Gibson Guitars and Ethernet

Gordon_Cabaniss writes "Gibson, the country's second largest guitar manufacturer, teamed up with twelve Silicon Valley engineers and modified the ethernet protocol to link audio between instruments and the mixer. Gibson is calling the technology MAGIC and they are boasting 'both a cleaner sound and a simpler setup.' 'Gibson's Magic carries up to 64 signals per cable, thus saving space and time.' The technology is licensed royalty free and tech giants Sony, Phillips, and Cisco are already showing interest. Gibson also says to not be surprised to see Ethernet ports on guitars within the next 12 to 18 months." I love the idea of my SG having 100mb/s ethernet on it. I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound ... well, just as bad, but digital.

Comments

First Post

[howardjp]

Hey, I haven't had a first post in ages!

whee

[VAXGeek]

you may have Ethernet on your Gibson, but I have NetBSD on my Fender.

Re:whee

[Bob McCown]

Better than having crabs on your organ!

Re:whee

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks a lot. I had just answered the phone on a tech support call when I read that and busted out laughing. Now the caller thinks I'm insane.

Serves me right for reading /. at work...

Re:whee

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I thought that MIDI was a nice, old link between instruments & mixers...

I guess this is the update, then?

Re:whee

[vax]

hmm. a vax geek using netbsd rather than openvms, what has the world come to. = \ hope still resides in the basement of universities and libraries heh. And just for the hell of it, Yea i got openVMS 7.1 on my Ibanez with a SCSI raid aray of 2.5in scsi drives and a 802.11a wireless card, who need ya stinkin ethernet i got an "airport" on my amp hehe.
Seems the day is coming more radidly when the most respected computer geeks will think vms is a part of VNC or perhaps that vax is a project on source forge. makes ya feel old you know?
VAX

Hella.

[SinisterAngel]

Can you say live music over the net?

Re:Hella.

[zeno_2]

I really dont think that is what they are shooting for, as you can do that kind of stuff already. This is about minimizing all the cables that musicians use *there are a ton* and also having better communication between devices.

Example would be what they said in the article, plug in your guitar to your amp, and your amp will remember what guitar it is and what settings you like for it.

Pretty slick I think.

The Gibson Les Paul

[matty]

This is a dangerous guitar. I played one once and almost shelled out the $1500 for it, because it played so damn sweet.

*whew* That was close! :)

Now, if it had an ethernet port on it? I probably wouldn't have been able to resist. Music and geekery combined into one? An absolutely irresistable combination, IMO.

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[mcj]

I guarantee you that a les paul with this magic stuff built in will cost a lot more than $1500. Hell, $1500 is on the low end of les pauls as it is. :-)

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[Bob McCown]

But this one goes to 802.11!

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh, but epiphone might support it as well.

Epiphone - good enough for the beatles.

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[mcj]

Good point...I've always kind of wanted a Casino anyway.

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to save money come to Canada and buy one. With the exchange rate you will probably save about 40% on it. It's been a while but I swear they were around $1500 here too.

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least they've cut prices they used to be over 2k for the crappy ones.

Re:The Gibson Les Paul

[unitron]

The Les Paul guitar is especially dangerous if you drop it on your foot.

(For the non-guitar players, they weigh a *lot* more than the average solid body guitar)

Talk about multitalented...

[Meefan]

It takes a real genius to both start a huge multinational guitar company AND at the same time start the cyberpunk genre. Who knew?

Aw yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now someone can root my six-string and play some good music, since I have no talent for playing.

hee

How was the concert?

[soft_guy]

Q: How was the concert? A: Fine until some jerk started a denial of service attack on the band over 802.11.

Re:How was the concert?

[Hobbex]

Now that copying records has moved into the digital age with MP3s, it is about time that bootlegging conserts did as well. Forget the DAT recorder, all you'll need is an iPaq with wavelan.

Re:How was the concert?

[Anonymous Coward]

*Actually*, 802.11b isn't the same as the other 802.whatevers that comprise the ethernet standard.

Encoded Audio?

[eples]

The TechTV article doesn't get too technical, so my natural first question is:

How does it encode the audio signal?

My second natural question is: Since the reverb pedal would alter the signal, would it violate the DMCA?

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the reverb pedal would alter the signal, would it violate the DMCA?

(Urge.. to kill.. RISING!)

The DMCA outlaws the "[circumvention of] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected [by copyright law]." I believe that sentence is fairly clear by itself, but allow me to clarify a bit more: The DMCA has nothing to do with reverse engineering or signal modification, and if I hear this stupid question one more time, I will be forced to kill someone.

Do you read me, pooky?

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I gotta see this, premeditated murder prompted by on-line activity. [I am not guilty, a cookie was left on a machine in a cyber cafe in Dunfermline, and I am under the influence of presribed medication anyway.]

I guess that a distortion box or other effects pedal would be banned, as it must violate the DMCA.

What ho?

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

My impression of the non-technical TechTV article was that no analog will be used until speaker output: your guitar sends data about which notes you are playing to the mixer. The mixer applies effects digitally and converts to audio for speaker output only.

Obviously, this would mean (1) new guitars capable of transmitting notes digitally over Gibson's ethernet protocol or (2) retrofitting existing analog guitars with a device that achieves the same.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[fireweaver]

First, I would imagine that a ADC would be built into the guitar so that the digitisation takes place right at the pickup. This would reduce defects in the signal to the absolute minimum. In addition, the various knobs and switches on the typical electric guitar would probably be attached to thier own, slower speed ADC to transmit the settings to the mixing console.

Second, I seriously doubt that the DCMA applies in this case.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Weh]

I can tell you one thing: "digital" is not so popular with guitar players. Guitar players tend to like something that predates even solid state: vacuum tubes for the amplification of sound. Tubes are expensive, require heavy amps (big transformers) and are *not* maintenance friendly. However, even though there are plenty of solid state and digital modeling amps, most guitar players like amplification through vacuum tubes.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Bush Pig]

Even though I can't justify the money for a _valve_ amp (I'm no longer a working musician), I prefer my real amplifier with its real (analogue) speakers (I've owned it for about 20 years, after all) and my real guitar (a damn fine Maton (TM) built in about 1960) plugged into it. I honestly don't think this'll run.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

my question would be that of latency-- if this thing is going to both interpret AND encode the audio, it would likely perform the first task in much the same fashion as most MIDI-guitars, ie: a string is hit, and a sensor detects the pitch by measuring cycles/second, and then sends the data to the device (mixer, sound module, whatever). however, if it then has to ENCODE the data (at a rate of 44.1kHz, or upward, for each STRING), it could cause an audible delay (latency) for the player. not only that, but i wouldn't feel safe using this guitar unless it could be clocked (wordclock, for those of you that aren't audio engineers..).. not to mention the fact that you'd have to get an expensive converter, as most mixers (even the amazingly expensive sony OXFORD) don't support such a protocol.
interesting prospect, though, if it can be worked out-- imagine, having an amp simulator BUILT RIGHT INTO the guitar! swwwwwwweet.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[foxwitt]

There *has* to be an analog signal initially. Pickups work by making an analog sinal from the vibrations of the guitar string through the induced magnetic field of the pickups. It'd then have to be converted to digital to transmit via ethernet, but the initial signal itself will be 100% analog. To do otherwise, you'd have to radically re-engineer a basic system design (magnetic pickups) that's been working fine since the 40's.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is using straight 16-bit PCM at 48 kHz, mono (who needs stereo on their guitar?), then just the audio itself would take up 750 kbit/s. Add on the weight of the Link layer, Network layer, and Transport layer and you come out to somewhere between 756 kbit/s and 768 kbit/s. And if you have 64 channels of instruments, all at these values, then we come to the total of roughly 48 Mbit/s.

48 MBit/s is over 4 times 802.11's MAXIMUM specs (you only really get about 8 MBit/s over it due to saturation)

Looks to me that this system would require 100Base-Tx.

Re:Encoded Audio?

[Shanep]

First, I would imagine that a ADC would be built into the guitar so that the digitisation takes place right at the pickup.

Yeah, makes the old EMG (EMG?) pickups with the pre-amp in-the-pickup seem old!

Second, I seriously doubt that the DCMA applies in this case.

I think he was being funny. At least I thought so.

I imagine this could be extended a lot with digital effects built into the guitar! They'll probably sell add on cartridges to do so or something.

Re:RANDOM NUMBER FIRST POST!

[Meefan]

No... electric guitars are electric.

Some more applications for this.

[eclectric]

Obviously, in-studio recording where you're not all in-studio is the "intended" application for this. However, I can see some practical uses for this in the live recording biz. Instead of piping everything through a soundboard, and then recording it, bands could instead have the music going to an on-site studio, that could get each instrument directly (and the audience) if you want it, editing and encoding the music right there, and perhaps having songs, or whole concerts, posted to the web that night.

Re:Some more applications for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I believe the "intended" purpose will be to essentially carry the studio with you. In other words, instead of bringing hundreds of pounds of processing gear depending on the venue, a musician would bring a laptop, a mixer, and their insturments and the audio would be processed off-site and returned to the venue.

Re:Some more applications for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Howzabout band practice over the web? No more need for rehearsal spaces as long as everyone has a fast connection in their bedroom/home studio...

Re:Some more applications for this.

[opermonkey]

the point of going to a concert, is to see the artist in person, to hear them, to see and feel the emotion flying through the air. When you are around people who are there too see the same band, there is a sense of unity. You may be a geek, a jock, or a "G" and still get along perfetly at the concert. Why take that away?

also, Moshing is very hard over the internet. MoshPit Quake3 maybe?

It fell off the back of a truck officer, I swear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Next thing you'll see is 802.11a capable so Van Halen doesn't trip over his ethernet cord.

mLAN

[wouter]

Yamaha developed a similar technology that could transport audio and midi-signals, going over firewire.

http://www.yamaha.com/proaudio/products/system_m la n.htm

It's an interesting way to hook up sequencers, samplers, synthesizers and sound cards to each other without having to plug in audio and midi wires, and worry about magnetic interference.

mLan can do about 100 separate channels of music (good enough for a Dolby 5.1 system? :) and 16x256 channels of MIDI data. Throughput is up to 200Mbps, so you don't have to worry about MIDI latency again :)

Re:mLAN

[wouter]

Forgot to say: Yamaha's mLAN is also supported by a wide consortium of music equipment manufacturers, ánd mLAN is already in the open since August of this year :)

Although Gibson's ethernet sounds nice, I sincerely hope that the technically - at first sight - better mLAN will prevail. But we all know what happened with Betamax... :)

Re:mLAN

[_typo]

Throughput is up to 200Mbps, so you don't have to worry about MIDI latency again :)

Huh? Latency and throughoutput are two *very* different things. One measures the number of bits you can push per second, and the other measures how long does it take a single bit to go from one end to the other. You could have a GB/s connection with horrible latency.

Re:mLAN

[wouter]

You've never experienced MIDI lag, eh? ;)

Fact is, the firewire protocol allows faster throughput than an ordinary serial MIDI cable, and that's important when you need to have 24 synthesizers squeak at the exact same time.

You don't hear it on violins and other instruments, but you do hear latency on percussion when using an ordinary MIDI cable and 8 percussion midi channels.

Maybe I've expressed myself with the wrong words. Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker.

Re:mLAN

[zerOnIne]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with DLT's. The latency is horrible though...

