Mark Chayet Interview: Introducing the Revolutionary Evertune Bridge

By: Rick Landers

Images: Courtesy of Evertune.

You’re on stage or in the studio and you throttle your whammy bar, only to get back into your groove with a guitar that’s so far out of tune you wanna crawl from the wreckage. Or you’re in the audience and you’re getting fed up while the guitarists are fumbling around tuning up their guitars. Not to worry, it looks like a California firm, Evertune, has come up with a win-win solution to the age old vexing problem of guitars getting pummeled out of tune at the most critical times.

Now, we wouldn’t suggest you gnarl up your vintage ’59 Les Paul with one of these, but Evertune’s new bridge design looks like a very promising piece of machinery for working guitarists, and some relief for impatient fans.

When we got wind of this new innovative design during Winter NAMM, we thought we’d catch up with the folks at Evertune and find out if this is the real deal. So, we called Mark Chayet, CEO, Evertune, and got the low down on the design, the mechanics and what he’s hearing from the guitar community about the company’s innovative new bridge.

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Rick Landers: Before working with Evertune, what kind of career experiences did you have in the music business?

Mark Chayet: I actually started out as a Political Science major, thinking I was on my way to law school. My undergraduate work was in business and I ended up coming out and spent most of my time ancillary in the record business. My background is that I owned a company. I came out and I worked for an LP manufacturer, believe it or not. You remember LPs, albums?

Rick: I’ve got a few left over.

Mark Chayet: Yeah. So, I worked for a company that manufactured albums and they moved me out to Los Angeles. When I moved to L.A., I actually went into business with one of my customers there, who was a small record label. We started a cassette tape duplicating manufacturing company called EverMark. That was what I did literally for about 15 years, until I sold it to a group in Nashville.

That was just when the CD thing was starting to take off. At that point, we had expanded from cassettes to audio, video, CDs and we were starting to do DVD and other stuff. A big group out of Nashville had approached us and I finally sold out and had a contract with them. When I finished it up, I moved on.

Rick: It worked out well for you then?

Mark Chayet: Yes, it worked out pretty good. I was introduced to Cosmos Lyles.

Rick: I’ve read some background on Cosmos and Evertune.

Mark Chayet: So, you know EverTune was invented, co-created by two guys. Cosmos Lyles, I would call the lead inventor. And a guy named Paul Dowd. Paul is the head of Creative Engineering and that is our engineering firm in New York. They’re in Bronxville and Cosmos is what I’d call…the idea came from him and he’s the lead inventor. I was introduced to them a little over two years ago. I had already sold my business and was looking for a business to get involved in.

Somebody said, “Mark, does it have to be music related?” I said, “No, but…” They said, “There’s an interesting thing. It’s a startup, but if you’d like to meet them,” and that’s how I met Cosmos. He had this, what I think is revolutionary kind of invention that had all the ingredients to what I was looking for. It’s brandable, as in we named it EverTune. It works. It’s revolutionary in the way it works. It’s organic and mechanical in the sense that EverTune lets any player play guitar, as they’ve always played guitar for 40 and 50 years. There’s no effect on the player. There are no digitals or processors.

Rick: This is all mechanical?

Mark Chayet: It’s all mechanical, so the beauty to me of EverTune is that whether you are a novice or a brand new player or whether you’re at the level of Slash, this is a viable and valuable piece of equipment to add to your arsenal.

Rick: I saw that John 5 is using it.

Mark Chayet: John 5 is using it and I have spoken to him about it and he just said, “This is the future of guitar playing.” And like I said, once I got involved with this thing and started doing a little research in this space, I realized there haven’t been a lot of improvements in a lot of things that moved forward in a long time, when it comes to stay-in-tune technology.

