Has anyone had any experience with the Roadie 3 tuner?
Please sound off, I'm thinking about one.
Thanks,
Keith
Grand Railboard #7244.

This is interesting. It seems like the Roadie Bass would be the one to look at, though, since they warn off of using the 3 for Bass.

I hadn't seen this. Cool! I'd be curious to see how well it works for Stick.

I watched a review of it and this particular reviewer really seemed to like it but thought it might be overkill if you use the same tuning 100% of the time.

For me, I play a lot of acoustic guitar and have about a half dozen tunings I use all the time so that has me more intrigued than tuning my Stick.

I bought a Roadie Bass tuner when it was a kickstarter, specifically to use with my Stick. I never got it to work well for me on the Stick. There were two big issues:

1. There were certain (low) strings where the Roadie could not sense the pitch. Generally if it could find a pitch it would do the right thing with the tuning peg and get things tuned well. But, maybe because of the tapped nature of the instrument, there were certain strings where it frequently could not sense the pitch that I was tapping. If I kept at it, with repeated tappings, the Roadie might eventually sense the pitch. But it was aggravating enough that I'm much happier using a normal tuner and turning the pegs myself.

2. The Roadie Bass reacts to notes that are in the environment, not just those being played on the instrument. One time I was struggling to get the Roadie to tune my Stick in a band situation when the keyboard player hit a note and held it. The Roadie heard the keyboard note and started tightening my string rapidly. I yanked the Roadie off before the string broke, but it could have been a serious problem.

I had several back and forth emails with the company and things never came to a good resolution. So, from where it stands, with my current experiences, I would not recommend buying a Roadie Bass for use on a Chapman Stick.

I hope this helps.

Scott

Is that really you? Good to see you Scott albeit figuratively.

Hope all is well.

Yup, it's really me. Still playing the Stick (poorly) and attending the occasional seminar. I stumbled across this question about the Roadie by accident and signed up for Stickist specifically so I could respond to the question. It seemed like I probably have better information on this topic than most folks.

In the more general sense I'm doing well. I hope you're also doing well Glenn. Good to see you (virtually) as well.

I own a Roadie3, too, and besides using it for several guitars and tunings, I made a custom "MR" for my Railboard tapped at the 7th fret.

The Roadie3 detects and tunes the highest 7 strings nicely, but care is needed not to bend one of these when tapping multiple times while tuning is in progress. This irritates the Roadie3 a lot ...

The lowest 3 strings never worked well, thus I skip them and tune them later via octaves.

Cheers,
Frank