Re:mLAN

[Nater]

Throughput is up to 200Mbps, so you don't have to worry about MIDI latency again :)

Throughput and latency are different things. Here's an example to illustrate:

• In New York, fill a railroad box car with 80GB hard drives filled with your mountain of data (many many many many terabytes in that box car).
• Send the boxcar to San Francisco in the way that one would expect to send a box car from New York to San Franciso.
• Unload the hard drives from the boxcar

Now, some calculations using simple numbers. Let's say you managed to stuff 5 exabytes of data into the box car and it took 3 days to get to San Francisco. Your throughput would be around 34 GB/s. Your latency would be around 3 days.

Is the difference clear now?

Re:mLAN

[Homewrecker]

That is probably the most insightful analogy I've ever seen. Kudos to you, sir. Kudos again.

Re:mLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analogy may be good but it's sort of wrong-headed. In MIDI, everyone calls the delays that build up "latency", because that's the way it appears to them. You press a key, but don't hear a note right away. It's a functional latency, but it's caused by the little MIDI channel being over-full of data. MIDI was only designed to let one synth control another, not for people to run dozens of channels containing entire scores of music on them. So in this case, increasing throughput decreases what is commonly called "MIDI latency".

Re:mLAN

[elmegil]

The problem is then MIDI's serial throughput limitation, not it's latency.

Re:mLAN

[scott1853]

Isn't latency included in a throughput calculation? Wouldn't the throughput in your example actually be measured as 5 exabytes per 3 days, since you wouldn't actually be receiving 34 GB/s in San Francisco, it would just be all at once.

Re:mLAN

[Nater]

Well, one way to measure it is to calculate how long it takes to send X amount of data from end to end and then do the appropriate division (that's how I calculated it, cause it's simple and it makes the point). But that does include latency in the throughput calculation. So you could measure latency separately and just subtract it from the elapsed time and do the division over again. Some people might consider that more accurate, but whatever. Under most networking circumstances, the latency is low enough that most people just ignore it anyway. In the box car example it would make a big difference. Tremendously big. Let's arbitrarily say that it takes about 1 minute to actually "arrive" in San Francisco. That makes throughput about 170 Tb/s. Most impressive. Another way to measure throughput is to pick a random point along the network and measure (at full usage) how much data goes past that point in a second. That's usually more work than is really necessary to get a good enough answer, but in the box car example, if you estimate that New York and San Fran are about 3000 miles apart, you can calculate the train's average speed and if you assume a certain size box car, you can calculate how long it would take to pass an average point at the average speed. Then take that number and do the division.

Anyway, it was just an illustrative example. Technical accuracy is only of secondary importance to the main purpose of showing the difference between throughput and latency.

Re:mLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

firewire? but why? oh, that's right, so outrageous hardware prices can be justified... damn yamaha, if you would fire billy sheehan and john pattitucci from your bass affiliations you might actually sell some um basso guitaristas.

Re:mLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

you idiot, he just ripped a common example in at least a million books. its not insightful at all, its karma whoring, and it's idiots like you who can't tell the difference

Re:mLAN

[pcidevel]

But in this application latency is the most important aspect (bandwith is most likely not very important at all).. That is why people are making the distinction.. 170 Tb/s is great bandwith, but at a latency of 1 minute that bandwith wont do a bit of good in a time critical situation like music.. in other words, you can transfer a huge file extremely fast and latency won't affect you much at all.. but in the world of music, when you consider that my pick touching the string is transmitted at near light speed (via an analog patch cable) to the amp, there is almost no latency between each note being played and heard (probably speed of sound is the biggest latency factor).. obviously, this is a simplified example...

In order for this technology to be successfull, a throughput of 200 Mb/s doesn't help if the latency is terrible.. the data is real time and needs to be transmitted real time to the recieving device.. even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music (and make the timing of the band extremely difficult, near impossible unless everyone in the band has the same latency)..

Uhmm.. all of that should be considered my opinion.. I'm no expert.. hell.. I probably don't even know an expert.. or really know anyone that knows an expert.. so uhh.. that's just my take on things.. ;) I guess I'm saying YMMV...

Re:mLAN

[Nater]

What book? Not Stevens, which might be the only book on networking I've ever read (/me thinks for a second)... yup that's the only book on networking I've ever read and there's no freight train example in it.

Re:mLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

ooh, freight train with hard drives versus a 747 filled with cd's. you're not that clever, asswipe.

Re:mLAN

[wings]

It's just a variation of another analogy (paraphrased):

"It's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDs, but the latency is a bitch."

Re:mLAN

[mr3038]

even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music

I really cannot imagine what kind of system would have a few dozen milliseconds of latency. It takes like 10ms to send IP packets over a couple of hundred miles via multiple routers. You really don't need that special hardware to send some sound 30 feet or so - digital or not.

If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.

Re:mLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty good data transfer.

www.boxcarnetwork.com here I come.

Re:mLAN

[Nater]

Not really. The latency is too high for most applicatons.

:-P

Re:mLAN

[pcidevel]

As I said, I'm no expert.. but I've played around with devices that create 50-100 (which is about the range I was thinking of with my statement) milliseconds worth of delay.. and playing has a very increased range of difficulty.. with more 100 milliseconds of delay, timing yourself with the rest of a live performance can become difficult..

If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.

I'd say I average about 10-20 feet maxiumum from my monitor's when I'm playing live.. and when I'm doing studio work I'm virtually inches from the speaker (pretty much all studio work is done with headphones).. I may be a bit off in my numbers (it may take a bit more latency than 50-100 milliseconds) but I doubt it would take much more than that to really throw you off...

Consider as an example, watching a movie with 100 milliseconds of delay between the screen and the sound.. I'm willing to bet it would be a bit disorienting.. now imagine playing a musical instrument with latency like that..

It's important to realize that the very first thing I did when I read this article is send a link to the bass player in my band, because I'm sure both he and I will be VERY interested in this technology.. I personally can't wait.. I wasn't trying to imply I doubt the technology at all.. Gibson does quality work with anything they do (did I mention I play a Les Paul? :)).. My statement had nothing to do with the article, but I was trying to point out why latency becomes a much bigger issue for technology like this than it would in a normal situation (like say transfering a file)..

One last thing that hasn't been mentioned is processing latency.. an IP packet can be transmitted in 10ms, but you aren't giving any time to process the packet or the data on the recieving end.. which is going to be a big part of the latency..

Again I'll point out, I'm no expert.. I'm just making guesstimates from my real life experiences with playing music..

Re:mLAN

[dillon_rinker]

Consider ethernet at 10 million bits per second. Those don't all arrive at the end of the second. They arrive in 1500 byte chunks, each of which takes 12 ms to transmit.Yet we do not describe ethernet as having a bandwidth of 1500 bytes/12 ms.

I would conclude that the bandwidth in question is not 5 exabytes/3 days.

Re:mLAN

[StikyPad]

It's not quite as simple as your boxcar analogy.

Here's another example:

• In New York, write the first letter from the first sentence of Marcel Proust's "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" on a scrap of paper and tie it around the neck of a pigeon.
• Release the pigeon and wait for him to make the trip to San Francisco and back.
• Repeat with the next letter.

We'll pretend that our pigeon can fly supersonic and requires little or no sleep, so he can make the round trip in under 24 hours. So our actual latency one way would be 12 hours. However, we can't respond until we have transmitted the entire novel. So 9,609,000 days later, the work has been sent in its entirety. Your throughput would be around 1.157407e-5b/s. Your effective latency would be 26 millennia.

--

Re:mLAN

[smatthew]

ahhh - but they're very inter-related. Lets say you have an application that sends out 1024 byte packets. On a 28.8 serial link - that would tie up the line for approx 35ms. This becomes a problem with time sensitive data - if your real-time data is stuck in a que behind a large packet - by the time the large packet has gone through the line your packet is late.

there any ways of dealing with it - ie fragmenting large packets to allow time-sensitive ones to fit down the pipe.

Re:mLAN

[larkost]

I believe the new name for this is HAVI (Home Audio-Video Interface), and there are a few devices on the market with it now.

I saw this technology during its first 'public' demonstration at Apple's WWDC two years ago, demoed speakers. The really nice parts about it are that you can have dedicated bandwidth on FireWire, and that you can also have other sorts of traffic on the same wire (ie video, control signals, other sources, etc). The thing that the recording studio guys where really excited about is that you can use this protocol for all components in a recording studio.

Apparently recoding studio's are a mess of different sorts of cables, all propritory, and all completely different. With HAVI your microphone could be plugged in to a hub (which could also power it) into which your mixer, DAT tape deck (or FireWire RAID-NAS device), headphones, etc, could all be connected with some sort of a computer arranging the traffic (it could also work without a computer, but that would require each piece to be more intelligent than i think is practical... what sort of display would fit on a microphone?).

Re:mLAN

[Smurf]

In Tanenbaum's book there's an exercise where you tie a small box of 3 GB tapes around the neck of your dog Bernie (a Saint Bernard), and calculate his throughput and latency as a data transportation medium. It's in chapter 1, I think.

The train analogy was also good, though. Since a lot of people (other than CS/EE mayors) may learn something it's not karma whoring.

Re:mLAN

[gig]

> The problem is then MIDI's serial throughput
> limitation, not it's latency.

The problem the poster is describing is "MIDI lag". Once you have multiple pairs of MIDI cables going, you don't get information back at precisely the right time from each device. MIDI is a 1980 technology ... think about it. It's not enough to make a new connection standard that just does audio and leaves MIDI alone. We want one cable going between each device, making one bus for every device to use whether it wants to move MIDI information or audio information.

There are various technologies in use to get around MIDI lag, but mLan is the one that looks like it's going to be the one everybody uses in the future. For a start, it was introduced to the industry quite a while ago and developers are knowledgable about it. Second, it uses common, cheap, hot-plug FireWire cables with greater throughput than 10/100 and FireWire ports are on every Mac from the past few years and also many PC's. Third, it carries both MIDI-style performance information and digital audio data, meaning fewer cables. Fourth, it is already in Mac OS X 10.1 right now. Fifth, Yamaha is a very respected electronic music manufacturer, and Gibson has a very, very bad name in electronic music.

Re:mLAN

[FFFish]

There's also CobraNet. It sends audio data over Ethernet, at real-time speeds.

Seems to me that Gibson is reinventing the wheel.

Re:mLAN

[unitron]

Throughput is what those so-called "water saving" showerheads restrict, latency is the time between turning on the hot water and getting water that's hot.

Re:mLAN

[netwiz]

or, as it was put in the fortune file:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tape backups"

Re:RANDOM NUMBER FIRST POST!

[pivo]

No, electric guitars are not normally digital they're just electric (and analog.) Not everything electric is digital.

Guitar hacks

[Violet Null]

A generation ago, you proved yourself talented by playing the guitar behind your back, or, in Hendrix's case, with your teeth.

Now, you'll have to prove yourself talented by playing your guitar in such a way as to hax0r slashdot.

Re:Guitar hacks

[Tha_Zanthrax]

It's a well known fact that Jimi didn't play with his teeth. It just looks like he did. He played with his tongue.

Now to transform the wireless interface

[s33t]

...802.11b?

Mwaaaaahhhahahahahahah

Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interface

[Bruce Perens]

CCL maps Guitar chords to common Linix commands and a subset of the ASCII character set. By playing a sequence of guitar chords, you can set up commands, pipes, and filters. Output is delivered by speech synthesizer. While the speech synthesizer text is from Linix, the frequency and other parameters are computer-driven to harmonize with, or improvise upon, the chords of your input. Visual output similarly turns mundane text into a rock video.

