound exactly like you envision.
It has its applications.Live performance for example,who wants to change axes midsong?
Not for everyone.Not for most even.
Godsend for those who need it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Only the least technical, uneducated guitar players depend on "drop-d" tuning. It is the easy/lazy way to play guitar. Nothing wrong with that (I love Stone Sour just as much as the next wannabe headbanger), but you might as well just tune your guitar to drop d in the first place then keep it in tune throughout the gig. Most of the hard rock gigs that use drop-d write EVERY song with drop-d tuning in mind, so there is no need to switch back and forth.
Having a machine tune a guitar is never foolproof, nor would the guitar be foolproof by tuning itself. It still takes skill and musicianship to play a guitar in tune, even if the guitar is "in tune" to begin with. A good guitar player can play a slightly out of tune guitar in tune, thus making this device a gimmick.
But hey, I'm just a drummer, so what do I know? I keep the drumsticks on my dashboard so I can park in the handicapped zones.
After 20 minutes of smashing on new strings - they are stretched out/worn in, and the dang bass does not go out of tune. Drop it, leave it in the case for a week, play outside - damn thing is still in tune. Of course since it weighs about 15 pounds, it would take a car to run over it for it to notice something was different. It has a single piece thru the body neck that is the size of a small sapling, grown on the slope of a volcano on Jupiter.
I have a newer Music Man bass - 9 pounds, bolt on neck. Plays very nice and fluid, but just not the same. They are very different - one's like a paring knife, the other is like a meat cleaver - I love the cleaver.
..........FULL STOP.
"This isn't the first, or the most advanced, self-tuning guitar system on the market. Over the past 20 years, a small Colorado company called TransPerformance has custom-built about 300 guitars, costing $3,000 and up for the electronics alone, for rock stars including Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen."
-- Boycott Shell
"This isn't the first, or the most advanced, self-tuning guitar system on the market. Over the past 20 years, a small Colorado company called TransPerformance has custom-built about 300 guitars, costing $3,000 and up for the electronics alone, for rock stars including Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen."
-- Boycott Shell
http://transperformance.com/perform/index2.htm
Sounds like a well-executed idea. The servos are located behing the headstock where the gear boxes are. There's a separate piezo pickup used to get the individual string frequencies. When you pull up on one of the knobs, the current is sent over the strings to the servo motors to tune the strings. Very clever!
I'm skeptical how well it does, but if it works well I'd definitely use it. People are complaining that tuning is an important part of a live performance, that seems like saying broken strings and tripping over cables are an important part of a live performance.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
I, for one, am welcomed by our new soviet russian overlords!
Many bad guitarists don't realize that off rhythm is as bad as out of tune. It's actually worse.
It'd be awesome if you could get direct access to the acoustic pickups and connect them to the guitar's output for a warm, natural sound. You've long been able to purchase piezo-based acoustic pickups as an add-on - if they're adding these pickups for tuning purposes anyhow, why not connect them to the output too? That said, maybe it would sound funny; acoustic pickups are usually attached to the guitar body to pick up the resonance - looks like maybe these are built into the bridge so that they can sense individual strings; probably wouldn't sound so good, I guess.
*however* since they can accurately detect the frequency of each string individually *anyhow* another obvious thing to do would be to drive a MIDI synth. Again, connecting a pickup for a MIDI system is often ugly, involving a great big pickup being stuck to the body under the strings. It'd be much nicer if this sort of thing could be integrated. Really, it'd be nice to see a more modular approach taken to guitar electronics - even a PC-style approach (!!! I just said that?). If a bit of spare space could be provided in the body to fit a few modules that connect to the conventional or acoustic pickups, it'd be easy to "upgrade" your guitar to acoustic / midi / whatever outputs.
It's interesting to see a large traditional manufacturer taking on a task like this. Their instruments already command such a large premium that the cost involved isn't prohibitive. I must say I'm surprised to see Gibson taking on this task as opposed to one of the more progressive companies (Parker, Steinburger, and other purveyors of space-age looking guitars). Not many people realise, due to their modern image, but the most popular electric guitar designs are about fifty years old and so were in existence before many of our favourite rock stars were out of short pants.
if they learned how to tune the damn thing, they wouldn't need the gadgets... then again, it doesn't take a genius to play electric guitar - so maybe it's too hard for them.
My Variax gives me that at the stomp of a pedal...and it doesn't hose the intonation.
I've been playing guitar for over thirty years... OK, I'm still not very good, but that's beside the point. One thing that I am very anal about is tuning. I've been using electronic tuners for many years and I've yet to find one that get's it quite right. I typically use the tuner to quickly get close, then fine tune so that it sounds right at both ends of the neck and with all strings in unison.
Something that I find odd was that the designers of this gizmo chose a methodology that tunes each string in isolation. Optimum tuning is not simply a function of each string being in tune. The strings need to be in tune as a group and there are slight variations that are dependent on string material, gauge, windings, height, length, and probably a dozen other variables that slightly alter the beat frequencies. The average listener probably can't tell the difference, but to some this makes all the diference in the world.
I think anyone who could justify spending this kind of money for a guitar would tend to be someone who cares critically about their tuning and therefore unlikely to buy such a guitar... For example, you're not going to see Steve Vai replace Thomas Nordegg with these gizmos...
"It's every guitar player's nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song--and discover that your guitar is out of tune."
Oh crap! If you're a highly-paid touring player you'r going to have a guitar technician who tunes your instrument for you.
If you're not the above (as I'm not) then you make sure you tune the ****ing before you walk onstage.
What a twerp!
Down like the titanic.
Opporknockity only tunes once...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Funny. I proposed this in 1989 and even built a single string demonstrator. This is actually a great science project for a high school kid and is something most people will understand. The motor was a little, but very strong, Swiss DC gearmotor I got from Parker Products up in Peabody Mass and to make things easy I used a steel string so I could electromagnetically excite and sense vibrations. I had an ancient 68705 (eprom 6805) do the work but nowadays a little PIC is easier.
Nobody was interested in '89. Did guitarists get lazier and/or less skilled since then?
Why didn't I think of that?
Oh well.. I can still build one for me I suppose.
Now I can actually learn some of those songs with alternate tunings! It's to much of a pain to do it myself!
Jimmy Page has been using the Transperformance system for years.
away from electric guitar!
the beauty of EG is in its spontaneous sound (that is when you know how to play) - think Hendrix for example - you gotta feel it
computer will kill it all
OK computer
Every time I see a show and someone is playing a Gibson, it is ALWAYS slightly out of tune, or the intonation is off, or something. Even when the guy tunes it, it will go out of tune before the song is over. I see it again and again on these Gibsons; they are most often responsible for that "indie-rock-badly-tuned-twang-guitar" sound. So is this auto-tune thing just a workaround instead of an actual fix?
I hope this isn't the result of some unruly slashdotter hijacking the site until Gibson sends 'em a free self tuning guitar.
Rickenbackers are great axes in general. I was more talking about the guitars than the basses, I don't know how great/not great EBMM basses are. The guitars are wonderful though. Anyway, my point is that Gibson/Fender are both VERY overrated. There are so many companies out there that make much better instruments...
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