Let's face it, Gibson's Dusk Tiger looks like the guitar you would play while lounging around in silk pajamas, on a rotating circle bed, while looking at yourself in your giant ceiling mirror. And like your rotating bed, the guitar's automation is pretty extravagant. But if you can get past the Ron Burgundy-esque name and aesthetic, there's a lot to love about this robotic ax.
First, the most crowd-pleasing of the Dusk Tiger's bag of tricks is its automatic tuning. No need for a tuner. You don't even have to touch the tuning knobs. Just pull on the Master Control Knob (MCK), set the tuning you want (standard, open E, drop D, etc.), and strum the strings. The robotic tuning machines jump into action, whirring and spinning as they tighten or loosen the strings to your specifications. You can also monitor each string's progress on the MCK's display: Each string turns from red to yellow to green as they tune. No more awkward stage banter as you fiddle with your tuning pedal between songs at a gig.
But surprisingly, this is probably the least impressive aspect of what Dusk Tiger can do. Once you've set your tuning, the robot knob changes displays and now controls a jaw-dropping amount of tone settings.
The guitar has two pickups that can be set to single-coil or double coil, in phase or out of phase. It also has a piezo pickup that can be blended into the other pickups via a rotational knob on the traditional three-position Gibson pickup switch. That switch changes between the bridge and neck pickups as usual. As you turn the robot knob, you can quickly switch between a handful of preset tones that take advantage of all these options to various degrees. You're essentially switching to completely different guitars with the turn of a knob.
And that's just the start. You can then plug the guitar into an interface for your computer and enter in your own custom tone and tuning settings. This is where you set how many coils you want in your pickups and any unusual tunings that you want. Oh yeah, and you can tweak the four-band EQ of each pickup, including the piezo, for an insane amount of tone control. Save the settings, assign them a letter to display on the robot knob and download them back onto the guitar. It's so geeky, it's cool again.
The best part about this is that it's all analog. At no point is your signal digitally processed so you always get that classic Gibson tone. No, it's not the best-sounding Gibson, but with all the options at my disposal, we quickly found at least four to five sounds that were exciting and unique.
My initial revulsion over the looks of the guitar (as well as its Puddle of Mud headlining launch event) were completely surpassed by its sonic and functional delights. But guitars are not just pragmatic tools; like the wands in Harry Potter, each one has a vibe that either beckons or repels you. Dusk Tiger's marblewood and ebony top and mahogany back sound good on paper, but something about the finish on these woods, along with the tigerlike appearance, make this feel like a toy guitar. There's no mojo. It's overwrought and the textures are all wrong.
If the same functions were shoehorned into a more classic Les Paul design, it would be hard not to recommend this guitar for any tone-snob, gadget junkie or control freak with cash to burn. As it is, we just hope Gibson sells enough of this limited run of 1,000 Dusk Tigers to bring down the cost of the robotics and prove that there's enough demand for it to expand it into more well-loved models.