Bruce :-)

sounds like a better MIDI

[Sebastopol]

So long USB/joystick-port MIDI!!

It's about time someone improved on the 16-channel 32 kiloBIT per second MIDI standard. Although there are still quantization issues on low frequency strings (don't try this on a bass), I'm glad to see MIDI adopting a proven standard. After all, MIDI is just a simple network (device ids, packets, etc). Traditionally it required very little hardware compared to ethernet, but that's changed soooo much in the past decade that i bet it is just as easy to hook up the hardware to ethernet.

whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Saving space and time" sounds pretty darn impressive. They do that a lot on star trek too.

my Jackson sounds great with a touch of temporal distortion...

grr

[Anonymous Coward]

hrmm i rember discussing a idea similar to this with some friends not to long ago but it was based around usb as opposed to ehternet. hrmm kinda nice to see that it is really happening. Just wish i had been part of it

This comes under the heading of...

[wiredog]

Why didn't I think of this. It isn't that difficult to do. Basically, you need an audio digitizer on the guitar. Connected to an embedded processor that will wrap the samples in tcp/ip packets. Connected to an ethernet port. If you don't mind a big box hanging off the side you could do it with 3 PC-104 cards. (The digitizer, cpu card, ethernet card.)

Re:This comes under the heading of...

[five dollar troll]

you didn't think of this because you were too busy whoring karma. Douchebag motherfucker.

The Spec

[d5w]

The actual MaGIC spec is available from Gibson's site.

Re:The Spec

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this one up! That's far better than the TechTV post. Looks like they kept as much of the 802.3 standard as they could, so they could call it "ethernet".

Sorry, not Ethernet

[xyzzy]

What the hell -- they "modified" ethernet? Sorry, then it's not ethernet. Can you broadcast other data over the same fabric and have it work? Then MAYBE I'll believe it's ethernet. Other than that, they ripped off some ideas. But why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? I bet they could have used EXACTLY ethernet and it would have just worked.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[geekoid]

They just added a perl onion...

I wouldn't get to woked up. the source on this usually isn't to tech savy. probably didn't change the protocal at all. But if they did go beyond the specs, then you're probably right.
2 point though:
1)you can change something and not violate the specs.
2)They found out the a certian military helicopter could pitch its blades 104%. (4% beyond the spec, which allows it to do cool things). does that mean it's not a helicopter?

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[Feynman]

I think if you read the spec, you'll find that it conforms to some level of the IEEE 802.3 PHY and link layers. It's the application layer that's been customized.

So, no, it's not "ethernet" in the sense that it complies fully across all layers and clauses of the 802.3 standard for some application. It's simply the same physical and link layers to permit use of standard connectors, media, and other physical-layer hardware.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[xyzzy]

Right, I did fail to normalize for press-release-itis and tech-journalism-itis. [but then again, so does 95% of the staff of slashdot, heh]

However, to respond to your comments:

- If you change the spec, and the thing no longer performs all the functions in the spec, you have done a bad thing. Hence my comment about running it over a regular networking fabric, with other traffic. So, the fact that the helicopter still flies means it's still a helicopter. But if you can't do all the other fun stuff that ethernet does, it ain't ethernet.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[Feynman]

(Sorry for the double post.) To clarify my previous post, I just wanted to note that the term "ethernet" really is very broad, so saying "it's ethernet," is frought with problems. Just in the physical layer...is it 10BASE-T, 10BASE-FL, 100BASE-TX, 100BASE-FX, 1000BASE-T, 1000BASE-SX/CX/LX, 10GBASE-?, etc? All of these fall under IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD (aka "Ethernet").

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[anothy]

yeah, so it's not ethernet. big deal. what's your issue? did you read the spec? there's good reasons they don't want any extra overhead, even the relatively minimal overhead imposed by ethernet. it's not like they're running IP over the link, or any other higher-level protocol. everything's designed for exactly one function, and highly optimized for it. real-time uncompressed live audio at analog quality is tough. you'd loose your bet.
now, as other people have mentioned, they might have been able to get away with using straight FireWire and had it just work...

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[kin_korn_karn]

It's nothing new anyway.

Line 6, a digital music gear company, has used RJ-45 connectors and cat5 cable for a while now on their modeling amps and processors. Usually they connect a controller to a master unit; my POD can have a pedalboard connected via a standard ethernet cable, as long as it's not a crossover.

RJ45 is great for small apps like this. The jacks can be TINY and allow for all kinds of miniaturization. In the past you needed huge MIDI "cannon" jack or a >1 inch deep 1/4" jack.

I think this thing will compete more with S/PDIF than anything else.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[dimitri_k]

From the MaGIC spec:

4.1 IEEE 802.3 Compatibility

MaGIC shares a common physical layer with Ethernet. It is UDP compatible and is
similar to UDP in that it has no handshaking protocol or retransmission ability.

Each individual link occupies the entire bandwidth of a discrete 100baseT link in full
duplex mode. This is necessary to provide the bandwidth needed for live synchronous
audio.

Therefore, MaGIC may only be said to be compatible with Ethernet at its lowest physical
layer of abstraction.


So, that explains MaGIC's relationship to ethernet. And as to why "people keep reinventing the wheel", they do that when they need a wheel to do something novel, as in this case.

Maybe they could have used exactly RS-232. No, wait, what they did is better.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[xyzzy]

Right, and I acknowledge that, and it's all well-and-good. But don't call it "Ethernet". The reason they did that is annoying, they want to piggyback on the idea of computer networking. It's a marketing maneuver. But hey, we're all engineers here, and when we say a word, we have a particular meaning in mind.

A few other notes:

- Since they're running point-to-point, no broadcasts, with high-speed ethernet they should have no problem with bandwidth. I do realtime speech recognition with audio streamed in realtime over an ethernet, WITH TCP/IP, and we do just fine. And don't try and convince me that speech recognition is less quality and latency sensitive than a guitar!

- Despite all the people telling me to "read the fscking article", the phrase "Gibson did this by modifying the Ethernet networking protocol..." makes me highly suspicious. But then again,it is really marketing fluff we're arguing about, so all bets are off. :-)

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[anticypher]

Did you read the spec? Looks like ethernet to me.

At the physical layer, they have chosen to use inline power ethernet, an emerging standard. Data pins remain unchanged. Power over ethernet seems to be optional, its just there for unpowered devices like acoustic guitars.

At the link layer, they conform to standard MAC addressing, and leave space for IP/TCP/UDP headers, so the signals can be routed/bridged.

There are new packet definitions for timing and other functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if I could just plug a pair of cisco routers in between some of these devices and make them work across a town. It might take some careful bridging configuration, but it looks like straight forward networking at layer 2.

The next higher layer jumps straight to application layer(7), and defines audio channels and control signals. As a networking person, I couldn't care less about that, I'll deliver any packet payload. And the application doesn't really care whether I moved the signals over fibre or copper or a WAN link.

Given their careful stepping around of the IP/TCP header area, I'd say when these devices exist, they will bridge/repeat any other IP traffic that obviously isn't MAGIC traffic. So you can have a browser behind your mix panel with only a single connection to the local router, and your friends can be playing their instruments behind their DSL connections.

For geek factor, I'd give this a 9. Very cool.

I'll leave the "gouging the musicians" comments to the musicians :-)

the AC

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[Anonymous Coward]

damn straight. just another way to make money...

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[TheTomcat]

The RJ45/Cat5 that connects your floorboard to your POD is just that. Straight-up, Cat5. The only thing that has in common with ethernet is the medium happens to be the same. It's not the same thing.

That's like pretending that the coax connected to my television is sending packets as 10Base2 Ethernet. It's just the same medium.

On that note, those Line6 products are amazing. I never have stage-wash issues anymore.... well, amost never. If only we could get a POD for the drummer. (-:

S

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[SuzanneA]

If this is GMIC its referring to, which it looks like it is, then its not even ethernet at all, but a custom protocol somewhat like S/PDIF or AES/EBU, but a multiplexed bitstream put onto a CAT5 cable. When Gibson announced GMIC about 2-3 years ago, they never made any mention of it BEING ethernet, just that it would use existing ethernet cable/connectors for sake of convienence.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[kin_korn_karn]

That's what I said. It's just the same kind of cabling. That means this Gibson thing is probably just some kind of digital pickup that uses cat5 instead of proprietary cables.

Line 6 stuff has its limitations (I just have a POD) but it's still miles and miles better than the alternative - paying $$$ for a triple rectifier and finding a place to mic it (in a woodframe apartment building? I don't think so)

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can't just plug it in to your existing routers/switches. Read the spec; MAGIC depends on using the exact timing of frame arrival to synchronize the sampling. Devices can only introduce up to 80 picoseconds of jitter in start of frame timing; standard switches and routers will not achieve that.

It looks like the compatibility stuff is there so there can later be "uplink" devices that would resynchronize a stream after sending over other types of links. Until such an uplink device is available you CANNOT use your existing switches/routers.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from the MaGIC Spec:

4.1 IEEE 802.3 Compatibility
MaGIC shares a common physical layer with Ethernet. It is UDP compatible and is
similar to UDP in that it has no handshaking protocol or retransmission ability.
Each individual link occupies the entire bandwidth of a discrete 100baseT link in full
duplex mode. This is necessary to provide the bandwidth needed for live synchronous
audio.
Therefore, MaGIC may only be said to be compatible with Ethernet at its lowest physical
layer of abstraction.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[DagSverre]

And don't try and convince me that speech recognition is less quality and latency sensitive than a guitar!

Ok, I won't try to convince you then, merely state that it's probably the stupiest thing I've read on Slashdot for a while (granted, I'm surfing at +1, but still...)

(And yes I do have the arguments to back that up, but I won't force them on you)

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[FFFish]

Xyzzy, is Cobranet compliant with Ethernet standards? Please give them a look at Peak Audio/CobraNet homepage.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[xyzzy]

Well, given that they recommend off-the-shelf hardware to route and broadcast the packets, it would sound like it. The Gibson article didn't make any such claim.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[unitron]

The co-axial cable feeding your television is 75 Ohm RG-59 or RG-6. 10base2 uses 50 Ohm RG-58.

(The BNC vs. F connector part is a lot easier to cheat on.)

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[anothy]

funny, i used to work on a speech recognition/tts project for a currently beleagured telecom equipment manufacturer. i'm also a musican (comments on quality aside). and i'm quite certain pushing guitar is harder. modern speech recognition systems are highly forgiving compared to the ears of an audiophile. we did multi-chanel streaming ASR (over TCP/IP over ethernet and ISDN), and typically a 64kbit pipe was plenty for a chanel.
they go over in pretty good detail in the spec how they use the bandwidth, and it all seems quite reasonable. further, note that they're using multiple chanels, for multiple instruments, possibly over a given link. and what's more (and is clear in the spec) they do have broadcast, if only for negotiation, device enumeration, and whatnot. but their lowest sample rate is CD-quality (44.1), and they go up from there.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[xyzzy]

It really depends on the speech recognition you are trying to do. If your problem domain is recognizing 50 words over a phone, sure -- no problem. If your problem domain is dictation or transcription in the 64k-128k vocabulary space, you need much more bandwidth, because your training data will have to be of higher quality to get the accuracy you need.

I doubt people moshing in a pit somewhere exactly qualify as audiophiles :-)

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet

[anothy]

It really depends on the speech recognition you are trying to do.

agreed. but remember, when dealing with music, you've got a much broader range of amplitude and frequency variations. the sampling needs to be good enough to avoid the cut out, pre-fade, and jitter effects common in many digital encodings, and the side-effects of trying to deal with them. also, keep in mind that "real time" is a much less stringent requirement for speech - which has frequent short breaks in the energy, and fairly unique energy/data characteristics (at least in english) - than for music - which is often constant, varrying energy, all of which could reasonably be considered data.

