A new Gibson can tune itself in seconds. You can even make a Gibson tune itself flat. (An Eb flat tuning, for instance, gives us the glory of Jimmy Hendrix doing “Little Wing“–and lots more.) Not only can the new Gibsons tune themselves, they can store all the different tunings so you can return to them–sort of like all those different car seat settings in an Audi.
Gibson released its first self tuning guitar back in 2007, with an add-on called Robot Guitar. It’s serious technology, and it has improved since. As with almost every new technology, it has people who love it (it fixes a pretty big problem, after all) and purists who dislike it either for nostalgic reasons or because they don’t think it works well enough. But like an iPhone, Gibson’s newest robot guitar is way better than its first one. More recent versions of the Gibson tuning system–the G FORCE–put incredible control at the guitar hero’s fingertips, if you will. As Musician’s Friend’s Dan Day says, “If you’re in a hurry for answers, I can tell you the Gibson Robot Guitar really does work—surprisingly well, in fact.” Favor a Fender over Gibson? You used to be out of luck, but not anymore. TronicalTune takes the robot action beyond world of Gibson.