We have lots of automatic tuners and lots of digital and electronic kind of devices that will now help you tune, but the difference in EverTune is EverTune is not a tuner. When you have an EverTune system on your guitar, be it from the factory or whether you retrofit it, you still, when you string your guitar, would need to tune it the first time. And I’m sure you’ve looked and you understand a little bit about how it works. But, that’s the beauty of it. It’s organic. You string your guitar. It’s not like an adding machine or a calculator that kids have, where you put in every number and it comes out with the answer and you don’t even need to know how to add.

Rick: The question is, is it easy to change tunings?

Mark Chayet: It’s extremely easy to change tunings. Are you talking about to change tuning, like to drop D?

Rick: Yeah, if you wanted to do an alternate tuning.

Mark Chayet: The way the EverTune works, and I know you’re a little bit familiar with it, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Mark Chayet: Basically all the controls are now done from the bridge. It’s a bridge-based system. You are no longer tuning from the tuning stock at the headstock. The tuning stock at the head really only works tension, so when you have a string that goes in there, if we started from scratch, the EverTune has three places where it fits. You’ve got the backstop. Did you go on our site and learn all this?

Rick: Our readers probably haven’t, so it’s good for our readers.

Mark Chayet: Okay, good. EverTune really operates in three places. You have what we call the backstop. The backstop means that the spring tension has no tension and the saddles are just sitting down. Then you have the middle zone, which we call the constant zone, or the sweet spot. That’s when you’ve engaged the EverTune and the tension on the string matches the tension on the spring, like a seesaw with two twins on it.

Then there’s the bend stop when you hit the very end of the travel. The way you get to this travel zone, so I’ll go back now, you’ve put a string in through the back just like any conventional guitar. You put it up through the headstock. Any guitar. You start turning it now. As you turn it, all of a sudden the saddle starts to rise. That means that the spring is now engaged. Once that spring is engaged, you can now take out your tuning key, which is a 2.5 Hex Allen wrench. We supply one with the guitar, but any one fits it. You actually plug in your tuner, or by ear, however you normally tune, and you tune it. Turn it to the right to sharpen it, to the left to flatten it, however much you’re off on your note.

Once you’re there, you can now turn the tuning stock at the top, the headstock. When you turn those tuning pegs, you have about three to five turns where the note stays exactly the same. If you’re plucking the string, ‘bong’, turn it, ‘bong’, turn it back to where it would go sharp. When the note goes sharp, you’ve hit the end of the travel. That means you’re at the bend stop. When you hit that bend stop,that means you can bend notes like any guitarist.

I call that sort of being on the fence. One side is EverTune-ville. The other side is conventional guitar. When you’re on that fence, you can bend your notes: ‘waa waa waa’, let go, right back in tune. Most players play an EverTune right at the bend stop. They want to be able to bend, but they also want to be able to have the stay-in-tune protection.

Rick: That can be good in a studio session.

Mark Chayet: If you’re a session player and you know you have no bends in your part, and you don’t want to get out of tune because your producer’s gonna point you out, you basically, this is what these guys tell me, you stay in the middle of the zone, in the constant zone. In that spot, you can’t change the note. So you have this opportunity to play in the middle of the zone, which is the sweet spot where your note stays constant, or at the bend stop where you can bend and do anything conventional and let go and you’re back in tune. So that’s the standard.

Rick: And changing tunings?

Mark Chayet: As far as dropped tuning goes, you put your tuning key in, which is right into the hole in the saddle. There are three different holes right on the bridge. If you’re looking at the bridge, and I’m not looking at it, but in case you’re online and you’re looking at it, the holes along the very back that are the horizontal pointing outward, those work the intonation. So, you have full ability to set your intonation on every single string.

The holes on the very top that you see on the faceplate, that works the action which raises or lowers the height of your strings. The holes are right in the saddle itself where the string is coming out, that moves the shuttle up and down, which changes your pitch. That’s the tuning key. So if somebody said that they wanted to go into dropped tuning, they basically would just turn in there. Let’s say you’re in E, standard tuning, and you want to drop it to a D. You would turn there until the string dropped. Again, once you set it, that’s where it stays.

