It’s tedious to tune up your guitar before you play, to tune between songs, and to retune to, say, drop D for one song — only to retune again after the song is over a couple minutes later. If you’re playing in a band you have to make sure that everyone is tuned to exactly the same notes, which gets trickier when you add certain instruments to the mix (e.g., mixing equally tempered instruments with ones that are stretch-tuned).
If you like lighter strings or are a heavy-handed player or, worse yet, if you’re a heavy-handed player who likes lighter strings, you’ll know how quickly and unexpectedly your guitar can go out of tune. A perfect take in the studio amounts to nothing if you’re not in tune. And nothing is as irritating as going out of tune in the middle of a song.
If you have multiple guitars, electric and acoustic, chances are you have multiple tuners, perhaps a clip-on tuner for your acoustic and a pedal tuner on your board for you electric guitar, and maybe you still have that cheapo tuner you got when you bought first guitar. Maybe you even have a high-dollar strobe tuner for setting your intonation. Good pedal tuners are around a hundred bucks, and there are plenty that cost more than that. And heaven help you if you’re searching for that elusive perfectly accurate tuner pedal that doesn't color your tone and has a display that’s easy to read in low light or if you have bad G.A.S. Not only do you have to pay for the tuners themselves, but you've got to shell out for batteries, patch cables, replacement switches, etc.
You get the picture. Tuners are kind of a giant pain in the you-know-what.
Imagine being able to switch from standard tuning to open G to DADGAD in a matter of seconds. Think about how much time you spend tuning when you could be playing. Those times when your guitar goes out of tune in the middle of a song.... What if you could roll off your volume pot, strum all six strings at once, turn your volume back up, and launch into the solo in the middle of a gig?
Self-tuning “robot” tuners have been around for a few years. Maybe you've seen Gibson’s Robot Guitar or their other high-end guitars (e.g., the Dusk Tiger) with robotic tuners built into the back of the headstock, or maybe you've seen Jimmy Page’s Les Paul Goldtop with the costly Transperformance robotic tuning system, which requires heavily modifying your guitar. Soon enough robotic tuners are going to be available on the mass market, and you’ll be able to retrofit practically any guitar.
The catch is that they’re probably going to be expensive.
You don’t have to wait, though, and you don’t have to pay a premium. Students and do-it-yourselfers have been building robotic guitar tuners for years now, using affordable stepper motors and various components you can get from an electronics parts supplier. If you've got chops with a soldering iron, why not give it a shot yourself?
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