Comments on: Tuning tech catches on with guitarists

Guitars had to be retuned manually after every song until Neil Skinn found a way to make it happen automatically.
Photos: A self-tuning machine

used "comprise" backwards

The whole "comprises" the parts.
"Comprise" roughly means hold together. People think "com" means "with" but it's really closer to "together", at least with the way Americans use "with". Comprise is like having a big pair of arms wrapped around the pieces.

New strings. That's the tuning that wears me out when I'm playing.

What's the 12 lbs?

[chassoto--2008]

Guitars are sooooo dark ages

Everybody knows that modern rockers use keytars. Oh, and piano
key ties! Mugatu! Mugatu! Mugatu!

[Michael Grogan]

Hmmm?

Only the ones that can't play.

[KTLA_knew]

If you're not a musician

That's true if you're not talking about musicians.

[askirk87]

Too bad....

It really is true though. A good musician must have his piano key necktie. Too bad Mugatu's stint of fame, begining with the invention of the piano key necktie, led to his eventual downfall...

[Dibbs]

ah yes

my keyboard-belt has brought me many years of good luck!

[David Arbogast]

No Good

New strings do stretch like crazy... once they pass their initial stretch phase, they aren't too bad. For those who understand and appreciate acoustics, these systems only provide a baseline for tuning purposes.

The acoustical properties of the instrument as well as the room in which you are playing have a great deal of impact on the sounds you produce. So much so, that a perfectly tuned instrument (according to the computer), may sound out of whack. Experienced musicians start with a base tone and can turn their instrument by "listening" to it in the actual environment the audience is in. The result is a better sounding instrument that is tuned properly for its performance environment. A computer may guarantee that a string is vibrating at a given frequency, but it isn't evaluating the overall sound with respect to environmental acoustical properties.

In the end, it doesn't matter one bit what the computer says... it has to *sound* good.

[David Arbogast]

I should add....

No stringed instrument has *perfect* intonation... which means that if you are playing your guitar mainly on the upper frets, your tuning will be off if your "computer" helped you tune open strings...

I agree and disagree.

"In the end, it doesn't matter one bit what the computer says... it has to *sound* good"
Anyone who has ever programmed a computer will know that a computer doesn't know or say anything. Its a machine that does what it is told to do, nothing more and hopefully nothing less. Therefore if it says that a guitar is out of tune, its because it has been programmed to analyse sound waves and compare them to what a guitar "should" sound like. In the process of writing such a program one would be wise to speak to musicians and people who know what they are talking about a whole lot more than any sole computer programmer.
I would suggest that the makers of this product have considered this. Therfore it does matter what a computer says. It says what its been told to say. It says what a musician has told it to say.
I do take your point however that there is no "right" sound for all environments and all guitars.

[smfriedland]

No Good, maybe not

Another way to look at this system is to consider that it can also hold any tuning you have set the gutar to. What it will do then is insure that the sound which has been, sometimes painfully, created by careful adjustment doesn't change during a set. That makes this highly interesting. So if it sounds good, this will help keep it that way.

[Darwin Hall]

Equal opportunity

Now what about us bassists? Personally I thought Ned
Steinberger's answer was, and is, far more elegant and complete.