Tuning tech catches on with guitarists

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It took more than a decade, however, to get The Performer to operate the way it does today, with a sound sensor system and software that tunes to a wide range of note combinations but also "touches up" the pitch on each string as tensions change and the guitar neck bends and twists.

"Everyone who got a (Performer installation) up to '98 has a prototype of some sort," said Skinn, who formed a company called TransPerformance to develop the system and retrofit guitars, which he does in his Fort Collins, Colo., home workshop. "It was a really slow process, and each guitar was different from the one before."

So far, he estimated, he has installed 200 Performer systems.

The pros sign up
TransPerformance's first client was Jimmy Page. Skinn said he managed to get a videotape to the Led Zeppelin guitarist that showed how the system worked. Page invited him to a recording studio in Reno, Nev., for a closer look and commissioned a Performer installation in a Les Paul model guitar. Skinn said he delivered the retrofitted instrument in late 1990. It went back and forth between Page and Fort Collins three or four times for re-engineering.

"Sometime in '91, he said, 'This is it.' He started playing it onstage," Skinn said.

The next customer was Aerosmith's Perry. Over the years, mostly through word of mouth, TransPerformance attracted avid amateur players and a fair number of other well-known professionals, including Tom Keifer (Cinderella), Mark Slaughter, Pat Metheny, Mick Fleetwood, Robert Hunter, Kenny Loggins, Eddie Van Halen, Peter Frampton, Sonny Landreth and young guitar phenom Matt Curran. Page now owns three guitars equipped with the system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience.

A Performer costs $3,400, including installation, which takes about a month. The electronics and motors are off-the-shelf, though most of the mechanical parts are custom-made. The system weighs about 3.5 pounds, adding about 8 ounces to the overall weight of the instrument, once the guitar body (typically solid mahogany or ash with a maple top) is routed out to accommodate the electronics and machinery.

Accustomed to assuaging concerns that retrofitting a guitar will change its sound, Skinn pointed out that the electronics, hardware and setup for the instrument's pickups, volume and tone adjustments remain unaltered and separate from the automatic tuning system, which is powered by a 12-volt cable that plugs into the guitar body. Optional battery packs are available for those who want to play on a wireless system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience. The Performer is designed to tune to any of eight notes (seven half steps) on the first string and any of nine notes (eight half steps) on each of the other five strings. In other words, it is capable of 229,376 tunings, of which there are at least 60,000 nameable tunings.

Word of the tuner's versatility caught the attention of William Eaton, a guitarist who also is director of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, in Phoenix. Eaton said he heard about the system a few years ago and visited Skinn's shop.

"I played Jimmy Page's guitar before it got shipped and it sold me right there," Eaton said.

A composer of world and new-age music, Eaton performs three or four times a week, often with small ensembles. He is building a harp guitar with two necks and a poplar-frame body that will accommodate a Performer, soon to be installed. He says he'll store about 30 tunings in the system, allowing him to write songs for a wider range of chords and work with pitch intervals that would be difficult or impossible to play on standard tuning.

"Rather than change guitars during a performance," he said, "this would allow me to make dramatic changes (to the same instrument) in a few seconds."

The need to carry only one instrument, Eaton added, will make air travel to and from performance dates easier.

Skinn, 50, said moral support from his family and investors, and feedback from clients, particularly those who play for a living, helped him persevere through countless hours of re-engineering.

An ongoing source of frustration, Skinn noted, is that most requests for automatic tuners come from acoustic-instrument players. But unless they're interested in retrofitting one of the solid-body acoustics for which Skinn has adapted The Performer, or they have luthiery skills like Eaton's, he has to turn them away. The weight, bulkiness and design of the system make it unsuitable for acoustic guitars, whose sound is derived not only from the vibrations of strings but from vibrations of the thin tone woods that comprise acoustic instruments' hollow bodies.

Which means that players like Mike Marshall will--for the time being, at least--continue to tune manually, one note at a time.

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.