Oops! I added the link…
I guess this ancient solution didn’t sell,
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That is pretty genius! I’m wondering how many therapy sessions began with the significant others of these customers walking past while they were playing with only headphones on. “Um, we need to talk about your playing. You are nowhere nearly as good as you think and your guitar is always horribly out of tune.”
Seriously cool idea though. Biggest downside is the tight coupling of the feature to ONLY that Peavey guitar. It would be nice if it could somehow work more like a plug-in and get it on our favorite guitars. Now I just sound like someone from marketing though.
Yeah - to be perfectly honest, these approaches of tuning a guitar to itself, IMO, are mostly useful as a way to audibly check that a guitar is at least in tune enough to play. If I’m doing anything that actually depends on getting it right, I go to a strobe tuner.
@kgk - I’d put the human ear at better than +/-6 cents, personally… but yeah, still at a handicap to a computer.
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I’m not a working musician, but I’ve read online that it’s not unusual in recording to tweak the tuning of the guitar out of equal temperament to maximize consonance for a given part.
I tried one of those AT-200 autotune guitars in a store, and it was actually pretty impressive. To me, the biggest issue was that at “bedroom volume”, you could still hear any out of tune strings acoustically, and of course that clashed with the sound from the corrected signal coming through the amp.
I haven’t tried a guitar with an Evertune bridge, but after looking into how it actually operates, I think it’s a great idea. On an Evertune bridge, each string is floating on an independent spring and lever system that keeps the string tension constant (within certain bounds). In fact, you even have to use the regular tuning peg to tighten a string to the cusp of the “sharp” end of the bridge’s correction range for that string in order to prevent the bridge from cancelling out bends on that string! For people who want to record super aggressively picked rhythm stuff, it can be adjusted to correct out the “sharpening” effect of pick attack that @tommo mentioned. I haven’t spent time hands on to test, but I assume there’s a tradeoff between “cancelling out accidental sharpening” and “retaining responsiveness of bends”. But since the strings are corrected independently, you could optimize the higher pitched strings for responsiveness to bends while optimizing the lower pitched strings for resilience against accidental sharpening.
Here’s a pretty concise hands-on look at the Evertune:
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With the disclaimer I’ve never played one myself, this is a common critique of Evertune bridges. I don’t personally know how accurate it is, but you can definitely see how it could be problematic.
That said, they just released an Evertube bass bridge, and yeah… if there’s ever an application for this technology, it’s aggressive bass performances. In the modern metal world it’s not uncommon for producers to go in and use melodyne to correct individual note attacks in the bass, and this renders that whole mess unnecesary.
What is interesting is that various companies (including Roland and Gibson) enabled or sold guitars where one could process each string individually! I presume that one can change the tuning in software, string-by-string, throughout the song, and have insane per-string effects.
Anyway, this is ancient technology that seemed to be unprofitable; I don’t think that they make guitars like this Gibson any more.
Yeah, the guitar world is so messed up, people want fake trashed “relic” instruments combined with the worst practices in electrical engineering.
Yeah, the “single string processing” world today is mostly limited to closed “guitar synth” and “guitar to midi” oriented solutions like Roland GK-3, Jamstick and Fishman Tripleplay. It’s possible the Roland ecosystem allowed some of the things you’re talking about, but I don’t know enough about it. You can still buy a GK-3 though. Line6 Variax uses a per string piezo system to do some cool things (emulating different types of guitars, changing tuning electronically), but not opened up in the way you’re referring to as far as I know. Before it was discontinued just a few years back, the Antares Autotune for Guitar system was available as an installable electronics kit that worked with a Roland-style hex pickup, and could be connected by 13-pin cable to a separate Antares floor box with all kinds of tuning and guitar emulation tricks.
On the “pure midi” side, while not quite on par with midi pickups yet, there is at least one intriguing software guitar signal to midi solution: Jam Origin MIDI Guitar 2.
Tangent: the processing approach has a necessary lag that makes it unsuitable for real-time processing and performance, but Spotify has developed ambitious machine-learning based polyphonic audio to midi software they make available:
https://basicpitch.spotify.com/
Beyond the web interface, they offer it as a Python library you can call from your own code or run from their command-line tool. (Though my first attempt to install it on Linux with Python 3.7 has ended in library version dependency hell).
And per their github page, someone packaged their model in a VST version for plugging into a DAW:
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What a delight! I can’t wait to try it, either directly from python3 or perhaps via a plugin.
I get what you’re saying from a technology perspective….but no I don’t.
I don’t understand the idea of “worst practices in electrical engineering”.
What do you mean?
Two examples that come to mind for something that should please mainstream users:
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Guitars should use XLR microphone cables and be powered with phantom power. A differential signal would pick up less noise and run much further that the cables that we use today. (The 1/4 inch connector should be banned, it makes horrific noises as it plugs/unplugs!)
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Guitars should make liberal use of opamp chips (basically what the pickup maker EMG does), but tastefully. This would dramatically reduce noise, improve output power and tone filters, etc.
But given it is 2023 it could be argued that the guitar should show up on Wi-Fi and send each string by itself…
I mean no disrespect, but by that measure the violin - or any other instrument - should have these features as well.
