Welcome to the machine
Robots.
People either love them or hate them. Either they want them to do their laundry and keep the bathroom clean, or they run away from them like Jamie Lee Curtis in a slasher film because they believe robots are going to take over the world and turn it into some Orwellian dystopia.
I’ve always been of the mind that robots are cool. I mean, nobody ever got hurt by the maid on the Jetsons.
Well, that all changed after I saw this.
That, my friends, is the Gibson Robot Guitar. The selling point? “All you have to do is play it.”
That’s right. You don’t need to learn anything about guitar to play one now. Just plop down $4,000, turn a couple knobs, and start bashing away.
Apparently it’s geared for those people who want to play an instrument without the hassle of, you know, playing an instrument, and Guitar Hero and Rock Band just isn’t cutting it anymore.
The Robot Guitar does all the work for you. It tunes itself. It more or less strings itself. It slices, it dices, and it makes a mean chicken catchatorie. It also has nifty LED lights, because nobody can resist something shiny. What, you couldn’t a fit a TV screen in there? What about the self-playing feature like those cheesy grand pianos you see in the mall? Hey, let’s throw in a tape machine, too, because it’s about time we had a Milli Vanilli-esque scandal on guitar.
The sad thing is, I’ve watched the video on how this things works, and it looks way more complicated than actually personally stringing and tuning my own guitar. But what does that matter? In a decade, nobody will need to tune a guitar, anyways. Heck, they won’t even need to play it.
I can see it now. In 10 years, the biggest band in the world will not be U2. It will not be the Jonas Brothers. It will not be another random boy band with a lame abbreviation for a name. No, it will be the Robot-ettes, featuring the Gibson Robot Guitar and Bass sitting on a stand, with that cheesy mall piano and a drum machine doing the rest. And on lead vocals, Jessica Simpson. But you already knew she was a robot.
If this robot guitar thing catches on, start running for your life. It means the machines are taking over.
4 Grand? It costs 4 grand and they didn’t mention how it sounds and plays? Jeez, I’ve got a little Korg GA-30 Guitar Tuner that cost me $15 at Ted Brown’s and I still got to go through all that manual labor of turning 6 pegs. I should get overtime tuning the 12 string.
But seriously folks, I may have found the untimate solution to the tuning problem….or at least the patter about the ancient Chinese folk song.
More than I’d like to count years ago, a bunch of us would get together at the Orondo Tavern every couple of weeks, all of us dragging along our acoustics, and sitting around one of the big tables swapping songs (and drinking). The night would wear on, and we’d keep playing (and drinking). Well, the next day I’d take my guitar out of the case to fiddle around a little and be shocked at how out of tune it was, and more shocked that I hadn’t noticed it the night before, since it was in tune when we had started.
I always wondered why that was so. Now that I’m older…wiser (?) and resonably sober, I wonder if the (and drinking) part had anything to do with it……