I doubt people moshing in a pit somewhere exactly qualify as audiophiles

again, agreed, but this is mainly targeted as a MIDI replacement/evolution. that's only got limited use in live performances, anyway; its primary funcion is in recording, especially in studios (but also in-line recording of live shows). so this technology needs to be able to satisfy an audiophile listening to a CD on her $20,000 home stereo setup.

Life imitating (art?)

[re-Verse]

How long until someone says something like

"Oh my god they hacked The Gibson!"

Hmmm.

Re:Life imitating (art?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, you beat me to it.

Not gonna fly

[javaaddikt]

Guitarists have already rejected technically-superior digital solid state amps going back instead to vacuum tubes because of the warmer sound. They won't go digital this time either.

Re:Not gonna fly

[Phillip2]

"Guitarists have already rejected technically-superior digital solid state amps going back instead to vacuum tubes because of the warmer sound."

I'm not sure that this is true. The first wave of transistor amps that came out where largely avoided if you had the money to buy valves. Eventually though the transistor people stopped calling the guitarists ignorant, and realised that they need to listen to what the guitarists where saying.

The solid state amps which are coming out now sound far far better, and are much closer to the sound of a valve than even five years ago. And of course they are much more robust than valve technology, and cheaper.

Who knows?

Phil

Re:Not gonna fly

[nanojath]

That simply isn't accurate. First off, calling a digital amp "technically superior" is just stupid. Beyond the conveniences of versatility, portability, power consumption etc., the only measure of the "superiority" of an amp is that a particular guitarist likes the way they sound playing through it. Every amp has it's own sound, tube amp technology is very mature and stable, so naturally even today there are a lot more decent sounding tube amps than pure solid state - just as a lot of early digital transcriptions of music for CDs sound like garbage compared to the same album on LP.

More to the point, there is plenty of solid state amplification going on in guitars, both 100% and partial (all modern tube amps have solid state components), see for just one example Line 6.

Finally, this is jsut a totally different issue. It isn't about amplification. This is about getting signals -any signals, not just guitars -to the mixing board. That's it. In the end of course how well the software maintains and presents the signal will determine if it is adopted. They say it is "cleaner" - in my book this often means they've cut off the top and bottom of the signal, eliminating a lot of signal with the noise and making for a flatter, less rich sound. And this is what's wrong with the assumption that digital is necessarily better than analog. People say, a CD samples at a higher rate than the ear can perceive, therefore anyone who says the digital signal is lacking is an idiot. No: but how the format and processing of the signal and how it is presented by playback equipment can have a serious effect on how much and exactly what is included and excluded from the raw input. Do it very well and you have a faithful reproduction, but with most of the annoying artifact noise removed. Do it poorly and you have the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Meddle. My brother made me a cassette from a 5+ year-old second-hand LP and it sounded better. Noisier, but better. This is why many early digital amps failed. Their signal was flat, thin, dull, the early attempts to model tube effects were crude.

Re:Not gonna fly

[kin_korn_karn]

Solid state has its own character. The Roland JC-120 is a good example. Also, highly processed guitars can do some neat shit.

One thing I've noticed about the current 'wave' of musicians is that they seem to respect progress. They don't say "tubes only, dude" or "all effects all the time". They know when to use effects and when not to.

Re:Not gonna fly

[MrResistor]

You're probably right, although in a way it's unfortunate. I finally found my prefered tone by using my solid state Bass amp (Peavey MarkIII with an Ampeg SVT cabinet (8x10)) and a tube distortion emulator (Tech21 XXXL) after trying and rejecting several other solutions, both tube and solid state. Not surprising, really, considering that the first Marshalls were just copies of the Fender Bassman.

The transistor really got a bad rap from those first few years of solid state amps, but the fact is that the tube amps from the first year or two after Fender was bought by CBS were just as bad. In truth, that great sound came from a combination of the electrocal properties of tubes, poor engineering, and shoddy assembly (both in the amp and the tubes themselves). After CBS got Leo Fender out of the way their engineers went in and cleaned up everything they could, and the result was amps that sounded like crap!

That said, there are certainly audible differences between standard transistors and tubes (even vs. odd-order harmonics, clipping speed, current vs. voltage triggered, etc.), but most of them can be overcome by using FETs. There is still an audible difference, but I find my solid state tone to be smoother, more consistent, just as warm, and about $300 a year cheaper!

Re:Not gonna fly

[wishus]

Yep. I'll stick with my Telecaster and my Boogie, and all the analog cables and 70s stomp boxes in between.

I once called Roland to find out exactly when my Phase II was manufactured, and they had no record of ever manufacturing anything called a "Phase II." It was too old to have been entered into their new-fangled computers.

I've played with all the Line6 stuff; I've put it on tape side by side with the Boogie, and their best rectifier model just can't touch the real thing.

Re:Not gonna fly

[splice]

I agree as semi-pro guitar player and a sys admin I was initially interested in all all the digital modeling and effects. Know what I play now. PRS to tube screamer to Fender tube amp. You can't beat perfection with a buch of tiny transistors.

Re:Not gonna fly

[errxn]

Ah, yes, the age-old "tube vs. solid state" debate. Something tells me that they'll still be arguing this one 100 years from now.

Well, I'll tell you what I've learned from my experience. When judging an amp or piece of gear, just *listen* to the damn thing, and don't worry about whether it's tube driven/solid state/digital modeling or whatever. The bottom line is, does the thing sound good? If it does, buy it and own it. If it doesn't, don't. Yes, it's pretty much that simple.

One thing that I can't *stand* is when people get all religious about gear, i.e., the old "if it's not vintage, it's crap" BS. Whatever. I've heard some "vintage" gear that sounds like two cats fighting, and I've heard some new solid state stuff that sounds wonderful. And vice versa.

Just get and use what works for you and be done with it.

Re:Not gonna fly

[iomud]

eric johnson was given the opportunity to use protools 24bit, he decided to go with 16bit because he thought it sounded better. This is a man who can descern the brand of batteries in his effects pedals and cables by ear and uses only vintage gear for the most part. I tend to agree with him, his (new) setup is very simple and as analong as possible.

Re:Not gonna fly

[ScoLgo]

Amen - brotha' errxn!!

btw - re: your sig...

What happens when pasta and antipasta collide?

Maybe this?

Re:Not gonna fly

[Weh]

yeah, but all solid state and modeling amps do is try to reproduce "tube" sound. Why not go for the real thing is you can?

Re:Not gonna fly

[LinuxIsStillBetter]

My Ethernet's gunna use tubes.

None 'o that new fangled digital stuff for me.

Besides, the sounds is much warmer.

Re:Not gonna fly

[Doctor Faustus]

That's already starting to change, though. Line6 is doing very well for themselves with clean solid state amps playing the output of a special purpose computer. The computer emulates the sounds of a dozen or so different types of amplifiers, plus a wide variety of effects.

Now, imagine combining that sort of system with a pickup that keeps a separate signal for each string, and combine them as you see fit. I would absolutely love having the bottom three strings as one signal, and the top three as individual signals. Then I could play a rythm part and three lead parts at once (as coordination allows, of course).

Of course, I think tubes sound like shit, so I may not be a very good barometer of the guitarist community.

Re:Not gonna fly

[unitron]

Actually they rejected analog solid-state amps in favor of the older analog vacuum tube amps.

The reason is that the (unavoidable, not intentionally added) distortion that the tubes add to the amplified analog of the input signal is harmonically related in such a way as to be "in tune" with the original signal, whereas the distortion added by the early solid-state amps was "out-of tune" with the original signal.

Re:Not gonna fly

[Phillip2]

"Why not go for the real thing is you can?"

Because the real thing has distinct problems associated with it. Valves break, wear out, take time to warm up, are expensive.

Phil

HAcking the gibson!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, i guess that is what they were going to hack in hackers after all.

Very useful...

[BMonger]

I run a 16 and 32 channel mixing board myself and just figuring out which channel goes to which instrument/mic is a pain sometimes. According to the article when the item is plugged in it would show up on the mixing board as "Whomever's Guitar" or whatever it was set to. This would be very very handy I think for the people behind the scenes. Not only will it be beneficial to the quality of the sound but beneficial to people like me. Hopefully this technology will be implemented in more things that guitars, which I'm certain it will.

It'd make life easier if you could upload effects straight to the guitar/mic instead of having to run it through an effects box too.

Re:Very useful...

[nanojath]

Hopefully this technology will be implemented in more things that guitars, which I'm certain it will.

I'm not sure how the impression got out there that this is about guitars. It's a connectivity solution - digital wireless cables, basically. Plug WHATEVER into a port, plug the central doohickey into the mixing bord, viola, they're connected. The innovation is not putting an ethernet port into a guitar (which as the article states is not even being done yet), but adding software to the ethernet protocol with the aim to minimize latency and synche everything to a master clock so that it can be used for music - making sure it all matches up and that the signal hits the mixer soon enough after the player hits the string/key/drum so that there is not a perceivable delay.

Oh, wait, I actually do know how the impression got out there. Silly me, as always it involves Slashdot editors that barely read the articles they post and Slashdot readers who feel justified in commenting on them without reading them at all.

Re:Very useful...

[okimsrazor]

What would be useful here is a Java JINI implementation. Each musical device represents a JINI service, which the mixer would dynamically discover, along with each instruments properties. The instruments, in turn, can contact other JINI enabled devices i.e. pedals. And with Java in the guitar, the possibilites for those effects and what not are greater as it will benefit from a solid Java developer forum.

Re:Very useful...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip: Figure out where everything is going to go ahead of time, put some white tape across the bottom of your console, and LABEL it! No more confusion. I agree it would be cool to "plug and play" on a mixer, but keeping track of your inputs on a 32channel board shouldn't really be a big problem...another tip: do it the same way every time.......

Re:Very useful...

[BMonger]

I actually do put tape and I do plug everything in the same way every time. But on occasion something needs to be changed for one reason or another. All I'm saying is it would be easier.

Re:Very useful...

[TheRain]

It'd make life easier if you could upload effects straight to the guitar/mic instead of having to run it through an effects box too.

the problem being 1. 99% of effects box's in existance cannot be uploaded to (you cannot upload new algorithms) 2. the few that can have proprietary formats that only the company that made it can use to create new algorithms (i.e. the Johnson J-Station)... 3. the few that allow algorithm creation are like $3,000 US (i.e. Eventide.).

conclusion: the creation of a guitar you could upload effects algorithms to is unlikely.

Great but...

[mickeyreznor]

Gibson guitars are notoirous for being insanely expensive. Any chance these'll be on any fenders or ibanez?

Re:Great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

fyi dude, you're slightly misled/incorrect.

gibsons are expensive, so are fenders, and
there's also loads of insanely expensive ibanez.

but there are cheaper les pauls (the no-frills
studio models, etc) made by gibson, then of course
the only company officially allowed to make clones, epiphone.

epiphone les pauls are nice enough, a friend of mine has a "tuxedo" paul that ran ~ $500USD, which is a good deal.. it needs a few hrs of work to
get it setup properly, but most guitars do.

epiphone high end == the foreign fender guitars.
epiphone low end == the fender "squire" guitars.

Re:Great but...

