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I LOVE my new Tune Bot!

GRUNTERSDAD said:
I was at a drum clinic Tuesday night and there was a gentleman there who was the drum tech for The Blue Man Group and he gave a demonstration on the Tune Bot. He had 5 or 6 with him to sell. He showed all of us how to use the Bot and not one tom was in tune while he was showing us. He was not the best person to be demonstrating the Bot and I had hoped that he would be spot on so that I could really see how it worked. So have I tried one, No. But i was as close to one and a drum set as one could be to see how it didn't work. He turned on the filter and it seemed to be better but my ear at this point is better from what I have seen.
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Guess you just gotta get your hands on it. That's a funny scenario because he seemed more like a salesman, then a drummer. It's much better than my ears and tuning skills so it's golden so far. That filter option works wonders. I'd save the $99 myself if I could tune with my ears.
 
I have become interested in this solely because of the length of the thread. From what I have been reading, this thing sounds like an electric knife.
 
B-squared said:
I have become interested in this solely because of the length of the thread. From what I have been reading, this thing sounds like an electric knife.
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Then you can use it to slice bread...

I think the other post in General Discussion has nearly 4,000 views, 113 posts. The word is out.
 
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GRUNTERSDAD said:
I was at a drum clinic Tuesday night and there was a gentleman there who was the drum tech for The Blue Man Group and he gave a demonstration on the Tune Bot. He had 5 or 6 with him to sell. He showed all of us how to use the Bot and not one tom was in tune while he was showing us. He was not the best person to be demonstrating the Bot and I had hoped that he would be spot on so that I could really see how it worked. So have I tried one, No. But i was as close to one and a drum set as one could be to see how it didn't work. He turned on the filter and it seemed to be better but my ear at this point is better from what I have seen.
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I think that many people misunderstand how to use the tune bot. I own one and read the manual. It really does work and I find it much easier to use than the drumdial, which I also own. The big advantage of the tunebot over a drum dial are two fold:

1. If the resonant head is different than the batter (clear vs coated) the tunebot will allow you to tune to the same note or an interval of your choosing. The drum dial will only help you get each head in tune with itself.

2. With the tunebot you can easily tune for intervals between your drums.

If you have great ears then a tunebot is not necessary. I don;t have great ears for pitch and using the tunebot has helped me develop my ear as now I know what to listen for.
It's a great ear training tool.

One more thing - If it doesn't work, you are probably not using it correctly, read the manual.

Wayne
 
B-squared said:
I have become interested in this solely because of the length of the thread. From what I have been reading, this thing sounds like an electric knife.
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Who here has ever carved a turkey? A whole 20 pound bird that's feeding 14 hungry people at your thanksgiving table? An electric carving knife works great. Slices that bird like butter; easier to control and slice evenly since all you have to do is steer, and not muscle. I don't use my electric carving knife often, but I appreciate that I have it when I use it.

Nobody needs an electric knife. Some people do prefer them. Some people are happy enough with a regular knife to not care. Some people are probably downright offended by the idea of an electric knife and lead crusades against them in cutlery discussions... Some of those offended types probably haven't even seen an electric knife in person, let alone used one.

So yes, a tunebot is just like an electric knife.

Personally, I have both the electric knife and the tunebot and am quite happy with both. The tunebot does what it is supposed to. Haven't used it too much, but did use it for a quick retune of my snare from a med/low tuning to a distinctly tighter tuning; it simplified getting to the tuning I wanted on one head, and then getting a nice complementary interval on the other. And when setting up my bass drum with felt strips, the tunebot made it easier to even up the lugs next to the felt where the bearing edge is lumpy and the head not terribly resonant. I've used it more than those two specific instances, but those two stand out as having been especially convenient.

So no, I don't use it all the time, but when I use it I sure am happy to have the tunebot. Your mileage will vary.
 