EverTune has the ability to hold whatever you set it at. When you say to me, “Can it do drop tunings?” Yeah. You would just set it. In fact, John 5 says it’s his drop C guitar. He just sets it at that. Now, I don’t think I would recommend trying to change tunings on stage, because I think that would take some time, but I don’t think you would do that with a regular guitar either.

Rick: A lot of performers have a rack of guitars in various tunings.

Mark Chayet: Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Basically, the time it takes to change tunings or do things like that is the same, but once you do it, it’s holding it. I don’t know if you’re looking at a picture of the bridge outside of the guitar. It’s been in a bunch of magazines. I think it’s on our web site somewhere. But, when you see those long springs, you can see where they attach to the shuttle I’m talking about.

Rick: I’m actually looking at the face of the Les Paul at the moment.

Mark Chayet: When you see the exploded view of an EverTune, a lot of times we demonstrate it and guys test it at shows, you think there’s magic going on in there because it’s incredible the way it holds the tune and holds the note no matter what you do.

I’ve got shredders that just grind this thing and when they let go and it’s still in tune, they say to me, “Do you know what that would do to my strings? It couldn’t be done. These strings would have to be changed for me if I was playing on a conventional guitar,” yet, they can move right on. So you can bend your notes and pop right back in tune.

Rick: So, is this device patentable?

Mark Chayet: We patented it nearly two years ago. It will be two years in September. We are patented all over the world. EverTune is patented for constant tension on a stringed instrument. Our patent is applicable, we hope, in the future to other models, which would include bass, acoustic, tremolo version and eventually onto any stringed instrument, because pianos work by string tension and things like that.

Rick: So, there’s no more tension put on the guitar based on your unit?

Mark Chayet: No, no, no. It’s a self-contained unit. Each string is individual also. I think this is actually a good thing. A lot of people have asked me, “Is it like a Floyd Rose?” where they were wound around each and if you broke one string, it connected all of them. The answer to that is, No.” EverTune is six individual modules that are connected by what we call a faceplate and a comb, so that when you’re looking at it outside, it’s one module. The faceplate is held on through the intonation screw so that you can shift the modules backwards and forward. The brilliance of EverTune is the geometry of the way the springs attach to the shuttle.

Rick: Let’s say, and this is probably self-evident, I’m a left-handed guitar player. I want to switch my strings around so I’ve got my high E close to me. That doesn’t have any effect, right?

Mark Chayet: No, no. In fact, we make a model. You can make it specifically for a lefty if you want. It would just have to be switched out. Yes, you could do it. It wouldn’t have any effect.

Rick: Okay. I guess you realize that this essentially destroys the onstage tradition of a guitarist getting paid while they tune up onstage [Both Laughing].

Mark Chayet: You know, it’s so funny. A lot of the comebacks I’ve gotten from a bunch of people, which include producers, techs and players onstage, it’s all along the same lines. The producers say, “You know you’re cutting my time in the studio. I’ve got to charge less because we’re getting done faster,” which is great. I’ve had guys say to me that they can stop recording, go back to it two weeks later, and things match with the same guitar.

There’s no more ‘Every three songs, let’s tune.’ You’ve got the techs onstage telling me, “I could lose my job because they don’t need me.” The truth of the matter is, they’re actually loving it, because they’ve moved on to much more productive stuff. Then the players say that their confidence onstage has never been better and I’ve heard this from more than one player, who says, “I have never felt so confident playing my guitar that I’m not staring down at a pedal, fumbling around when I’m trying to talk to the audience,” whether they’re a small guy just talking to a little audience or not.

Rick: Because they could be playing instead of tuning.

Mark Chayet: Yeah, they get more songs per set.

Rick: They’re not worried about being out of tune.

Mark Chayet: No, no. It’s a real confidence builder according to the guys that I’ve talked to.

Rick: So, you said the idea of this was between Cosmos and Paul.