[TheCrazyFinn]

A good Mex Strat or a great Ibanez costs less than an adequate Gibson SG. Epiphones are poo.

For an Ibanez, all you need is a RG550 or 570, the high end ones are the same, with somebody's name on it.

The high end Mex strats are OK, provided you test drive them, the quality control sucks.

The Crazy Finn

Re:Great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

About time somebody asked the obvious question, " what about Fender". Guitarists lost thier mind over the CyberTwin for gods sake, wait till they see this. For the record I like the CyberTwin but this Gibson thing is going to have to really prove that its not going to mess with the sound.

Obligatory Beowulf Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

this in theory is okay i guess, but i have a
feeling it'll "TAKE OFF" like all the midi
synthesizers that've been around for years for
guitars. They're damned neat, but most people
no matter what they play, be it metal, punk,
blues or country, will eventually come to realize
that life is good w/ a> a guitar that's quality,
b> a stompbox or two, c> a good amp. ethernet be
damned.

and oh yeah. my 79 strat plays better than your
les paul.

(hey, stupid ass OS wars always start here, couldn't resist)

Re:ugh.

[kin_korn_karn]

My Schecter beats everyone's guitar :) best guitars made, if only they weren't made in Korea.

of course, the USA strat that's waiting on me at the Fedex dispatch might trump that, but as of right now, Schecter 0wnz j00... muhuahhahaha

Re:ugh.

[orange_6]

I too think it will take off, no more of this outdated midi crap, especially when you realize that when putting it on a cd, it's going to be digitized anyway, why not just do it from the source?

I know it would help me...if only I wasn't poor...

My 50's National hollow body beats your strat.... such a sweet sounding thing....

Later
Josh

Re:ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

My handbuilt 3 inch-thick ash heavy-as-hell Gibson-necked guitar'll take all. Without the switchable coil-cuts (push-pull) on the LP custom neck pickup and SG bridge pickup, that's more juice than ethernet wants to get near... (especially with the pre-amp on... The only kid on the block with a 9000 mv guitar...)

Re:ugh.

[Rew190]

There's no way in hell your Fender can top my '59 reissue.

Re:ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

especially that it's a 79' strat. Those years were the worst for fender.

Re:RANDOM NUMBER FIRST POST!

[draggy]

Guitars are "DIGITAL", which means operated by fingers.

Their sound isn't yet DIGITIZED!

MIDI

[dustman]

IANAProfessional musician, but composing music has always interested me. I am a computer nerd, and like the idea of creating music completely electronically.

I know that electronic synthesis still isn't perfectly simulating real instruments, but that doesn't matter to me, since I like electronic music (and its various sub-genres) anyway.

I have used various commercial program demos (reason, rebirth, cubase, etc), various free programs (pd, jmax, buzz), and even written small programs of my own (of the "connect generators/effects together" variety), but one theme has remained constant in all my exploration: MIDI sucks.

As a math/computer geek, I have read about the math behind sound and music, and as I am breaking the ties to actual physical instruments, I want to break with their limitations as well. And I'll repeat: MIDI sucks, for several reasons that probably don't interest many people who don't share my particular obsession.

So, this technology is very interesting... maybe we can hope for an ethernet-based sequencing protocol in the next few years, and MIDI can finally be burned and its ashes scattered once and for all.

Re:MIDI

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I think you are a brainless wonder
Midi rules, dude.
Don't you know any bigger words than
"suck"?

Re:MIDI

[Anonymous Coward]

I think midi sucks too, but it is, um, well-established, to say the least. Which means that if this standard - MAGIC - is to be used to send musical event data as well (alongside digitized audio signals), the data will probably be in midi format. A change of the physical layer (DIN to RJxx), nothing more. Crap. I think this is what Yamaha's mLAN does also (mLAN being similar to this MAGIC thing)

For (admittedly academic) potential replacements for midi, do a google search for "zipi". Note that it is dead because (effectively) midi is so entrenched (and, well, I guess it's good enough. For most people.). Then follow the links there to the subsequent projects by the same people. They have created a really high-level (perhaps to a fault - fwiw, I think zipi was a good balance between abstraction and practicality/implementability), abstract network music protocol and associated wares. Both this and the zipi design docs are recommended reading for anyone interested in practical (ie. potentially useful for hardware) abstractions for musical processing.

Cheers.

Skip wires, move directly to wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

When my band plays, the floor is an absolute mess. There are cable running everywhere. Personally, I'd like to see Gibson move to wireless ethernet like 802.11 instead of wired ethernet. I hope Roland picks up on this. I have a session v-drum set and the only hassle is all those damn wires.

Re:Skip wires, move directly to wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy wireless modules that plug into a little box that you can clip to your belt. You already don't need Ethernet to go wireless.

Not so sure....

[zarathustra93]

As a semi-pro musician (check out my website :-) I think this sounds really cool. It will indeed make life simpler as far as setup and cabling is concerned.

I do have a few issues though. By the time you get 32 or more tracks of 96khz audio running, it would surely fill up most if not all of the entire available bandwidth.

Also, I'm really not looking forward to replacing a rather expensive mackie mixer. I'll do just fine with what I already have.

Lastly, If Gibson manages this as well as they do other products, then it is doomed from the beggining. I used to use Opcode Studio Vision Pro. It was killed, along with one of the only viable macintosh midi managers (OMS,) within a matter of months after Gibson bought them out.

Re:Not so sure....

[WeirdKid]

OMS may be dead, but FreeMIDI emulates it and is more stable than OMS ever was.

Re:Not so sure....

[zarathustra93]

Indeed,

my rig is all MOTU and Freemidi. My only complaint about Free Midi is lack of support on many vendors part. For example, Propellerheads reason is not free midi compatible, so if I want to use it, OMS is the only option. I realize that most programs do support free midi, but there are some choice one's that do not.

will musicians buy this?

[Lxy]

I have a lot of experience working with guitar players and many of them would never go with this type of thing. Most guitar players like their sound raw, using analog effects and tube amps. Why? Because its sounds so good. There's nothing like the crunch of plugging your guitar into a Marshall stack and blowing people out of the building. It's tough to capture that tube sound in digital technology, and this ethernet guitar takes it one step farther away from the analog that they want. I really can't see a lot of hard core musicians going for a system like this.

Re:will musicians buy this?

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously this is for wannabe musicians like taco, who think its cool and don't really have a cool about anything musical other than guitars can impress chicks. unfortunately , he still doesn't get any.

Re:will musicians buy this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and a lot of those same musicians want a volume knob they can turn up to eleven.

Re:will musicians buy this?

[DeadPrez]

Hmm, where did I hear that before? Oh that's right, when electric guitars came out. I am pretty sure I heard this from ye olde skool accordian players when the electric accordian with firewire and usb jacks came out and now look where the accordian industry is.

BTW, does hardcore really mean resistant to change?

Re:will musicians buy this?

[given_to_fly]

As a guitarist my self, I can pretty much agree with you. I , and most of the guitarists i know, are into analog circuit effects an tube powered amps. There is just more warmth.. its not as clean.

however there are quite a few of dsp's that simulate vintage amps.. Line 6's POD and amps, Fender Cyber twin.

while these do sound pretty impressive and do give some extra flexibility, they still don't match a Class A amp.

I could not see any musicina in the near future pluging cat 5 into their guitar.. maybe into a set of mic pres that then went to the mixer to clean the mass of cables up .. or for midi and such.

just my thoughts.

Re:will musicians buy this?

[wheeeee]

I agree. I would also be reluctant to "buy in" because RJ45 connectors are not road worthy....those locking tabs always break off! I'm also guessing that once you pass the signal though your array "stomp boxes" (for me: compressor, fuzz, wah-wah), there will be no need for a digital delay!

Re:will musicians buy this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital effects can match any tube amp, you fucking total moron.

Re:will musicians buy this?

[orange_6]

What about those who don't want to blow people out of the building? Those who want to use it as a tool for creation of music and not the destruction of eardrums.

"hardcore musician" != "actual musician"

later
Josh

Re:will musicians buy this?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I would also be reluctant to "buy in" because RJ45 connectors are not road worthy....those locking tabs always break off!

That's what the plastic hoods on ethernet cables prevent.

I'm also guessing that once you pass the signal though your array "stomp boxes" (for me: compressor, fuzz, wah-wah), there will be no need for a digital delay!

Rather than passing it though the stomp boxes, build new stomp boxes that send their settings to a single effects box as MIDI-in-Magic. Then the effects box applies all the effects at once. One hop, negligible latencey. (When expressed in digital form most interesting stomp box effects are trivial computations.)

Whole new meaning....

[linuxrunner]

to "live" music over the internet!

Heck 4 and 8 tracks will be a thing of the past if this goes. Instead of hooking your guitars up to a 4 track and then making recording off of that for your demo, you now go straight into your computer.... your basic studio setup but with digital quality sound and digital output onto a demo CD....

The more I write the more I like the idea....

Better start learning where to put my finger for that A chord now....

Re:Whole new meaning....

[kin_korn_karn]

Recording to PC sucks. The consumer applications of this will probably be throttled anyway (knowing Gibson, an old company that believes in tiered products) so you won't get nearly what a pro gets.

Other applications

[Ed Avis]

Okay, so how long until cable Internet providers kludge up a protocol to send audio data over MAGIC, use a software V.90 modem implementation treating the audio packets like an analogue phone line, and run PPP on top of that?

MIDI for the 21st Century

[hrieke]

So the MIDI protocol / technology is updated. Good for Gibson, et al.
The nice thing about their technology is that it uses off the shelf parts. Should be stanard here real soon.
Wonder if it will require an IP address or not?
Another side though is that the RJ jack should change, to prevent someone from plugging into the wrong network.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[hrieke]

Okay outside of my first comment which was based on reading the press release I mow have digested their RFC and am less impressed with the design.
First, MaGIC is built on UDP, so delivery of the datagrams are not guarantied. If a collision occurs on your network you've lost data. The way we hear sounds this will become noticeable if enough collisions happen.
My biggest beef is the sampling rates are too small and to few. The tradeoffs are for a higher sample you lose channels (48k sample gives 32 channels, 192k has 8).

They didn't take flight with the technology and dream big.

Rather than doing something completely new, they did rework MIDI for Ethernet (not that that's a bad thing). It will have it's place, just not with guitars, and most definitely not live on the stage.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[tricorn]

Simple collisions won't cause loss of data on an Ethernet. The chip detects it and (usually) automatically re-transmits. UDP packet loss is usually caused by an overloaded router that doesn't have enough room to store the backlog. Re-transmission at 100Mbps won't significantly slow things down. Regardless, in a real-time protocol, it's better to throw out stale data and continue delivering on-time than it is to push everything back to avoid a small amount of data loss.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[Xenu]

Huh?

Collisions do not mean data loss on Ethernet. They are just a method of arbitrating for the wire. The link layer will automatically detect the collision, back off and retry. No data loss occurs unless things are hopelessly screwed up.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think you need 192kHz, then you need to go and read about the nyquist theorem. If you don't want to do that, then fine, go and spend your money on products whose specs are dictated by the marketing department - because you are exactly the kind of consumer they aim for. Anything beyond 48kHz is snake oil.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[bigdavex]

First, MaGIC is built on UDP, so delivery of the datagrams are not guarantied. If a collision occurs on your network you?ve lost data. The way we hear sounds this will become noticeable if enough collisions happen.

UDP seems like the right choice for this situation. For real time audio, you want as low a latency as possible. The receiving end shouldn't be buffering much data, and therefore any retransmission will arrive too late to be useful.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[hpa]

First, MaGIC is built on UDP, so delivery of the datagrams are not guarantied. If a collision occurs on your network you?ve lost data.

