An 'acoustic' guitar with automatic tuning

Our Jan. 11 story about the Performer self-tuning system for solid-body electric guitars focused on how the device was developed and how it works. But it also included the observation, offered by the Performer's inventor, Neil Skinn, that most requests for automatic tuners come from acoustic-instrument players, not from electric-guitar players.

Unfortunately, the approximately 3.5 pounds of electronics and miniaturized machinery that go into a Performer installation aren't suited to hollow-body guitars, whose sound derives not only from the vibration of steel or nylon strings but from the accompanying vibrations of the guitar body's thin tone woods.

A Performer setup--bulky and heavy as it is--would interfere too much with the tone of a hollow-body instrument. Solid-body electric guitar bodies, meanwhile, are carved out of a single slab of solid wood, often mahogany or ash, some of which is routed out to accommodate the Performer.

The Performer installation is kept separate from the guitar's sound circuitry and has no effect on the instrument's tone, though it does allow the player to select any one of more than 200 tunings with the touch of a button. (Check out the alternate-tuning Web site presented by Skinn's company, TransPerformance.)

That is small comfort to acoustic fans, who, until recently, have been left to tune manually. Skinn found something of a work-around, however, by adapting his system to Gibson USA's Chet Atkins SST, a "solid-body acoustic" that is constructed like a solid-body electric but, when plugged into an amplifier, sounds like an acoustic guitar. Skinn says one of the highlights of the new setup is what he calls the Piezo Rocker Bridge, a string bridge he designed using an easily adjustable piezo transducer made by Highland Musical Audio Products.

The installation price for the Gibson Chet Atkins SST is $4,975. The customer supplies the guitar.

Which brings up one more issue: The Chet Atkins SST, while still in stock at some retailers and available used, was discontinued by Gibson as of Jan. 1. Skinn said he will talk to any guitar builder who might be interested in building a solid-body acoustic like the Chet Atkins.