I made what I think is the first guitar self-tuning mechanism back in 1987.  It was crude as mud, but amazingly it worked. You had to turn a selector switch to which string you wanted to tune and then pluck it. Then a hot-wired Korg digital tuner would cause a simple comparator circuit to turn one of six miniature 10mm Micro-Mo gear-motor one way if the note was flat, and the other way if it was sharp. I had no clue how to take it beyond this, which is not unusual for guys in the R&D business.

A year later I finally got to see the real deal – a Les Paul electric guitar equipped with the TransPerformance fully-digital self-tuning system, invented, designed and built by Neil Skinn of Ft. Collins Colorado. It was incredible technology for the time, a real breakthrough. You could change tunings right while you were playing, say from Open C to DADGAD, and you could store a number of custom tunings in memory. Beyond the trick of tuning each string precisely, Neil had worked out all the math behind how down-tuning one string by so much caused the other five to go slightly up in pitch by different amounts. It was a very sophisticated algorithm Neil had to figure out to get all this to work in a closed loop manner, but he nailed it.  Problem was, this was back when circuit boards were called boards for a reason. Neil would take your Les Paul guitar, install his TransPerformance system, which included some pretty good size stepper motors, and give it back to you significantly lighter than it was when you gave it to him. Each system was a custom installation and was pretty expensive, but it worked perfectly.

The next big breakthrough in guitar self-tuning technology came out of Germany in the early 2000’s, dubbed the Tronical system. The year after Neil Skinn’s original patent expired, Gibson bought a five year exclusive license on the Tronical technology and marketed it as the “Robo-Guitar”. Capable of being mass-produced, the Tronical system brought the cost of guitar self-tuning technology down to a reasonable price range, and, more importantly, made it compact, simple to install and simple to use. You just had to remove the regular tuning machines from your guitar’s headstock, and replace them with an array of circuit board-mounted digital stepper tuners. These felt and acted like regular tuners allowing manual tuning when the system was off, but when the system was activated the tuners took on minds of their own, like six little humming elves turning their hats this way and that.  A little self-contained battery and control module sits on the circuit board to complete the kit.

Using the Tronical technology, making your Ridgewing guitar self-tuning is pretty simple, but goes one step further. There is no need to unscrew your headstock’s tuners and replace them - just slip on a whole new headstock with the self-tuning system pre-installed. Naturally, it is click-click interchangeable with the standard Ridgewing headstock. 

Because the Tronical auto-tuning system had to go on the back of the headstock, it blocked the standard Ridgewing cam lever mechanism. Do the string de-tensioning lever had to be moved to be a side-action. To save weight, the lever here is made of titanium. However, the compression dowel that the cam-lever forces against the end of the neck, visible here protruding between the two mounting pins, has to be hard steel.  The prototype headstocks include a couple of fairly complex precision CNC’ed aluminum pieces, and is heavier than it should be.  Molding these parts out of carbon-fiber would help bring the weight down, but we just haven’t gotten there yet. Another Ridgewing Maker opportunity!