It’s been a good month for the Los Angeles company, which also just won an Invention Award from Popular Science. Evertune says it’s finalizing testing on a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument in tune regardless of the temperature, humidity, or how a string is pulled. Normally, a guitar goes out of tune when the tension of its strings loosens. With the Evertune bridge, a set of “six spring and lever contraptions” (in PopSci’s words) compensates, keeping each string at whatever tension is set by the guitarist.
- Evertune raises $800K to keep guitars in tune
This is an intriguing product, indeed intriguing enough for investors to chip in for a stake, but I question the impact that this kind of technology would have on music-making in general. Certainly a product like this would be commercially valuable to professional touring musicians who can’t be bothered to stop and retune. It would be convenient not to have to retune whenever you bring two guitars together and want to make some kind of halfway harmonious music. It would be convenient for anyone who wants to pick up a guitar and just be able to strum away.
But I think it would be a bad idea to excise the process of tuning from guitar playing entirely. When you tune, you are forced to pay attention to what the guitar gives you, six strings working in concert to provide you with a set of notes. The strings are each their own instrument, but the magic of the guitar as an instrument is the relationship between the six strings (or depending on your preference, seven or twelve) determines the way you play the music and, in many cases, the music that you can play.
When you remember a song, these are the things that can easily stay with you: the general shape of the soundwave, the rhythms and perhaps even the words. But when you take the chords of the song apart, they are individual notes produced by individual strings, each one related in some way to the others. It is harder to remember these individual notes, and so tuning is important because it forces you fundamentally to pay both relative pitch and actual pitch.
When I haven’t picked up a guitar in a while, I have a really hard time tuning by ear. This is because i have spent time away from the strings, and my memory of how the notes relate to each other has faded somewhat. But the more I play, the more quickly I can tune. I hear the songs I’d like to play or that I always play, and turn the knobs into place to bring back the notes.
I will freely admit that I do occasionally use tuners, but when I am playing enough music to feel connected to the guitar, I only need a single reference note (usually the low E) to tune. The rest just slips into place naturally, string by string, and the music comes out in the same way.
I was skeptical of this idea too just hearing what it is, but reading more about it and watching the video on their website I’m starting to believe it might actually work.
This product seems to be less for bedroom-picking than for performance. Certainly, for me, I’d rather tune a guitar by ear if I’m just hacking away at home, because I kind of enjoy it. But onstage tuning by ear is a bad idea, and since most performers use a floor or rack tuner anyway, it’s a short step to a bridge designed to keep the guitar in tune.
What I don’t really understand is how they can need so much venture capital to put this idea into practice. Since the device is mechanical, not electronic, it doesn’t seem like it would be very expensive to manufacture, and the design work seems to be done already. Is all that money for their marketing budget, or. . . ?