• Full-duplex Ethernet (which is what MaGIC is built on) doesn't have collisions -- there is nothing to collide with;
• Collisions don't mean data loss on Ethernet, although it means a slight delay.

Re:MIDI for the 21st Century

[tricorn]

You're very confusing. You say "it doesn't have collisions" and "if a collision occurs". I think what you're saying is that with full-duplex Ethernet, going through a switch, the chip doesn't see that there's a collision (even though there is one) and thus doesn't retransmit. Depends on the switch. Some of them will store-and-forward in that case, some will generate a collision (jam it) when it sees that the destination is busy. Some will simply drop it, in which case (with UDP) you're right, you'd lose a packet.

I don't know...

[stungod]

I'm sure there's very capable AD/DA conversion going on here, but a LOT of the sound you get from an electric guitar is the result of good ol' analog circuitry. The coils of the pickups interacting with the amp is what defines the "character" of the sound.

I know DSP has come a long way, but I can't see this being used by the real hardcore guitarists, since it removes all of the weirdness that defines the sound of that special guitar plugged into that old Marshall amp.

Re:I don't know...

[3am]

this doesn't seem like it's going to replace the analog on the guitar (you'll still be able to play with the way your humbuckers are wired). it would however replace all of the analog footpedals that people daisy chain together (unless they convert from digital back to analog, or do the effect through software).

my guess is that the guitars would have an analog -> digital converter before the jack, and that they'd send this signal over 64 channels to the 'intelligent' mixer that they envision. i think that this would have some very real benefits to professional bands and their rodies, as well as high end studios.

i really don't think that this would interests hardcore players either, but i also think that it won't elimate all the analog coolness that a really great guitarist can manipulate. and who knows, it might create a whole new set of neat tricks...

Next: circular guitars for moving heavy objects

[T.E.D.]

"What we have done is called 'middleware,'" Juszkiewicz said. "We have put software on top of Ethernet that basically synchronizes those packets to a master clock and allows it to send many, many channels and have many work stations that work together in synchrony, meaning low latency, meaning music."

Congradulations to Gibson and their tech team. They have successfully invented FireWire!

Guitars and Ethernet

[zangdesign]

I can see the headlines now:

"Unnamed Hacker 'ownz' Ted Nugent - 200 fans hospitalized for serious inner ear bleading.

"The Nuge was not available for comment as authorities are investigating allegations that a hacker had broken security on Ted Nugent's favorite guitar. Apparently, the attack caused the amplifier stack to overload, drawing about 800,000 watts for approximately 10 seconds. The resulting decibel levels were off the scale and one spectator described it as "WHAT? WHAT WAS THE QUESTION? WHAT?!". Several fans were hospitalized in critical condition - surgeons are even now trying to figure out how to re-sect bones that have been 'pulverized by hypersonic forces."

This post copyrighted, patented, folded, spindled and mutilated. If you live in the EU, even reading it may be illegal. If you live in France, you probably wouldn't get it anyway.

Re:Guitars and Ethernet

[Fjord]

Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack, you score one of those Gibsons man.
-- Cereal, Hackers

There's still one problem

[Dop]

Most guitar dealers around here (Central IL) carry mostly Fender equipment. They'll have a few Gibson guitars, but even fewer basses. I've been searching for an SG style bass for months just so I can test it out before buying one.

Of course, maybe the new technology will step up demand and force stores to carry more Gibson equipment.

Re:There's still one problem

[UberLame]

Around here (PA), most stores are Fender or yamaha. Thankfully there is one gibson dealer though.

But really, I don't want ethernet to my guitar. Maybe ethernet from the amp, but not from the guitar. I like my pickups buzzing, humming, and feedingback.

Re:There's still one problem

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Most guitar dealers around here (Central IL) carry mostly Fender equipment. They'll have a few Gibson guitars, but even fewer basses. I've been searching for an SG style bass for months just so I can test it out before buying one.

I have a Gibson EB-0 from the early-70's... I don't like it, but that's why I'm trying to sell it. It's been re-finished in the last 7 years or so, and plays decent. Word to the wise: Gibson basses weigh in the neighborhood of 2 tons...

Re:There's still one problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm spoiled living in Austin, TX, but I
find it almost impossible to believe that you
have trouble finding stores that carry Gibson
guitars. I can think of at least three local
stores that probably carry the full line of
just about every brand, and none of those
are even specialty guitar shops!

Is it really that hard to find good music
equipment in some places?

interesting idea...bad timing

[shftleft]

I dont think this is the right time to start changing the fundamentals of instruments and equipment whose sounds have been perfected over the years using an analog signal. I know I wouldnt want to be at a gig and have the driver that runs the ethernet card in my mixer go flooey, theres enough equipment problems now as it is without having to have a rodie sysadmin. They should have been working on this technology 5-10 years ago, so it would be ready for the studio and road now. The way it is, big name studios have already converted their analog recording and mixing equipment to directly feed in to a digital signal, for mixing, editing, processing, ect... what will they want with ethernet enabled instruments, when they will have to migrate to mixing/processing equipment that comply with the new standards....

Given Gibson's Track Record...

[Black-Man]

And how they destroyed Opcode... I am highly skeptical that this protocol will be used outside of Gibson guitars.

We need a replacement for MIDI - a 20 year old serial technology - and mLan is the best hope I've seen. We need a music manufacturer like a Yamaha or Roland to step up and form a consortium with Gibson, ala Roland and Sequential Circuits with MIDI in 1983.

Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in high school keyboard class,
they had a bunch of Korgs linked up with ethernet.
There was one keyboard for the instructor, and
she had some control panel that could switch
a student's keyboard onto the room speakers
for solo/demonstrations. Granted, this was
just using CAT5....

packet solos...

[silversurf]

What really gives me pause about this is that most musicians I know can barely figure out their effects pedals, let alone get their amps setup right; I don't know how they're going to deal with ethernet (and some of these guys are pretty accomplished).

I can see it now; the lead, rhythm and bass guitarists on stage battling for QoS priority on the switch.

Whatever you do don't let the drummers know about this, the last thing we need is networked drums. Drummers hog enough of the audio spectrum, stage and free beer as it is, we don't need them hogging bandwidth also.

I say this out of total love and respect for my musician friends of course.

-silversurf

Re:packet solos...

[Happy go Lucky]

What really gives me pause about this is that most musicians I know can barely figure out their effects pedals, let alone get their amps setup right; I don't know how they're going to deal with ethernet (and some of these guys are pretty accomplished).

What effects pedals? When I want distortion, I scrape a comb over the strings. When I want some other effect, well, I haven't yet.

I can see it now; the lead, rhythm and bass guitarists on stage battling for QoS priority on the switch.

The bassist should be in nice mode, in the background with the distributed.net client. The less people notice him, the happier the rhythm guitarist is. That's especially important since I'm the rhythm guitarist.

Whatever you do don't let the drummers know about this, the last thing we need is networked drums.

Our drummer? Give him a few beers and some rubber bands to play with, and he's happy.

Re:packet solos...

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? This is marked as insightful? I know MANY very intelligent, and technologically literate guitarists. I get sick of all of this constant stereotyping of guitarists and musicians. Lay off of it, I've already heard enough of this unsubstantiated drivel to last me a life time.

Re:packet solos...

[silversurf]

Whoa relax, that post was meant as a little joke for those of us who have been around music and musicians. We all know some, smart and dumb, I was just having a little fun. I'm a guitarist too and sometimes dabble in other instruments, I was merely making fun of something of which I love. A bit of dry humor maybe, but not enough to get up in arms about.

However, I do agree with you on the moderating part, I don't really understand the "insightful" part myself. "funny" at level 2 maybe, but not "insightful". My post was about as "insightful" as a cup of playdough.

I don't pretend to understand the ways of /. moderation, maybe they thought I was making some serious point. No one is stereo-typing anyone (well, maybe the drummers, my drummer usually deserves it).

-s

posted a long time ago

[proj_2501]

this looks familiar...

More Channels for the Digital Musician

Slashdot editor translation

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell -- they "modified" ethernet? Sorry, then it's not ethernet. Can you broadcast other data over the same fabric and have it work? Then MAYBE I'll believe it's ethernet. Other than that, they ripped off some ideas. But why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? I bet they could have used EXACTLY ethernet and it would have just worked.

What the hell -- they "modified" ethernet? Sorry, THAN it's not ethernet. Can you broadcast other data over the same fabric and have it work? THAN MAYBE I'll believe it's ethernet. Other THEN that, they ripped off some ideas. But why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? I bet they could have used EXACTLY ethernet and it would have just worked.

Re:Slashdot editor translation

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother in law griped to me the other day about Slashdot's then/than problems, especially Taco. It seems they get it wrong more than a monkey or a if (rand(2)) { word[3] = "e"; } else { word[3] = "a"; }.

It could be you, Dave, or it could be the start of a movement.

3 chords?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a waste of an SG. I hate people like you, Taco.

Obligatory idiocy

[gmcraff]

&lt idiot mode="on&gt

Could you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these babies? It'd be like, like... a BAND!

&lt/idiot&gt

Now we just need ethernet ports in drum kits, synthesizers, net-attachments for brass, woodwind, and string instruments, and you could play your piece of a song over the 'net. I don't think the "multiplayer" option will arrive, though... different latencies tend to really kill the song.

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[Fast Ben]

I want a chord kernel configurator!

Snakeoil

[Mononoke]

Gibson also says to not be surprised to see Ethernet ports on guitars within the next 12 to 18 months.

The combo instrument business (instruments, amps, etc. for your typical garage band) is the largest snakeoil business in the world. Out-of-this-world inventions show up here all the time, and every rockstar wannabe will save up money from his lawn-mowing job to buy whatever latest piece of crap is marketed to make him think he can be the next Eddie VanHalen. Guess what: Two years from now the cool crap will be old worthless crap because it didn't do anything but make money for the local music store.

Wanna know the first problem I see with this: Nobody plugs their guitar straight into the mixer. The guitar amplifier is an integral part of the tone and playability of a guitar. A Les Paul plugged into a Marshall stack; A Stratocaster plugged into a Fender Twin; These are still around because they work. Stick a mic in front of the amp, run that through the sound system, and away you go. Save the digital conversions for places where it's needed.

Bands don't need more-complicated ways to hook their guitars up. The current way works just fine. There are some wonderful improvements occuring with digital consoles, digital system processors, and so on. But these have little to do with Gibson and guitars.

Gibson is still trying to find ways to put a New & Improved label on an already perfect guitar invented over 40 years ago, just to get people to buy the latest crap.

Sad part is, people will.

(Yes, I'm a sound man. And I do have digital consoles to work with. But all the digital crap in the world won't make a player any more talented.)

Re:Snakeoil

[proj_2501]

Actually that Roland guitar synth is really quite cool, and it still connects to your guitar amp.

Re:Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

Guitar--> amp --> sounds great. No argument there. But no one here seems to understand that the amp itself could/will also have this jack there also, so the FOH mixer can get a signal post-amp and post-speaker-emulation. There's already XLR outs directly from amps that go straight into the snake to the board.

Re:Snakeoil

[kin_korn_karn]

The combo instrument business (instruments, amps, etc. for your typical garage band) is the largest snakeoil business in the world. Out-of-this-world inventions show up here all the time, and every rockstar wannabe will save up money from his lawn-mowing job to buy whatever latest piece of crap is marketed to make him think he can be the next Eddie VanHalen.

