Roadie 3

I’ll be good, I promise, and try to avoid jokes about wind-up merchants, but I don’t promise nuffink. After all this is about a product whose whole purpose is winding things up. Well, strings anyway. On banjos, guitars, mandolins and ukuleles with breakdowns for different types of those instruments, And as if that wasn’t enough you can add in your own custom instruments and your own custom tunings. There’s 150 built-in tunings, yet you want more? Who do you think you are, Joni Mitchell?

Ok, so there’s an obvious difference between this string winder and many others out there. This one “knows” what the string you’ve attached it to should sound like and it will stop when it gets there. If it goes a bit past it, it will retune slightly until it’s right on. You can watch the progress on the built- in screen. when the tuning is right this winder give a little self-satisfied beep, which winds you up as well.

Oh, and it can also act as a metronome.

I tried it out on a number of instruments – a classical guitar, recently restrung, a Yamaha acoustic in standard tuning, a Fender acoustic in Open D. a Fender Telecaster, a Gretsch resonator (steel guitar) and a mandolin. This model doesn’t handle bass guitars.

One word of warning. When you’re unpacking this device the cardboard moulded to the shape of the gadget fits the gadget OK, but doesn’t fit the box it comes in. It’s theoretically glued to the box but in my case this had come away. This may have happened in transit as a result of being shaken for some time, but still, be careful. This isn’t a cheap device and if you insist on dropping it on things, try to make sure they’re padded.

Given that this device is also marketed as being useful to people “on the road” soft cover would be useful to prevent damage, especially considering the price. You can buy a hard case for it. RRP £29

This comes with an app to download. Do so and use it. You can enter your instruments and enter their names and all details one letter at a time,. scrolling through the alphabet, but even Stephen Hawking found a better way than that. Use the app. it will save your sanity. Because….. you can do things on the app you can’t do on the device, like picking the tuning you want.

What you’ve got here is a screenshot showing what you get when you select an instrument in the app. You get shown what each string will get tuned to, you can change the tuning in that little box marked Tuning (swipe up or down), and you’ll have noticed the really clever bit. You can set this up so that you can stick a capo on, say, the 3rd fret and have the winder get you the right tuning, so you’re not in Open G but B-flat.

So what’s it like to use? Well there’s a fair bit of torque in the motor so you have to keep a pretty strong grip on it. It’s also quick, apparently a lot quicker than it’s predecessor (so I’m told) and a lot quicker than other powered winders I’ve used. You do also have to keep plucking the string you’re tuning. It won’t do anything unless you do that. It doesn’t ‘listen’ to the note using a mic but instead relies on the vibrations from the string. useful in noisy environments, and essential for tuning an electric guitar. Yes, they actually don’t need to be plugged in to anything, you just tune them like an acoustic.

It can be a bit awkward if you’ve got the guitar resting on your knee. it’s better if you can place the guitar on a rest or something that allows you access to the headstock. Otherwise you’re likely to brush the control button and maybe stop the tuning process. That means starting again. You can just pick one string, useful if you’re replacing a string on stage, but if you’ve just got to the G string it’s quicker to start again rather than select three strings manually.

When you’ve tuned all the strings, start again anyway. Changing ther tension in any string can change the torsion in the neck and affect the tuning of strings you’ve already tuned. It’s not the device’s fault, you just can’t beat Physics. There’s also a setting called Accuracy: you can set it to Fast or High Accuracy. In a quiet room it didn’t seem to make much difference.

It tuned the mandolin in under two minutes and each string was exactly the same as its twin. Three guitars were tuned in under five minutes. The classical guitar had just been restrung and the strings were slack. it took just a few seconds to go from slack to tuned. The electric guitar was tuned to perfection in under 20 seconds, the Yamaha in 30 seconds. It struggled a little with the resonator though but just on the top E string. That took close to a minute., but this may be because I hadn’t selected the “correct” option for the type of guitar. My three options were Lap Steel, Dobro round neck or Custom. I chose the last, maybe I should have chosen one of the others. After all this device is all about good vibrations and a resonator has a lot of those.

If all else fails there’s a manual tuning option, just like the various tuning apps you can get for your phone.

You can use this device to take a string off your instrument, and restring it using the WInder mode, which has 3 paces. You can unwind fas, put the new string on select the string note that you’re changing, press and hold the button and that 120RPM motor will whizz it up for you you and stop at the right note. In theory. It can be a little precious in doing that.

The battery is supposed to be able to handle 150 strings being tuned before it needs a recharge (USB-C cable supplied).

The claim is made that if your instrument has geared pegs then this device can tune it, so if you play the violin or viola you’re out of luck. Maybe. You probably have a violin which relies on friction to keep it in tune, you know, pull, tune, push, check. Swear. Start again. For. Each. String! Or you could buy a set of geared pegs. These will set you back anything from just under a tenner to £200 for a set. Now this gadget will work for you as well.

This is an impressive little device (it’s smaller than the palm of my hand, but I have reasonably large hands (stretching to 10 white notes on the piano – not up there with Liszt or Poulenc but not baby paws). First contact, it feels like it’s worth the £129 RRP (£107.50 at the time of writing). If you’re playing regularly on stage and under lights it might well be worth having one to give your axe a quick sharpening when you feel it’s needed. Get one for your roadie. For me, i do most of my playing these days on the beach, in the hot sun where sometimes you can hear the tuning drift during the course of a single song. It’s going to get a work out over the summer, so I’ll come back and give an update after I’ve used it in anger.

I also think I kept my promise and avoided obvious puns. Don’t expect that to happen again.

3 Month Update

It’s not totally happy down at the beach. for some reason it doesn’t seem to like the wind and ends up winding up and down past the note several times before deciding it’s OK, then you play a chord and find 2 or 3 notes are out. Or it decides that what you really, really wanted to do was unwind that string, not tune it up. Nothing you can do will stop it except to turn it off, manually retune the string a bit and try again. Is it the noise? Because if it is I’d have difficulty recommending one for gigging. It’s not every time but it’s happened to me three times so far, once at home twice by the sea. Could just be a glitch. If you’ve got one and have anything to add please leave a review