So apparently Gibson has made some changes in 2015

Cagey, StubHead - yeah, your worries are moot. You tune your guitar how you like it, then you press a button on the doohickey and save it as a preset (obviously they give you several presets to play with, 6 I think).

Stubhead, your flat E string and big plain G string - yeah, you just tune them where you want them, and save it. Then when you next ask it to tune the guitar, that's where it'll tune it to.

Cagey, your big frets thing. You give your buddy your guitar, he screws with the tuning. He gives it back to you, you strum the guitar and press a button, and hey presto, it's back where you want it. And if your buddy plays your guitar a lot, you can save his preferred tuning as a preset too. So the two of you can pass it back and forth all night, and each time you do, the guitar tunes itself to how you need it in between 3 and 10 seconds.

My very first tuner was "calibratable" - you could say to it, "no, this is an E". And then you could tune your guitar to that, with the little green "in tune" light lighting up when each string was in tune with that original E (or whatever) you played. It's not particularly surprising to discover that 25 years later they've not forgotten that things like that happen, and indeed evolved the idea a bit. You can tune one string to what you want it to call "E" (or whatever - any string), press a button, and it tunes the rest of the guitar to be in tune with that one note - using your desired tuning, of course, whether it be DADGAD or just one with a 15-cent-flat bottom E.

Sure, maybe the tech is a solution in search of a problem, but you guys are in search of a problem with the solution. In your desire to think of drawbacks with it, you've forgotten to find out if, just maybe, these guys have thought of those drawbacks too, and solved them.
 
Jumble Jumble said:
Sure, maybe the tech is a solution in search of a problem, but you guys are in search of a problem with the solution. In your desire to think of drawbacks with it, you've forgotten to find out if, just maybe, these guys have thought of those drawbacks too, and solved them.

You're probably right. It's engineer/pragmatist in me that likes to poke around. Still gonna use manual tuners, though. They're just too simple and practical to ignore.
 
Just so you know I'm not totally against technology, here's a list of things guitar improvements of which I may or may not be a fan, but I'm cool with even if I don't like them:

locking nuts
locking tuners
active pickups
straight pull tuners
headless guitars/basses
pointless (or pointed) body shapes
double acting truss rods
side adjust truss rods

Most of those are in the bucket of "neutral opinion, let me hear/play it". I'm just not a fan of putting an automatic transmission into a guitar and calling it progress.
 
Good list. Although, I'd knock off locking nuts and add noiseless pickups.
 
Locking nuts were one of the ones in the list "not really a fan, but I'm  at peace with their existence. My inner guitar player no like. My inner manufacturing engineer is cool with it.
 
Locking nuts are one of the few "advancements" that I genuinely do think f*** up the tone of the guitar.

These auto tuners: the geek in me thinks they're brilliant - what a gadget! But the guitarist in me isn't interested at all. I just don't have tuning problems, so I don't need to spend the extra money to get it.

If I won some as a prize, or otherwise acquired some for free, I'd put them on a guitar for fun. And provided they didn't make the guitar worse, I think they'd stay on it. There isn't really much of a downside apart from the money - speculation on reliability aside, of course.

They're probably great for people that do several tunings for a single gig. Sure as hell cheaper than having another guitar for DADGAD or whatever.
 
Here's my other beef with the contraption. The better way to make use of some convoluted gadget of questionable reliablity and utility when a vastly more reliable  and inexpensive solution has existed for decades is to do it this way:

stringmaster2.jpg


That way you can use it on all your cool spendy guitars, their backups, the Les Paul you use only to play XYZ because it's got the underwound bridge pickup and the burr in the nut that makes that open string on the signature riff "just so". And if it craps out, 1) your guitar isn't screwed up, 2) you can have a fully functional backup x 10 back stage.

Honestly, a lot of these things are like making love in 3/4 time. I suppose you might could figure it out if you worked at it, but it flies in the face of a vastly more natural solution that's so blatantly obvious that you have to work hard NOT to do it that way.
 
I can see your point there, it works for all your guitars. It's nothing like it though, really. How do you do one song in EADGBE, and then the next song in DADGAD? It'll take almost the same amount of time as doing it manually. The only thing it's saved is the actual manual turning of the pegs, whereas Tronical tunes all strings at the same time with one or two strums.