Wrong, the biggest snakeoil business is the golf business. Both are dirty, though - one takes advantage of dumb teenagers, the other takes advantage of insecure middle managers.

Re:Snakeoil

[zeronyne]

I think that's what this Guitar Port from Line 6 is also.

www.line6.com

Re:Snakeoil

[Sabalon]

I dunno. I still think the best sound is a mic in front of the amp. Line-out's on amps just don't sound right. I seriously doubt that ethernet out would sound any better.

Now...if you could place an ethernet mic in front of the amp with the syncing on it, that'd be cool - at least until:

"Illegal Operation: device eth0 detected "Stairway to Heaven". Port disconnected.

No Stairway - denied!

Re:Snakeoil

[rho]

Fair comments. But, before you disparage it, take into account the next bunch of teenagers saving their lawnmowing money for this "digital crap" may be the ones who will push music creation and/or delivery towards a brand new direction.

Your complaints are similar to the first guy who complained about electrifying the guitar: "Just put a mic on a plain old' accoustic--that's the best sound you can get!"

Here's a from-the-ass example: a bunch of guitar players get together in a club, connect all together through a switch, and run the signals through a processor that converts all the sounds to the same key. Which key is controlled by another device that reads motion patterns of the people on the dance floor. The combined sound is then piped into the club's speakers. Evolutionary music!

Just keep an open mind about it. Sure, Gibson developed it to sell more stuff, but that's what they're there for. Unless you think that music stopped in the 1970's with guitar rock...

Re:Snakeoil

[given_to_fly]

Very interesting idea..
like not recording with reverb because you can add it in later.

i wonder how it would sound.. you could then pick and choose amps and settings to make it sound how you like. all you are recording then is the guitarists motion, the guitar body, strings and pick up..

you would probably then want a "monitor amp" for the musician to get some feedback from..

thanks man .. this makes this thing look much cooler then i first thought..

Re:Snakeoil

[TheReverand]

Actually it is called a pod.

If you would like to here what a pod + a steinberger GMT-7 sound like straight into the board, listen to the right track on troublemint.com's mp3s. Alternately, a Parker Nitefly through a pod is in the left track.

Re:Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

Here here!

They can take my '71 goldtop Les Paul Deluxe and Fender Super Six when they pry them out of my cold dead hands....

Cold and dead because that damn Fender amp fell over, crushed me half to death, and finished me off with thick chunky voltage from the shattered soviet surplus tubes.... but dead nontheless!

Hell, a cheap amp in a fish tank is all Duane Eddy needed.

Re:Snakeoil

[MindStalker]

WTF are you talking about? The biggest snakeoil buisness is bob's snakeoil. They sell the highest quality snakeoil you can buy. If you go into a golf shop trying to buy snakeoil you won't be able to find it. So I think your just confused buddy!

(I apologize for not being able to find any websites that actually claimed to sell snakeoil. I really wanted to link to one :( oh well)

Re:Snakeoil

[goodie]

Ok, you're obviously a guitarist. Now from a sound engineer's point of view.

Unbalanced pickups in guitars SUCK. I have to have a DI box for every channel, muck around with Earth Lifts to reduce the humming, mess around with feeble 1/4inch jacks, etc etc etc.

If only some musicians would put decent balanced pickups in their guitars and a Canon connector straight on the end...

As far as mic'ing the amp - I had a moronic musician once insist that I use a high quality Neumann U87 mic on his amp because a DI box would distort the sound. He then proceeded to play through the most vile distortion effects pedal you could imagine.

Re:Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

But what you think doesn't matter, as it is purely the musician's vision. If that "vile" distortion is what he wants to provide the desired effect for his music, that's what he needs. You're just there to make sure you get as clean and clear a reproduction of the sound he's making as possible.

Re:Snakeoil

[hejpig]

Snakeoil is the name of the game but does this facility have any upsides? Music (big subject) has a lot of angles for different people and somebody will end up not being able to live without this.

The big market is the home wannabees and the semi-pro hotel type bands who play every night. We cover players with strong feelings are not amongst the big spenders. The hotel bands and touring machines might well welcome this as it means (even) shorter set up times. Although setting up time is mostly decided by the equipment tonnage and the size of the drum kit. I can't quite see a rock guitarist on stage with an RJ45 though. This is not a plug designed for repeated insertion. Guitar changes with a tramsmitter... poor stage hands get enough grief with cables designed for stage use.

Studio music may well use it, especially if it gives a sound which is a bit different. Novelty is important and in the studio and anything that works is Kosher. Somebodies do plug their guitars straight into the desk, but then they play loudly in the control room or studio with some good loudpeakers or through an amp (which is also miked up). Everthing gets tried in the studio.

Re:Snakeoil

[Mononoke]

Now from a sound engineer's point of view.

From one sound "engineer" to another:

If only some musicians would put decent balanced pickups in their guitars and a Canon connector straight on the end...

Why the heck would you want direct guitar sound into the console? Have you ever heard an electric guitar direct? Sound like crap, because the guitar is only half of the equation.

As far as mic'ing the amp - I had a moronic musician once insist that I use a high quality Neumann U87 mic on his amp because a DI box would distort the sound. He then proceeded to play through the most vile distortion effects pedal you could imagine.

The muso was right: The word 'distortion' means the unwanted alteration of the timbre and character of sound (in this case.) Your DI could not have gotten the tone the muso wanted, because it wasn't hearing what was coming out of the speakers. What was coming out of the speakers was what the musician wanted.

If you can't understand that then you are definately in the wrong business. Where did you get your "engineering" degree from, anyway?

Re:Snakeoil

[goodie]

What you're saying applies a little in a studio when recording a CD and the artist is happy to pay megabucks to continually re-record it, but in a live situation the engineer can make or break a performance and have a real effect on the audience's enjoyment of the performance. Getting the right balance between instruments, the right amount of bass guitar at the right time in the song etc.

NOOO! This is no good!

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll just give the fucking guitar players ONE MORE REASON to turn their amps all the way up and drown out the rest of the band.

They say a bass player needs amplifier watts equal to the rest of the band put together. Some claim that this is due to the low sensitivity of the human ear to low frequencies. This is incorrect. It's to compete with the fucking guitarist and his 100w full stack and his lame ass Fender or Gibson.

Journal, Feb 13 2003

[rocjoe]

Dear Diary, I connected my SG to my old Win 2000 box and played a live sumulcast through my website. Unfortunately I was hit by the Nimda virus and my guitar will only play "In-a-gadda-da-vida"

This sounds good until...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You are at the Van Halen concert, and it's just about time for one of Eddie's solos, and all the sudden script kiddies DoS the mixer panel. Or worse. They're really clever, and all the sudden, the speakers start booming...

"I love you, you love me, we're a happy fam-i-ly..." from the Barney kids show.

IP

[Unprintable]

Why do a incompatible and non-routable hack? Better do IP all the way! Even better, IPv6 with stateless address allocation, router advertising, multicast, IPSEC, and publish a RFC.

Re:IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Because straight IPv6 is totally inappropriate for this application. You need real time performance, and you need extremely low latency. There are protocols (like RSVP) that might provide enough quality-of-service stuff to give you the bandwidth partitioning you need, but they focus on large networks with routers, and their goal is to make something that will work over a WAN. They do not focus on delivering packets with the absolute minimum latency, which is of critical importance with musical instruments, because all the notes need to happen at exactly the same time.

In fact, it's really best if the latency is exactly the same for all audio channels. Otherwise, you'll be picking up the same noises on different microphones and they'll come in out of phase. If that doesn't make sense to, just trust me that if you don't manage latency very carefully, the band is going to sound like utter crap.

I haven't read the spec, but I'm hoping they actually broadcast some kind of clock signal or otherwise synchronize on time and then take all the samples at the same time.

Even if they pull off great timing and latency, it's still potentially problematic, because in a live setting, you usually have two different sources of amplified sound: the instruments' amps on stage, and the main speakers. If there's a significant delay between the time that sound comes out of the amps on stage and the time that it comes out of the main speakers, that's going to be perceived as an echo or a phase effect or something bad. In fact, at big shows that have more than one tower of main speakers, the sound guy usually uses a special digital delay box to delay the sound coming from the speakers closer to the stage so that the sound from that tower and the tower that's out in the audience arrives together. Otherwise, you can make even an open grassy field sound like a gymnasium or football stadium.

Now that I think about it, this may be the reason for having the Ethernet in the guitar and not the amp. If the guitar amp picks up its signal from the Ethernet just like the house sound then it should have the same delay (modulo the speed of light and some factors that can be controlled). That's a Good Thing(tm). The more I think about it, the more I think the Gibson folks have probably designed something pretty good.

A plea to slashdot: I like my trolls to be 'real'

[Anonymous Coward]

In the good old days of slashdot, there used to be some pretty good trolls in amongst the general noise and discussion. With the migration of all the top-quality trolls to adequacy.org, slashdot seems to have lost some of its anarchic qualities.

Is there any way we can try and attract those old-skool trolls back to slashdot ? I am fed up with the crapflooding and first-posting that passes for 'trolling' these days.

Bring back Jon Erikson, osm, OOG the caveman, 70%, 80md, gbd, dmg, gnarlphlager, iat, tlt, jsm and many many more.

Please. Its time to stop the rot!!!

Yes, but will they run linux?

[Eugene O'Neil]

They are talking about putting ethernet ports on guitars... which means there will be little computers embedded in the guitars. Add linux and apache, and you get a web server that REALLY "rocks"!

Re:Yes, but will they run linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! You've won the first "But does it run Linux?" post contest! Scotty, tell Eugene what he has won!!!

Is it really going to matter?

[Master Of Ninja]

Is it really going to matter for the amateur in the bedroom? They talk about concerts in the article, and as I don't have any experiences of concert management at all I couldn't comment on how difficult it would be to set up. 64 signals per cable? Not for me - I only need 3 max. The emphasis in the article seems to be for live bands, and probably then only ones who do big concerts (not the cosy wee stage venue type).

This won't change the experience at all for most people (IMHO anyway). The only thing this would be useful for was to hook up to your computer to make home-brewed music (i hope this is in the specs anyway). I wonder what else anyway one could do with these - a competition is required me thinks. Since ethernet cards are quite cheap these should become standard quite soon anyhow, but still there's something more comforting in thinking the sound is analogue - another poster did mention people abandoned digital to go back to analogue. There's not really enough information to see what useful stuff could be done with this. Are they going to rob us of our analogue cables in this move as well?

Re:Is it really going to matter?

[geekoid]

When this technology is mass produced, most guitars at the amature level will probably have it. that means that you can have a bunch of friends over, plug into your network and jam. no more set up.

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[Nightpaw]

Sure, Bruce, my pinky gets lazy on a C7 and "ls" turns into "rm -Rf".

Good News

[eclectric]

1. Ted Nugent "fans" (the term is highly suspect) are already deaf.

2. If this proposed incident did actually damage or kill 200 of his "fans," wouldn't that decimate his fan base by 100%?

3. Hopefully, the buffalo (or is it a bison?) that he parades around shamelessly will finally die and free from its miserable life.

Re:Good News

[zangdesign]

Actually, I think the buffalo is already free from it's miserable life. Damn, I hope so - coz' that's just some horrible crap to make a buffalo listen to.

Re:Good News

[penguinboy]

decimate his fan base by 100%

That's humorous, given the meaning of 'decimate'.

Re: Bad Chords

[Canthros]

I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound... well, just as bad, but digital.