How many guitarists can tune a guitar without a tuner? 95% perhaps.
How many guitarists can tune a guitar faster and more accurately with a tuner? 99% perhaps.
How many guitarists can tune a guitar to absolute pitch without a reference? 0.001% perhaps.
The Tune-Bot discussion is the same as discussing if a guitar tuner is a good thing.
For most people it is.
 
jornthedrummer said:
How many guitarists can tune a guitar without a tuner? 95% perhaps.
How many guitarists can tune a guitar faster and more accurately with a tuner? 99% perhaps.
How many guitarists can tune a guitar to absolute pitch without a reference? 0.001% perhaps.
The Tune-Bot discussion is the same as discussing if a guitar tuner is a good thing.
For most people it is.
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Very flawed analogy, I'm afraid.

With the drums, it is rare that we are tuning to an absolute pitch. I can tune my guitars without a tuner, absolutely but getting absolute pitch is the difficult part. Tuning the guitar to sympathetic notes is practice and listening. Tuning drums is the same as tuning a guitar sympathetically, it's a case of practicing and listening.

If I were tuning tympani, I would definitely think something that tracks pitch would be helpful but we are not dealing with note pitches when we normally tune drums. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
 
Mike Armstrong said:
I was thinking about Timbre Matching. It makes sense that any given drum will resonate best at a given Note and that what Good is looking for when he thumps the shell. That Note is the point at where that particular drum resonates at it's natural best and that's the sweet spot for that drum. Even two shells of the same kind, depth, mass, ect., will have their own particular sweet spot where it resonates best and the Note it produces may be totally different from it's twin. That's why Good is using those Notes to select shells for a perfect kit. makes sense I think, for initially building a kit that is.

But as soon as the hardware is bolted on the mass changes, the resonance changes and so the Note changes too. So you can no longer tune to the 'stamped' Note but instead you have to again find where that same shell, with it's new hardware mass, now resonates best and what the new Note it now produces is. Hopefully each drum in your kit will naturally, with it's hardware on, resonate at a Note that blends with the others drums. Otherwise using the heads aren't you having to force that drum to a Note other than it's best natural Note and hence the drum won't resonate or sound the best that it could otherwise.
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Absolutely correct. A drum doesn't resonate as components, it resonates as a whole instrument. Everything that's bolted to the drum, or even touching it, contributes to the overall resonance profile, & that even includes the heads themselves. A set of boat anchor lugs doesn't exactly help in that quest for a clean fundamental ;)
 
BacteriumFendYoke said:
Very flawed analogy, I'm afraid.

With the drums, it is rare that we are tuning to an absolute pitch. I can tune my guitars without a tuner, absolutely but getting absolute pitch is the difficult part. Tuning the guitar to sympathetic notes is practice and listening. Tuning drums is the same as tuning a guitar sympathetically, it's a case of practicing and listening.

If I were tuning tympani, I would definitely think something that tracks pitch would be helpful but we are not dealing with note pitches when we normally tune drums. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
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I enjoy a good discussion.
I think many drummers have difficulty hearing a clear pitch when tapping the lugs one by one. I am certainly one of them.

The Tune-bot cannot find the sweet spot on its own and we could argue that the quest is more to get each lug in tune rather than to get to something that sounds good. I remember seeing a video with Simon Phillips in the studio were he was detuning 2 lugs. Otherwise I think his approach is to tune batter and resonant to the same pitch.
Once the sweet spot is found however, the Tune-Bot can help us to get back there after a change of skins or to exchange tuning ideas with other drummers.
I would still say it can help many drummers, specially those that are less experienced.
 
If this thing does what's advertised, I could see it helping a lot of people with tuning. That's obvious by the amount of interest in it, I believe. It's a tool. Tools can help. Having an ear for tuning is great, but not everyone has one. People struggle. Others don't. But saying something is worthless because you don't struggle with doing what it does is a pretty empty argument, imo.

I can see advantages in it. I get handed some pretty shady rental kits, and often have to work with them in different environments [sweaty holes, outdoor shows, basement clubs, etc.]. To be able to even shave 5 minutes off my soundchecking time, which is already crammed with other guys making noise, if I can have a little help from a machine to find what I'm looking for....seems like a good idea to me. If it can do that, I'm in.
Also, I'd love to be able to dial in my saved sweet spot for every drum on my two totally different sounding/sized/headed kits. If it can do that, I'm in.

I also play bass [and use a TU-2 to save time]. The drummer in my band could really use the Tune Bot, I believe. That way I won't have to tune his drums all the time.

