{"id":484,"date":"2008-10-17T13:12:29","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T20:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=484"},"modified":"2008-10-17T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T20:13:12","slug":"the-stupid-ass-robot-guitar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=484","title":{"rendered":"The stupid-ass Robot Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gibson’s Robot Guitar<\/a> features a special bridge and motorized tuners. You turn the knob, it automatically tunes your strings. You want an alternate tuning, it twiddles the tuners for you. MSRP: $4000, retail around $2500.<\/p>\n

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When I heard about it, I was skeptical. When I saw and heard it myself at CES this year, I was convinced by their own demonstration that it was a bad idea. And now — no surprise at fucking all – it’s on clearance. $1400, anybody?<\/a> (That’s still $300 more than a standard SG Special.)<\/p>\n

Why did it fail? Because innovation is bred by need, and failures are bred by gimmicks. Musicians do not need <\/em>this technology. If you are blessed with perfect pitch, you already have an electronic tuner on your pedal board, or a $3 tuning fork. I don’t need hundreds of dollars<\/em> of extra shit on my headstock to do what my ears already can. It’s actually pretty insulting. And this is a classic dumb move where a company comes up with a product and tries to invent a need for it, only to find what any real consumer could have told them before they wasted all that money: no need exists. So suck on the excess inventory of your failure, you arrogant bastards.<\/p>\n

Gibson, if you want to drag guitar technolo into the future, stick with the MAGIC system and the HD.6X-Pro digital Les Paul<\/a>. Bring the costs on that down to levels normal human beings can afford and you might have a cool creative tool. Someday, someone will improve on what Les and Leo did in 1952. Automated tuners? Fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gibson’s Robot Guitar features a special bridge and motorized tuners. You turn the knob, it automatically tunes your strings. You want an alternate tuning, it twiddles the tuners for you. MSRP: $4000, retail around $2500. When I heard about it, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}