Worlds first self tuning guitar released

• 7th Dec 2007

Guitar Company, Gibson releases the world’s first self tuning guitar today (December 7th)

The Robot Les Paul allows users to store different tuning presets in its memory allowing them to change tunings by simply pressing a button, rather than altering the tuning by hand and ear. This innovative idea will be good news for musicians, allowing a range of tunings to be made available with ease.

Gibson have claimed the guitar as a ‘remarkable musical experience’ and announced to stock the guitar in 400 stores worldwide with retail costing around £1400. The company has also released a statement saying they expect the model to sell out in many stores worldwide. The guitars are currently limited edition first run’s meaning that there will be a maximum of ten in each store, probably so the company can evaluate the overall success of the models.

On their website (link) They released the following story about the guitar.

On December 7, 2007, Gibson will change the guitar world forever. Again.

True to the spirit of innovation that inspired Gibson to invent the legendary Tune-o-matic bridge, the powerful humbucker, and the revolutionary Digital Les Paul, Gibson proudly presents the Gibson Robot Guitar—the world's first guitar with robotic technology.

Since the dawn of the instrument, musicians have come to accept the guitar's imperfections and lack of tonal precision as necessary evils. Onstage and off, guitarists have fought to stay in tune. Every music lover and performer has had to suffer through the show—halting, mood-killing atonal droning of a loudly amped guitar being brought into tune. And in the studio, or at home, imprecise intonation throws the guitar in and out of tune, up and down the neck, as the instrument requires tweaking with each season and at times with each string change.

For as long as the guitar has existed, guitar lovers have had two choices—live with a temperamental and out-of-tune instrument or make frequent trips to the shop for setups. Not anymore.

Introducing the Gibson Robot Guitar. All you have to do is play it.

This guitar is no doubt big news to the music world! However, in my opinion… It’s not exactly the hardest thing in the world to tune a guitar manually! This method may also make musicians lazy, for example not using their ears to notice the pitch while tuning up could cause the inability to tune up without the technology used on the guitar to help them. With the ability to change the tunings on strings easily it will no doubt be easy to change string settings in order to make chords a lot simpler, another good feature of the guitar. Again however, it’s not hard to that either regarding you know your stuff…

For live performances however, this idea will definitely come in really useful and sort out problems with tuning on stage, as well as speeding the process up.

Myself, I’m 50/50 about this idea. No disrespect to Gibson in any way as it is an excellent idea and will help many musicians out.

As I’m yet to try one of these out my opinion stays the same, where the technological advance made on the guitar is superb, I’d be satisfied with a plain old guitar!

More information on the guitar can be found on the website link