But to address this issue of "And if it craps out [...] your guitar isn't screwed up", do you know this to be the case with min-e-tune (or whatever the heck it's called now)? With no battery in the thing, or if the tuner component fails, or the motors burn out, you can tune it manually, like a normal guitar. Are you suggesting the actual mechanical components are somehow more likely to break than those in a Kluson? Seems a stretch.

Again, I'm not arguing that it's brilliant. It costs $300, for god's sake, which is crazy for something you don't need. It's just that as far as I can see, the only definite downside to it is the cost.t
 
Yes, I'm arguing no confidence for teeny tiny high rpm motors geared way the heck down with cheap teeny tiny gears actually surviving any reasonable length of time. Strip a tooth, slip, grind jam. Whole thing breaks I'm guessing is the primary mode of failure. Dead battery is a user mode failure.
 
Well, "Hitler doesn't like it" is not the best reason to stay away from the robo-tuners, but that was definitely nicely done.

 
So, I was looking at these today.  They had a little enclave of them at GC.  I can't help but notice the headstock says "Les Paul 100" in, supposedly, Les Paul's handwriting.  The "Les Paul" part I can see as they've had his signature on there forever but they decided to make the "100" match the "Les Paul" script.  Pretty shameful to drag a man out of his grave just to have him sign a few overpriced guitars.
 
Dimebag Darrell has been designing guitars for the Oriental Dean for two decades now. As a consequence, I and many other thousands of people wouldn't be caught dead with any "Dean"... I don't know if the owners have just so badly misread the public - it's not like Pantera was anything other than another place-holder for the 14-year-old "IT'S THE GREATEST MUSIC EVER!!!"

If you were 14 in 1978, it's Van Halen forever!
If you were 14 in 1980, it's Ozzy/Randy Rhoads forever!
If you were 14 in 1983, it's Yngwie Malmsteen forever!
If you were 14 in 1987, it's Ozzy*/Zakk Wylde forever!
If you were 14 in 1988, it's Guns 'n' Roses/Slash forever!
If you were 14 in 1990, it's Pantera/Dimebag forever!
If you were 14 in 1991, it's... Kurt Cobain forever?!?

So WHO the frick buys all 25 different Dimebag "signature model" Dean P.O.S.'s?!? They look to be photo-printed, so it's no big deal....

Meanwhile, Gibson did manage to 'wink a whole slew of people with all their various "Les Paul Reissue" thingums. And all the elders at the Les Paul Forum dutifully sell and resell them to each other for $3,000 - $4,000. "R9" and "VOS" and "Murphy-aged" and all these other "qualities" that make them somehow desirable. But I don't even need to go there to know Hitler nailed it on the Min-Tune thing. Those guys are really lucky they had each other to set the "value" of a Les Paul - and so was Gibson. Was....

*(Yes, I know.)
 
swarfrat said:
teeny tiny high rpm motors geared way the heck down with cheap teeny tiny gears [...] I'm guessing

Well, fair enough. It's a slightly uncharitable guess, for a thing that costs 300 bucks, but yeah. If your guess is right then it will be unreliable. I hesitate to criticise the product based off of guesswork, though. Horses for courses.

Sooner or later someone on here will try them, I guess, and then we can find out.


EDIT: Just looked it up. Seems that the most common mode of failure is drive belt breakage (looks like the gearing is done in a sealed box). Can still be tuned manually but motor spins freely. And they don't sell spares. So you have to source your own new ones! That's pretty bad - although from what I can tell, it's quite rare. Still, it does look like a bit of a pain in the butt to repair if it does go.
 
The fact that we *already* have data on breakage modes...

The prosecution rests its case
 
Seriously? Data? I found one guy explaining how to repair it. No idea how it happened. That's anecdote, not data.

[edit: to be fair, I can see how my post makes it sound like it's happening quite a few times. To be clear, when I said "primary mode" I simply meant the only failure I can find any evidence for, and there's one instance of that online]

I get the feeling that you've already made up your mind and will twist anything you hear to support that decision. I'll leave you to it.
 
Back
Top