THIS COULD BE A BOON TO RESTRINGING?

[jonshack]

I have one of the newer Roadie 3’s and I’ve been using it for about 6 months so here’s a review: It’s expensive for what it is but it’s robust and good quality. It does make restringing a bit less of a chore but a cheap electric winder would do that too.

You can store lots of tunings, you can easily set up E9 and C6 tunings for example, with your own offsets, so that’s quite nice. It works on vibrations in the tuning pegs so I don’t think ambient noise would be an issue (not sure) but the more resonant the instrument the better it works. So it’s more responsive to acoustic guitars than pedal steels in my experience. It works, but it can take a while to latch on to the note on my Sho Bud for example. Some strings seem to work better than others.

One reason I got it was I thought it would make replacing a string on stage a bit easier. I think it would, but some of the speed advantage is taken away by the fiddly thumb control. It’s too easy to press on the wrong direction and end up in the wrong part of the (tiny) screen menu. Using a tuning setting, say E9th, doesn’t work for restringing from scratch. You have to be on the winder setting, get the string taught enough first, then go to the tuner setting and navigate to the right string in the menu. Also you don’t want to accidentally have the Roadie on a different peg from the one you’ve selected - sometimes it will detect your mistake, but there’s a danger you could break a good string.

It’s pretty accurate as a tuner and compares well to a Peterson. If you’re feeling lazy you can get ten (taught) strings tuned up at the peg head in about 45 seconds. No faster than with a standard tuner really and it’s not going to do your pedals and levers.

All that said, I do use it a fair amount for various instruments, it’s a well made and useful gadget and I’m more likely to change a set of strings, which I’m always putting off. I don’t regret buying it but it’s far from essential. Maybe if you have a quad Stringmaster!?

Jonathan