Mark Chayet: Yes. I don’t want to try and take any credit for inventing it. I’d like to take credit for seeing it and finding it and realizing this was a good thing to be the investor in.

Rick: Is Paul related to Mike Dowd?

Mark Chayet: I don’t think so. Somebody else asked me that and I’ve never heard that he is.

Rick: I suppose you talk to these guys, at least maybe Cosmos, about how he came up with the idea.

Mark Chayet: Yeah, I’ve talked to Cosmos many times and other interviews have asked him. I think he said, “On my couch.” And again, these are just my words, not his. I think he’s a brilliant engineer who graduated from Duke University Engineering School. Necessity is the mother of invention, ‘I wonder if I could figure out a way to keep this from going out of tune?’

Rick: I wonder if there was like a ‘Eureka!’ moment where, mechanically, things came together and it was, “Yeah, now it works.”

Mark Chayet: I think that there were many. The EverTune took five years. It’s not something that happened quickly. The R&D on this is four years long. Last year we spent the entire year testing with players, producers, techs making small incremental modifications on our bridge, whether they were cosmetic, whether they were just smoothing some things, like if it was breaking a string because the saddle was too sharp, just modifying things so it was ready for total mass production.

Rick: Did you pass this around to some top guitarists and get some feedback?

Mark Chayet: We did. We sent out our first 50 to 75 guitars to guys for testing.

Rick: And you got some good feedback?

Mark Chayet: Great feedback, Rick, and this is just honest. There are some guys that most of their remarks are cosmetic, where one guy says, “Make the bridge longer.” The other guy says, “You should really make it shorter,” [Both Laughing] So, cosmetically you can get a lot of different ideas. One thing that is interesting about something like this, we are EverTune and we’re branding a company, and you could make your bridge look exactly like the bridge that’s on a Telecaster, for example, or we could make it look exactly like the bridge that’s on another style of guitar.

But, EverTune does have its own identity. So, we tried to make something that fit. We make three models that fit Gibson-style guitars with a higher angled neck and a higher string height. Our F model fits any Stratocaster-style guitar and our T model fits any Telecaster-style guitar.

Rick: Well, that’s a lot of guitars.

Mark Chayet: Yeah, that basically covers the industry. It’s funny, but the industry really is a knock-off on three guitars.

Rick: That brings up another issue, and that’s that some people are very traditional, especially guitarists. They like the Teles, the Strats and the Les Pauls. Have you found that anybody says, “Well, you know, this isn’t true to my Les Paul,” or my Strat, even though the design of the Evertune is very clean.

Mark Chayet: The design is very clean and I’ll tell you what’s been happening, Rick, and it happens over and over again. That can be the initial reaction, and what happens is that a lot of the people we started out with have more than one guitar, so they’ll talk to me about it and say, “Well, it doesn’t look like this. It doesn’t look like that.”

My usual comeback is, “Well, what guitar is your beast that you just cannot keep in tune?” and they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve got…” whatever one, Les Paul, etc. I say, “Try the one that’s a beast,” and when they get it back and start playing it, inevitably they say, “Can you do my others?” [Laughing] Most people have said that to me, that the benefits so outweigh any of this iconic or traditional stuff. If you see on our web site, we’ve got a session player named Dave Levita. We’ve done four guitars for him now, but I’m talking with him about the first one; His 1962 ES-335.

Rick: Yeah, nice guitar.

Mark Chayet: He loves this guitar and said, “This is my baby.” I mean, he refers to it in the ‘she’, like a girlfriend.

Rick: Of course.

Mark Chayet: He basically said it, and I said, “Look, we’re not trying to be a vintage restorer. That’s not our marketing. I want to be on guitar’s OEM. You walk into Guitar Center and you could buy any brand. Ernie Ball? It’s got an EverTune. Gibson? It’s got an EverTune. Fender? It’s got an EverTune.” I want it to be an option in there, or the retrofit model, which is the aftermarket, where you can send in your guitar. So, he has his old guitar and he says he just loves it.