I'm intrigued.
 
mikeyhanson said:
If this thing does what's advertised, I could see it helping a lot of people with tuning. That's obvious by the amount of interest in it, I believe. It's a tool. Tools can help. Having an ear for tuning is great, but not everyone has one. People struggle. Others don't. But saying something is worthless because you don't struggle with doing what it does is a pretty empty argument, imo.
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Not to mention it's condescending and very unhelpful for those trying to learn tuning. It's art form, no one disagrees with that. And as such, there are people who can paint photo-realistic paintings freehand and those who can barely draw a stick figure with a ruler. Most are somewhere in between and some of us need to use tracing paper, templates, etc.

mikeyhanson said:
I can see advantages in it. I get handed some pretty shady rental kits, and often have to work with them in different environments [sweaty holes, outdoor shows, basement clubs, etc.]. To be able to even shave 5 minutes off my soundchecking time, which is already crammed with other guys making noise, if I can have a little help from a machine to find what I'm looking for....seems like a good idea to me. If it can do that, I'm in.
Also, I'd love to be able to dial in my saved sweet spot for every drum on my two totally different sounding/sized/headed kits. If it can do that, I'm in.
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Yes, these are some of the advantages of the tune-bot. We all know it's not for turning the drums into a melodic instrument capable of playing chords and scales. Rather, it's a tool to help you know what that sound is that you liked and get you there much faster and more consistently. It's also very helpful in understanding the relationship between the drums, which for some is even harder to get right than tuning an individual drum.

And, here's another important use that even tuning prodigies can use it for: communicating to others how you achieved that great sound. Most tuning tutorials out there are just some person on a video tapping the damn thing saying into the camera, "this is a bad sound" or "see, that's a good sound, you just have to develop an ear for it." Very unhelpful communication, at least for me and how I learn.

For me, I don't just want get a good sound, I want to know why it's good and how to get back there consistently. Or, when I hear a good sound on someone else's kit, I want exact information on it so I can try it out on my kit (which I know, may or may not work on my kit which has different drums).

I'll bet if I took a tune-bot to some of those drums that others tune by ear, I'd find that most of those drummers have pretty whacky tunings going on, and I'll also bet that if I come back in a week I'd get very different readings. That's not to say that there aren't some out there with a very good ear (like my painting analogy above), but I also think there are probably those that are more confident than they ought to be. I've watched plenty of tuning tutorials where the person claimed they got a good sound and it sounded like crap to me (yes, I know it's about personal taste, but I'm talking really crappy here).

mikeyhanson said:
I also play bass [and use a TU-2 to save time]. The drummer in my band could really use the Tune Bot, I believe. That way I won't have to tune his drums all the time.

I'm intrigued.
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I used to play acoustic guitar, and I most definitely used an electronic tuner to get the E string (then I could tune the rest of the strings off of that). I don't hear in perfect pitch, and I even struggle a bit with relative pitch.

I have a tune-bot, and I highly recommend it. I'm much quicker and more confident of my drum sound now. And I can tell people who complement that sound exactly why it's good and help other drummers learn to do the same using the language of the tune-bot. It's as much a communication tool as it is a tuning tool.
 
I tried idrumtune today. It seemed to struggle to hear certain lugs no matter where I put it. I detuned a lug one full turn and all the app could pick up was the lower fundamental of the whole head not by each lug - no matter where I put it. Plus it takes a long time to register new hits. I would imagine the mic in the phone is the weak link.

The drum dial is much more effective.
 
This has been an interesting read indeed! To say that I am a great tuner is far from reality, however I had gotten better before I had witnessed a demonstration of a TB @ NAMM this year; in a very noisy room I witnessed a gentleman detune a snare and tune it right back up to sound amazing and that was impressive!

Once I found out that this was out on the market I ran down and picked one up...I am thrilled with it. I can tell you it has been a fabulous tool in helping train my ear and put my drums in tune far better than anything I had in the past (slum-dial) and thanks to Ebay did not lose any money when I resold it! LOL.

There are some on here who do not see a need for this tool due to the fact that they have a great ear and can tune well, and others who can tune well, have a great ear, and see the value of the tool. My ear has gotten better even before the TB, but I know it is getting even more tuned in thanks to a great tool like this.

To each his own EH?
 
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