Uploaded December 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A clear-headed review of the Roadie 2 automatic guitar tuner. Clever idea, cool design. Has some fundamental issues. Not a magic bullet.
Get Roadie (now Roadie 4!): band-industries.kckb.me/609410da
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I love how fast Roadie 2 is and the overall feel of the unit is slick and modern. The Roadie app is well done with syncing between phone and Roadie 2 happening smoothly.
The fundamental issue is that Roadie just isn't perfect at getting the guitar in tune. For reasons that are not clear to me, it regularly leaves strings slightly out of tune: usually just a few cents, but I have seen up to as much as 20 cents on some of my guitars. Naturally, I can fix these errors with manual tuning, but it then begs the question: why use Roadie at all? Perhaps to get you quickly in the ballpark, especially if you're tuning up from a restring, or if you're a total beginner: close is better than nothing. Or if you can't hear at all, like tuning up backstage.
Roadie's tuning peg confusion is one you will likely bump your head up against. Either by being a little too slow to move to the next string, not noticing that Roadie is done with the current string, or by accidentally grazing another string and thus giving Roadie an incorrect signal as reference. This is what I mean by fundamental design limitation--something like a Tronical tuner doesn't have this issue because it always knows which peg it's turning...because it IS the tuning peg. Of course that introduces its own challenges, and it's fair to say that no automatic guitar tuning solution is going to be perfect.
Overall, I think there's a lot of potential in Roadie 2 and it's a cool gadget that you'll likely be seeing around. My hope is that the tuning weakness can be addressed in firmware updates and isn't inherent in the hardware design. Any questions about my experience with Roadie, feel free to ask.
A clear-headed review of the Roadie 2 automatic guitar tuner. Clever idea, cool design. Has some fundamental issues. Not a magic bullet.
Get Roadie (now Roadie 4!): band-industries.kckb.me/609410da
PATREON - Support Here! patreon.com/sahergalt
Facebook: facebook.com/sahergalt
Twitter: twitter.com/galtmusic
I love how fast Roadie 2 is and the overall feel of the unit is slick and modern. The Roadie app is well done with syncing between phone and Roadie 2 happening smoothly.
The fundamental issue is that Roadie just isn't perfect at getting the guitar in tune. For reasons that are not clear to me, it regularly leaves strings slightly out of tune: usually just a few cents, but I have seen up to as much as 20 cents on some of my guitars. Naturally, I can fix these errors with manual tuning, but it then begs the question: why use Roadie at all? Perhaps to get you quickly in the ballpark, especially if you're tuning up from a restring, or if you're a total beginner: close is better than nothing. Or if you can't hear at all, like tuning up backstage.
Roadie's tuning peg confusion is one you will likely bump your head up against. Either by being a little too slow to move to the next string, not noticing that Roadie is done with the current string, or by accidentally grazing another string and thus giving Roadie an incorrect signal as reference. This is what I mean by fundamental design limitation--something like a Tronical tuner doesn't have this issue because it always knows which peg it's turning...because it IS the tuning peg. Of course that introduces its own challenges, and it's fair to say that no automatic guitar tuning solution is going to be perfect.
Overall, I think there's a lot of potential in Roadie 2 and it's a cool gadget that you'll likely be seeing around. My hope is that the tuning weakness can be addressed in firmware updates and isn't inherent in the hardware design. Any questions about my experience with Roadie, feel free to ask.
