Agreed. I thought about Bigsby tailpieces and such when I was writing my post, but being more specific: AFAIK no Les or SG was ever offered with the Floyd Rose type floating bridge/locking tremelo.
Those guitars are hideous. Give me the standard stop tail any day over that.
What about the locking jack thingie? Anyone know if that works well?
I assumed that. The issue I was wondering about is that, as a person, tuning a guitar with a floating bridge you deliberately overshoot and tune sharp initially because you know that each string will be pulled flat when you tune the next one. I doubt the robot would be clever enough to do that, as it tunes one string it de-tunes all the others. If it tunes all the strings at once I can imagine it continually overshooting sharp then flat.
If it could change a set of strings, that would be impressive.
Really, how much trouble* is to tune a guitar?
*actually quite a lot when it has 18 strings, but I don’t have that one any more.
I can’t find anything referencing it on the web for some reason, but a few years ago BC Rich made a guitar system that basically had drop in strings that made swapping out strings a much faster task, but you had to buy special strings of course.
Dude - you’re scaring me. 18 strings?! So it had 6 courses of 3 strings each? Sounds like Tom Petersson’s (of Cheap Trick’s) Hamer 12-string bass…4 courses of 3 strings each…eesh, what a monster!
Think about it, I spent years imitating Jimmy Page. You have five minutes before I’m off, clock is ticking. . .
I had* a friend this would be ideal for. He’s the kind of guy you want in your band. He doesn’t mind playing rhythm parts all the time, he has a decent voice, but more importantly, he is willing to do all the shit that nobody else wants to be responsible for. He figures out arrangements, organises practices and calls everybody, keeps lyric sheets handy, etc, etc, etc. He finds gigs, handles money fairly, always has enough of the right kind of batteries (for active electronics and wireless rigs), you name it.
The only problem is he has a tin ear. He never hears when he’s out of tune, exacerbated by playing a '67 Strat** (IIRC); notorious for having to be retuned after every song. He eventually bought another guitar, which helped a lot, but still.
For him, this would be worth spending band funds to acquire, even with all the problems noted. No more, “Dude!! Tune!!!” all night long.
- He didn’t die, he just moved away.
**The same guitar used by Todd Park Mohr (Big Head Todd). Beautiful tone, but I saw his guitar tech exchanging two identical guitars between every song throughout an entire set. And they weren’t (always) being retuned to different tunings.