Courtney Cox Demonstrates The Auto Tune Guitar

When I first started playing out as a teenager, I remember our band playing a song, tuning, playing a song, tuning… tuning… tuning… I actually think that some of the people listening thought they were songs…

But let’s face it, being out of tune can ruin your whole day.

And yes, tuning is a problem for a lot of guitarists and, especially on the acoustic.

Well here’s a solution on the electric that is called the Peavey AT200 Auto Tune Guitar. Talk about hitting the easy button.

I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING? ANYTHING FOR THE ACOUSTIC?

Well….. almost. Check this article out:

“Our Jan. 11 story about the Performer self-tuning system for solid-body electric guitars focused on how the device was developed and how it works. But it also included the observation, offered by the Performer’s inventor, Neil Skinn, that most requests for automatic tuners come from acoustic-instrument players, not from electric-guitar players.

Unfortunately, the approximately 3.5 pounds of electronics and miniaturized machinery that go into a Performer installation aren’t suited to hollow-body guitars, whose sound derives not only from the vibration of steel or nylon strings but from the accompanying vibrations of the guitar body’s thin tone woods.

A Performer setup–bulky and heavy as it is–would interfere too much with the tone of a hollow-body instrument. Solid-body electric guitar bodies, meanwhile, are carved out of a single slab of solid wood, often mahogany or ash, some of which is routed out to accommodate the Performer.

The Performer installation is kept separate from the guitar’s sound circuitry and has no effect on the instrument’s tone, though it does allow the player to select any one of more than 200 tunings with the touch of a button. (Check out the alternate-tuning Web site presented by Skinn’s company,TransPerformance.)

That is small comfort to acoustic fans, who, until recently, have been left to tune manually. Skinn found something of a work-around, however, by adapting his system to Gibson USA’s Chet Atkins SST, a “solid-body acoustic” that is constructed like a solid-body electric but, when plugged into an amplifier, sounds like an acoustic guitar. S

The installation price for the Gibson Chet Atkins SST is $4,975. The customer supplies the guitar.” read more

Well I don’t know about you but, I think I’m going with the $20 tuner and my ear.

TUNING HINT FOR THE ACOUSTIC:
did you know that for Martin and most similar style guitars, you should tune your B and low E string slightly flat to get the guitar in better overall tune?