Acoustic drums would be gone and replaced by electronics. Which has been possible more than a few decades. But the vast majority of players- even the pros’ pros - prefer the ancient design.
Why? Technology still can’t get the feel right - and according to at least one drummer friend - the separation of the input and sound drives him nuts. Forget about an acoustic drum and durability.
It isn’t all about technology.
They’re inherently acoustic, like pianos, so adding electronics would create a different type of instrument. Improvements there might be in glues, finishes, etc.
Guitars have had some improvements that are well-tolerated like humbuckers, Floyds, and stainless frets, so that’s good! What makes me laugh is CNC machines manufacture them only to have luthiers mess up the paint with a “relic” job… but it’s all good, the artist has to be happy with whatever they love, and it is not for me to judge! 
It’s been tried, and done. It didn’t catch on because it doesn’t sound good. Les Paul did it in the 70s. Guitar players don’t want crystal clear highs and what not, because it’s harsh and grating sounding. I wouldn’t want it either, it would be stale and have no character. Those imperfections are what make it interesting, imo they are perfectly imperfect.
Just because you can send the highs doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d do that; it’s easy to filter signals anywhere that you want (including inside the guitar). My point (?) is that guitars violate many electrical engineering best practices, but the customers like it that way. I’m not sure why they behave like this (embracing a “tradition” that only goes back to the 1950’s), but “the customer is always right.”
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I think I don’t want to argue about it, there’s nothing at all violating best practices in a passive electric guitar. Cost vs minute performance increases, and stuff that objectively doesn’t sound good. It’s a musical instrument that produces sound, not something that reproduces sound. It’s all a matter of personal taste for the player, if they want that they can have it, just no one wants it. Same as we don’t want buffers and preamps in our guitars, or hexaphonic pickups generally.
Take a Fuzz Face, it’s a repurposed super high gain amplifier that originates with RIAA moving magnet phono preamplifiers. Remove the equalization and you have a fuzz. It’s weird and has a low input impedance, which interacts with the guitar in a pleasing way. Is it a good design? For it’s intended purpose it is, from an engineering standpoint it’s horribly noisy and impedance mismatched and susceptable to radio interference and other stuff. Does that make it bad? Nope, it does a thing, and nothing else does that thing. If you change it, it starts to sound different, which may be pleasing and may not be…
Part of the problem, though, is a lot of the sound of rock guitar is those exact electrical engineering inefficiencies.
There are tons of ways to reduce hum in a guitar other than taking two coils, placing them out of phase, and wiring them in series, that wouldn’t roll off the high end so aggressively and would capture the sound of the strings vibrating much more clearly - I mean, right off the bat, a piezo crystal is itself imperfect, but is much better by those standards. Likewise, there’s much, much more efficient ways to take that signal and amplify it, than run it through a series of vacuum tubes, and then into four 12" speakers with no high frequency driver… and, to then take the sound coming out of those speakers, and get it into a recording, with something much more true to life than a Shure SM57.
But, when you do all those things… it sounds awesome. It’s inefficient, sure, and you lose a lot of information (especially in the high end) and then clip the crap out of that signal, and then filter it pretty heavily when it hits the mic… but the result sounds so good, that that’s what we want to do.
Plenty of room to experiment elsewhere too if you want a really clean, transparent, and hi fi reproduction of the sound of a guitar string vibrating in the body… but for better or worse, all that shit works.
No, the sounds can be created many ways, including software (Axe FX 3, Kemper, etc.).
Let me give a final example of something that I view as ridiculous. Lots of people have a guitar with HH pickups. It would make sense to record the guitar in stereo, so one can pan, or even process them differently—what a shame to lose a recording if one forgot to flip the pickup toggle switch! Gibson (they actually seem to be pretty forward-looking, with great body shapes, etc.) figured this out in 1959 with their ES-345. Decades later, we have laptops with Logic Pro and zillions of channels—something that they could not have dreamed of—and guitars don’t have multiple outputs, just one. In many ways, this is sad and pathetic. But I accept it and my main guitar looks cute on the outside, and that’s good enough, I suppose.
As I said, this has all been done before in the 60s and 70s and rejected.
Hexaphonic pickups in particular, as you can play complex chords on them without the dissonance you get with a standard pickup. It was tried again in the 80s with the Ripley guitar, and again it didn’t catch on. DSP has come a long way, but it’s still not the real thing, its only a snap shot at certain settings, it would need to be automated in a way where all the knobs on an amp were set and sampled at every single possible combination which would be an insane amount of data to model. You’ll get close enough but the feel of things cannot be replicated yet, nor the interactions between amps, guitars and the player. Maybe in 100 years we’ll be able to do that, but as of now it’s not going to happen with our current technology. Analog is often unpredictable and we don’t fully understand physics yet either. We’re trying and will get there eventually, and it’s good enough for some people but not good enough for others.
Most great classic rock players like Joe Walsh, Leslie West, David Gilmour, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page and most of all Edward Van Halen used specific tuning offsets arrived at by ear and in conjunction with the use of a Peterson or Conn mechanical strobe tuner to get the best intervals for chords and single notes across the open strings and the entire fingerboard.
To see exactly how EVH did it, please read through my forum post on the subject: https://www.vhlinks.com/vbforums/threads/62695-Van-Halen-tunings-with-Peterson-strobe-tuner-reference
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