Roadie is the automatic tuner: clip it on a tuning peg, pluck the string, and a motor turns the peg until the note is right. Band Industries started it in Beirut in 2012, funded it on Kickstarter three times over, won the TechCrunch Disrupt Audience Choice award with it in 2014, and has shipped four generations since — the original app-driven Roadie, the standalone Roadie 2 and Roadie Bass, and the colour-screen Roadie 3.
The phone app is the other half of the product, and I built the Android one.
Two apps in one
A tuner. Without any hardware, the app is a free, accurate tuner for twelve instrument types — guitars from six to twelve strings, ukuleles, mandolin, banjo, bass — in standard and more than 150 alternate tunings: open G, open D, drop D, half step down, D modal, and whatever you define yourself, string by string. Instrument mode shows the headstock and lights up the string you’re on; chromatic mode shows the nearest note for anything with geared pegs, dulcimers and santoors included.
A remote control. Paired with a Roadie over Bluetooth, the app becomes the device’s control centre: the instruments and tunings you keep on the phone appear on the tuner, reference pitch and capo position travel with them, beeps and vibration are yours to switch, and firmware updates for the device are delivered through the app. The same app handles every generation, from the original Roadie to Roadie 3.
What the Android app has to get right
- Pitch detection people trust. A tuner that hesitates or flickers is one nobody uses twice. The tuning screen has to read the microphone continuously, settle quickly, and stay stable while a string rings out.
- Bluetooth that just works. Discovery, pairing and reconnection across a spread of Android devices and OS versions, with clear feedback when the tuner is out of range or mid-update.
- Firmware updates that never brick a device. The update flow runs from the phone; it has to survive a dropped connection and resume, and tell the musician exactly what’s happening.
- A data model musicians think in. Instruments own tunings; tunings own strings; strings own offsets. Custom instruments and custom tunings fall out of that naturally instead of being a special case.
Where it stands
The Android app has passed 100,000 installs on Google Play with a 4.6-star rating, and is still updated. It’s the app in the box for every Roadie sold to an Android owner.