“I can’t keep it in tune, Mark. Not for one song. It’s lost.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “Look, I can lay this guitar under my bed and never play it anymore, or I can try and do something to it.” We did it. He got it back. Four days after I gave it to him, he went on The Tonight Show and played with Alanis Morissette with it.

Rick: Oh, cool.

Mark Chayet: And he said to me, “Mark, it’s unbelievable. It’s not only back, it’s better than ever.” So, like I said, there’s a perfect example where doing it to it outweighs the negatives. I get guys who call with vintage guitars and I try and dissuade them, because I feel like, would you put new brakes and power windows in a ’57 Chevy? It’s up to you. If this is an investment-quality piece that is really just hanging on your wall and not playing anyway, I wouldn’t do it. I’m looking for players and people who just want to have this great playing experience.

Rick: I think that makes perfect sense. I think that a lot of guitar players, that I interview, when they talk about their guitars, especially their stage guitars, they refer to it as a tool. It’s not this elegant thing you’d place on the wall and just stare at. Their guitars are a working man’s tools.

Mark Chayet: That’s why those guys are so deeply into this and just really coming around on this thing. The professional players and the producers have absolutely been our biggest fans. That’s because they rely on the fact that they don’t go out of tune.

Rick: That tells me that they can probably put a guitar in tune at the factory. Ship it out and somebody opens the box and it’s in tune.

Mark Chayet: That’s exactly it. That is basically it. That is the eventual goal of EverTune. I’d like to say we’d like to be on every guitar, but the technology certainly is available to go on every guitar and pull it out of the box and be in tune. That is what people are saying to us. When I deliver a guitar to somebody, or when they get it just even shipped to them, they’re absolutely freaked. Most of them say they laugh for like the first 20 minutes.

Rick: Yeah. What I do when I ship a guitar out, because I’ve sold a few guitars on eBay, is I always detune the strings because I’m worried about the neck breaking in transit.

Mark Chayet: Actually we do the exact same thing, but the point is with EverTune, what will happen is it will be completely set up before it goes out and then they just detune it. As I have told you, once you tune an EverTune, even if you detune it, all you’re doing is releasing the tension. When they get it and just turn the tuning pegs at the top and bring it back to tension and watch the saddle rise, it’s in tune or very, very close.

Rick: Cool, okay.

Mark Chayet: Yeah, it’s in tune because the tuning was done before they detuned it.

Rick: I would see manufacturers really being keen on this.

Mark Chayet: Well, we’re starting to get a lot of positive, positive response. The critics have been overwhelmingly positive with us and the players are unbelievable. We’re starting out. We basically launched our product at the NAMM show in Anaheim in January.

Rick: Yeah, we were there.

Mark Chayet: That was our first really public outing of this thing. Since then it’s been overwhelming. We’ve been taking meetings with almost all the major companies, converting their guitars. The best example for somebody to see it is on their brand guitar. I expect that you’re gonna see EverTunes hanging in stores already installed, end of this year, beginning of next year.

Rick: What about price points? I see they’re selling about $300 something?

Mark Chayet: The retail price on EverTune is $330.

Rick: That’ll probably go down if you get…

Mark Chayet: That might even go down on the consumer front in the future, but for now that’s the one-off price. Of course, if we do an OEM deal, obviously they’ll pay less than that. It would be in mass quantity.

Rick: Let’s say you have a low-end guitar that someone pays $500 for. You’re not gonna put a $300 EverTune on it, but I would assume at some point you might develop models that will meet that $500 range?

Mark Chayet: You’re exactly right. We realize that if there was any business model to follow, we’d probably fall more into the category of some of these high-end designers that eventually end up at K-Mart and Sears. So the initial outlay of the EverTune is absolutely high-end and custom shop and getting these high-profile players. The main and eventual goal is to get on the mid-line and low-line price guitars, where you sell the highest volume.