The Guitar That Stays in Tune
In October, an engineer and a musician named Cosmos Lyles began selling EverTune, a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument from going out of tune no matter how hard its strings are strummed or bent. Self-tuning guitars have been available since the late ’80s but have failed to gain traction among players because of their complexity. Gibson’s Robot Guitar system, for example, requires a rechargeable battery to power an onboard computer and motors that retune the instrument. EverTune, however, is a purely mechanical spring-and-lever system: when a string stretches or slips, the springs apply the opposing force necessary to compensate for the shift, thus maintaining the correct tension and tuning. Lyles’s solution eluded guitar builders for decades, but he stresses that it’s not the product of wildly original thinking. “Ask any engineer how to flatten a tension curve, which is what EverTune does,” he says, “and 9 out of 10 of them will say you should use a spring-and-lever system like the one I designed.” — Tom Beaujour
It appears that the Gibson auto-tune system is the equivalent to killing a mosquito with a thermonuclear device.
