Gibson Robot SG

I played around with one of these yesterday at Guitar Center:

Buy Gibson Robot SG Special Ltd. Electric Guitar online at Musician's Friend

First off, outside of the Robot features, this guitar felt like a good SG. Solid, lighter than a Les Paul, easy access neck, great humbucker style tone....basically what you'd expect in a SG Standard (granted it was metallic purple).

The major difference is obviously the ability to have the guitar tune itself. You basically pull the bottom tone knob, select a tuning, press the button at the center of the tone knob, and strum the guitar....then the tuning pegs quickly move around and fine tune the guitar (pretty freakin' cool).....the lights on the knob let you know when the tuning is complete. At first, I had the guitar simply tuned itself making all the minor/fine adjustments one would want to make in the middle of a set (probably saves you 5 secs or more doing it manually). Then I started playing with the alternate tunings and a slide that just happened to be handy next to the SG....WOW. I could quickly chose a G or E chord tuning and completely go to town on this thing playing blues slide....especially in the upper register. With the right setup....mid-song (or mid set) you could take a 10 sec break and go to standard tuning to play a fingered lead!

One bad thing that happened....after unrealistically tuning the thing to a bunch of alternate tunings for 20-30 minutes.... the battery died. It's a rechargeable, so the party was over, and there was no way that we could see to swap in another battery....but you could still manually tune the guitar in a pinch.

The electronics are covered by a colored see-through plexi-glass, so you could see the inner workings. I actually dug the color of this instrument...unique but still classy. The price wasn't too bad $2300....which is about $500 more than an SG Standard...kind of collectible (especially in this color, and being the "first" of this series for an SG). I'd like to see this system available on more Gibson models (like a Gold Top Les Paul with the P-90s, an ES-335, or just nice looking Gibson Les Paul Standard with a nice sunburst).

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