Back when I was seventeen, I was a wretched guitar player in a band with some high school buddies. I could not tune my guitar to save my life, so when it went out of tune my friend Steve, the other guitar player, would have to come over and tune it. I remain scarred by the memory.
Today’s kids need not suffer such humiliation, however, because Gibson is now manufacturing a line of self-tuning guitars. In a new twist on the manipulation of feedback (something tells me Hendrix would not be amused), the Powertune system uses special piezoelectric pickups to monitor the frequency of each string’s vibrations. The signals are analyzed by a computer embedded in the guitar’s body, which controls tiny motors on the guitar’s tuning pegs that adjust each string’s tension. (A video demonstration is here.)
The trickiest challenge in building the system was writing tuning algorithms that could achieve the necessary degree of precision, reports Technology Review:
[Inventor Chris] Adams says that because the system is automatic, his company had to develop a tuning algorithm more sensitive than that of most external digital tuners. All guitar players are familiar with the waver of a tuner’s indicator needle even when a string is in tune: the waver results from the minor fluctuations in a string’s vibrations. A human tuning manually can easily ignore these fluctuations, but an automatic system must be programmed to discount them.
Purists find the machine distasteful: “‘I think it’s something that isn’t necessary if you’re a good musician,’ says Rick Kelly, a well-known custom-guitar maker at New York’s Carmine Street Guitars. ‘I think there’s something lost in the live experience when you lose the tuning aspect.'” Then again, I can’t remember the last time I saw a guitar player on stage actually tune by ear. Tuning long ago became mediated by digital machines, with the player taking the role of the unskilled machine operator in the process. Powertune simply takes the next logical step, dispensing with the manual labor altogether.
It’s a good example of how, as computing power continues its relentless rise, software algorithms are able to automate ever more sophisticated work. Are those algorithms freeing us or replacing us? Both, I guess.
I can see one immediate problem with this system: everyone in the band needs this, they all have to be in perfect tuning with each other. You can’t just ask the bass player “hey give me an E” and all tune to that standard. Tuning to THE standard is less important than picking a common standard.
Charles: you miss the beauty of Gibson’s marketing.
The product, by design, tells a certain class of professional musicians to simply not bother with this product. Don’t even try. A fixed set of tuning presets? They don’t even bother with Fripp’s new standard tuning (as a silly example)? It’s slow as heck to tune and noisy. You can’t count on it to tweak your tuning in the middle of a piece. It’s “too fussy” in that adds yet more crap to your axe.
(the product also tells another class of working musicians that it’s just what the chef ordered, but, that’s another story)
No, this is a product that is currently aimed squarely at amateurs and at low-end-of-the-market pros (e.g., rockers who can’t afford tuning-monkey rodies or 5 different guitars). And for that group it looks like, possibly, a really fun product. And that’ll theoretically lead to further R&D……
It’s a really nice, probably quite awesome to have set of training wheels. Surely nick can remember casual nights around the dorm when, through the haze of nothing in particular, such a tool would have just rocked the boat awesomely.
the time to panic is when gibson comes out with the bluetooth model that phones home to record statistics on your tunings of choice and that will reward you with new tunings if only you’ll let it play adds over your pickup…. :-)
-t
Power guitar techniques might really benefit from the next generation of this — versions that can maintain a tune during a performance. Some heavy styles naturally tend stretch strings and/or wrench even the steadiest tuning pegs out of position. Some feedback here might go a long way.
To return to Nick’s scary starting point: yeah, along some lines of development this turns into (yet more and yet more sophisticated) instruments that make basically obnoxious use of psychoacoustics. But, that’s what axes are for.
-t
But, that’s what axes are for.
Let’s face it: the electric guitar was a signal-processing device from the get-go.
Tom, if you watch to the end of the video, the tech says the strings will mute during tuning on the production models, he left them live so you could hear what is happening during the demo.
It is a fairly impressive technology, but alas, it solves a problem that nobody really has. Tuning a guitar isn’t really that difficult. The real problem is staying in tune. Strings stretch, tremelo bars move the bridge around, this axe isn’t going to help keep in tune while you’re in the middle of playing. Many guitar techs have tried to solve that problem, but nothing has ever worked.
I recently saw a video of Pete Townsend, one string went out of tune in the middle of a song, he waited for a moment with a sustained chord, then reached up and tweaked the tuning peg without even breaking the rhythm. If they can put that sort of intelligence in a guitar, I will just give up playing forever, skill will no longer be necessary.
If they can put that sort of intelligence in a guitar, I will just give up playing forever, skill will no longer be necessary.
Ah, but can a guitar be programmed to smash itself?
Nick: the “noise” i meant was the motor noise which I think I hear on that video but perhaps that is just an artifact of the recording. You set it to tension strings or to tune and there’s this audible (through the air) “bzschzschzsch” — or again, maybe that’s just an artifact on the vid.
Charles: I know, tuning isn’t hard. Except that it is until you learn a few things. Some people have really good pitch perception. Almost everyone can get pretty decent pitch perception. It doesn’t come naturally — learning situations are precious — this tech is one such learning situation — i think it’s pretty awesome even if it isn’t an obvious tool for virtuosos or high-end pros.
-t
(disclaimer: i’m a gibson fan-boy, though have no commercial interest)
“but can a guitar be programmed to smash itself?”
I’m envisioning something like the cow in Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
A childhood memory I have was a episode of The Partridge Family where Bobby Sherman was a guest star. Sherman’s career has plateaued since then so he actually has a page about it on his current web site. The scene that I remember was Shirley Jones walking in on Sherman playing a keyboard to recorded music in their garage. Sherman explains to Jones that he played the instruments for and sang the parts of all of the other tracks and was doing his own mixing. I think that help drive me decision to learn several different kinds of instruments to play. I was never great at any of them, but I got by in community music settings.
Fast forward 30 years and I recently ran across a similar experience of being impressed by something new. This video by Imogen Heap shows her doing live accapella multi-tracking. Heap is an English singer-songwriter. This almost certainly requires that she pre-plan her track usage and keep them sorted out in her head during the performance. She has to start each track at the right moment, remember which tracks to loop, manage volumes/fades and it helps a lot she has a wide vocal range and a very good sense of rhythm and harmonization. She does not seems to attempt to change her tempo at all. The basic technology she uses has probably been around for well over a decade. She clearly designed her music around the technology and accepted its limitations, but she also successfully utilizes the advantages it has to offer and single-handedly and in real time offers a sound somewhat competitive with other successful acappella groups like The Bobs and The Real Group.
Good classical and modern guitarists can already handle key changes in music so this new feature should have little effect on music writing.