Self-tuning guitar to put roadies out of business?

Ah technology. Forever putting people out of jobs, isn’t it ?

Well now the roadies have reason to shake their fists at guitar manufacturer, Gibson. Gibson has only gone and invented a guitar that tunes itself. No more waiting for the roadies to stop mucking about with guitars on stage before the main act. Or before any at for that matter.

The Gibson “Robot” Les Paul has electronics built into the body of the guitar. At the touch of a button, the guitar will happily sit there and tune itself. The tuning doesn’t take long (we’re talking seconds, not minutes) and as well as default tuning you can also set it custom tunings which are out of the ordinary or completely your own.

Gibson big wig, Henry Juszkiewicz, says that tuning is time consuming for musicians and often frustrating as guitars fall out of tune quite quickly. When you add in lights and weather for stage performances a guitar can be almost constantly out of tune.

The guitar is aimed at the more casual guitarist, really. His point is that all most of us little people don’t have 80 guitars and a roadie for each so we can chop and change when one goes out of tune.

Having said that, if this does catch on with professional players (the arctic monkeys are already making “I want” sounds) they’ll still need someone to push those 80 buttons for them.