So... Your music would be discretely bad instead of continuously bad. I suppose that's an improvement.

Re:Sorry, not Ethernet -- RTFA

[Conspiracy Theorist]

**sigh**


"We have put software on top of Ethernet that basically synchronizes those packets to a master clock and allows it to send many, many channels and have many work stations that work together in synchrony, meaning low latency, meaning music."



Doesn't look like modified ethernet to me...

Re:Sad news for horror fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit - now I'll never know what happens to Roland and friends. I always thought that he'd die before finishing the Dark Tower off.

So, was it the wacko with the van again?

The movie hackers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't a major point of this move to hack into one of those major "Gibsons" ???

Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[SirSlud]

MIDI is not what they are talking about here. They are talking about audio. MIDI is not audio, but rather 'piano roll'. The only data being sent to the sequencer/keyboard is which notes to play, and when. Conversely, audio is the actual audio signal generated by the instrument, whether it be a keyboard or a guitar.

The true value of audio over ethernet is the existing infrastructure (hubs, switchers, etc), coupled with being able to identify 'devices' hooked up to your setup. Mixers, be them software or hardware mixers, that are 'ethernet aware' would be able to auto-assign the devices name that an instrument reports itself as to the network to faders and knobs in your setup. Currently, you have to know which wires are going from which instruments into what audio-ins on your hardware/software mixer/multitrak; in order to fade a guitar line, for instance, you need to be physically aware of which audio-in the guitar is connected to. This amounts to a huge amount of organizational work for producers/techs, as they must use project software or notebooks to keep track of how various projects are wired up. Some technologies are alleviating these troubles, but from what I understand, its still a pain in many setups to keep track of which songs and projects are wired up which way.

Hopefully, this Gibson technology would allow producers and sound guys to forget those details, and just assign 'network instruments' to which ever faders they please, without ever having to verify that the guitar was plugged into the correct audio-in, corresponding to the controls (faders, knobs) you wish you use to do your production and mixdowns.

At least, thats what I get out of it.

BTW, I am a d'n'b producer with a fairly functional grasp of lo-pro to mid-pro MIDI and audio gear, so while I'm not privvy to the nitty gritty of doing sound for live shows or full rack mixers in-studio, I think I can glean what the true pay off is here, for the sound guys and musicians alike.

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[SirSlud]

BTW, on top of this, sequencers/multitraks/etc could remember effect/send/insert, levels, eqs, etc for each instrument. So a musician could come into the studio, work for awhile, save his setup, and then have that setup automatically come up again the next time he plugged into the studio a few weeks later. The more devices were MAGIC aware, the more time would be saved in setting up between projects. I can just set it .. foot pedals remembering which instruments were set to what levels ... oooooooo, so cool.

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[elmegil]

This'd be a lot more useful if they weren't outfitting guitars with it. Amps, on the other hand, would be a nice place to be able to go straight to the board with something that ID's who it is etc. Bypass the mic by giving me a digital out that is the same sound being fed to the speaker, and I'll be pretty happy.

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[CoolVibe]

(as a guitar player) I think this is interesting. Especially if you can save a couple of different setups so you can get back to a sane state if you were.. erh.. experimenting. Also, per-track settings is a cool thing, I bet.

This will take a lot of hassle out of setting up your guitar-effects and amp settings. I like it. I wouldn't mind messing with it.

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[s.o.terica]

Unfortunately, MAGIC really does just confuse the digital future of music, primarily because it is an inferior technology to Yamaha's mLan. Advantages of mLan:
- mLan is FireWire (rather than this "modified" Ethernet), so it already works with virtually any new computer
- mLan is also nominally at least twice the speed of MAGIC (typically more since FireWire generally gets much closer to its rated throughput than Ethernet)
- mLan combines (modified) MIDI and audio data over the same bus
- FireWire supports isochronous transfer which makes it far more valuable for time-sensitive data (i.e. music) -- one of the main reasons FireWire is the predominant standard for DV.
- mLAN devices have already been available for around a year.

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[SirSlud]

I think the idea here (it being an open protocal) is that it could go on ANY device. Gibson is primarily a guitar maker, so it's only natural they would demo it on guitars and pitch the technology on guitars to get the ball rolling.

For instance, I don't think amps would be useful at all .. it would be much more useful on my turntables ... see what I'm getting at? :)

Re:Confused? Maybe this will clear things up.

[SirSlud]

Fair enough, although to be honest, I hadn't heard of mLan before today, and I am quite attentive to the music tech scene (tho, as I said before, not the studio scene/culture .. I'm a bedroom producer). I will defaintely check it out now. Note: I'm a PC guy. I realize that a substantial portion of the digital music world is Mac. I grew up with Mac, but alas cannot afford my once childhood buddy anymore.

Also, to get firewire on my computer would require I buy a firewire card (no idea on prices), where as MAGIC seems to work on existing ethernet (maybe this is where I'm confused), with an overlying software layer that processes traffic in a way that makes it digital-music production friendly. To that end, lots of spaces/studios/etc are already wired with ethernet networks, so you get serious reuse here. Of course, if you truely do need 'modified' ethernet cable/hubs/etc, then this point becomes moot, and I place myself in the corner with a pointy hat on my head. Even beyond that, MAGIC seems to be more geared towards live performance setups and mixing boards (ie, hardware), than PCs themselves. Just my perspective on it. Thanks for the heads up about mLan!

The network roadie?

[jfsather]

This is great. Does this mean that bands will have to have network engineers as roadies?

"Um, were sorry people, the show can't go on--the router crashed."

-J

Re:The network roadie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just try to watch that Cisco guy fix a routing table after a 2 hour coke binge with the roadies in the back of the trailer.

sssssssshshhwooooowwww IIIpppppp connnnnnnnfig

It will still be proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

"Modified the ethernet protocol" A bad idea
"Used the ethernet protocol" a good idea
"Used the TCP/IP/UDP protocol" a better idea

Re:It will still be proprietary

[statusbar]

That doesn't mean that it will be proprietary.

A system like this cannot be done without modified protocols. The existing ones don't cut it.

--jeff

Wireless

[malarkey]

Make this wireless and it will take 1/8 the time to set up the band.

Cables won't hold up

[alexjp]

I'm constantly plugging and unplugging my laptop ethernet cable (4x/day). The ends last about 3 months before the plastic tabs break off. Somehow, I think that ethernet cables won't hold up well enough for any serious music use.

Re:Cables won't hold up

[geekoid]

sounds like you have found a spin-off market "musician quality connectors"

Re:Cables won't hold up

[Loligo]

>"musician quality connectors"

Great. Monster Cable will start making cat 5E..

-l

Re:Cables won't hold up

[Anonymous Coward]

and charging $60 for 18' of it, to boot!

Familiar

[loydcc]

I loved this when it was called MIDI.

Stairway to Heaven Virus

[Sturm]

A good crack would be to break into someone's guitar and make it play 'Starway to Heaven" over and over and over...

Re:Stairway to Heaven Virus

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh-huh, and given what the average amateur's guitar is used for, how would you be able to tell when this had happened?

Not such a good idea

[Tom7]

I think this will make a good bus for communicating between digital devices (say, a DAT and your computer, or maybe a keyboard/MIDI box and a computer), but it seems to be a pretty crummy way to communicate between a guitar and an amp. (And I am sure as hell not going to record guitar directly into my PC!)

One good side effect, though, will be "ruggedized" ethernet cables available at my local music store. =)

fire up tcpdump and see...

[jeffiet]

arp who-has "Lucille"

Get it? B.B. King's guitar.

Wait a second...

[albamuth]

Are they really using ethernet or are they simply using RJ45 jacks and plugs? Like another poster said, if they modified ethernet, than it ain't ethernet!

"Lenny, get another hub -- we've got too many packet collisions on bass!"
"Your amps may go up to eleven, be we've got 100Mbits/s!"

I think I'll stick with good ol' analog.

It is NOT just a new MIDI!

[PastaAnta]

But more along the line of AES/EBU or SPDIF.

MAGIC can transfer digitized sound without (excessive) jitter and latency like AES/EBU. But AES/EBU can only transfer a single stereo channel in 24 bit/92kHz whereas MAGIC can transfer 32 channels in 32 bit/192kHz!

MIDI only transfers information like notes, volume etc. Not the digitized sound itself. This enables you to connect a MIDI keyboard with a synthesizer and produce sound, but NOT to transfer digitized sound from e.g. a guitar to an amplifier or DAT.

The spec. for MAGIC allows for sending control packets containing MIDI information though. Therefore it can ultimately replace BOTH MIDI and AES/EBU etc.

Re:It is NOT just a new MIDI!

[gse]

Well... people have transmitted audio over MIDI via SDS SDS. Yeah, it's virtually useless because MIDI's transfer rate is awful, but it works -- I've used it.

If I'm understanding the Gibson thing right, the neat part is not that you can have digital output straight from your guitar; it's that you can replace analog snakes with ethernet cables between the stage and the FOH mixer. I suppose that's cool... but OTOH sound guys know how to troubleshoot and repair analog problems; knowing what to do with yer ethernet is hosed is a different story.

But hey, if they can simply replace MIDI that'd be a pleasant step forward (though Yamaha's mLAN hasn't managed to do it yet).

I smell a Milli Vanilli comeback

[jkindoll]

Wait a minute...Milli's dead. Oh well, Vanilli can not only lip synch his songs, his band can air guitar while Wil Wheaton sits at home and plays the music for them! Sounds like a whole new bunch of Grammys are just waiting to be given back.

Les Paul would have been proud....

[StressGuy]

Although, I can't help but think about that old Les Paul synthesizer guitar that had the ribbon cable coming out of it and the box that modulated the sound by blowing through a flexible tube.

Re:Les Paul would have been proud....

[given_to_fly]

Les Paul can still be proud as he is still alive.
The tube with the box is called a talk box but it is not related to the synth really.. they are 2 different entities

Re:Les Paul would have been proud....

[StressGuy]

Wow, I had heard that he passed on...perhaps bad info.

Yes, I know about the talk box, back when I was in high school (in a town where every other male played guitar), a friend of mind had both of those items, I guess I tend to think of them together.

Technically superior?

[Frank Sullivan]

It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?

The only thing "technically superior" about digital amps is that they are cheaper to manufacture.

And no, i won't be putting ethernet on my Gibson. Experience and simple physics dictates that the cord itself from the high-impedance guitar electronics to the amplifier input also colors the tone, and i'm not going to give up that coloration. Digitizing at 16bit/44.1khz "CD quality" commits absolute horrors on the subtleties of good tone (this can be mostly defeated with sufficient bandwidth, ie 24bit/96khz, but the Philips/Sony "Perfect Sound Forever" format is a crime against music).

Then again, my main guitar is an acoustic with no electronics at all, so i suppose it won't be needing ethernet. :}

Re:Technically superior?

[dimitri_k]

And no, i won't be putting ethernet on my Gibson. Experience and simple physics dictates that the cord itself from the high-impedance guitar electronics to the amplifier input also colors the tone, and i'm not going to give up that coloration. Digitizing at 16bit/44.1khz "CD quality" commits absolute horrors on the subtleties of good tone (this can be mostly defeated with sufficient bandwidth, ie 24bit/96khz, but the Philips/Sony "Perfect Sound Forever" format is a crime against music).


The spec claims 32 channels of high fidelity (32 bit, up to 192 kHz) audio. So, that should be "sufficient".

If you want the coloration of your audio chord, then don't use this.

And of course, you can plug this into a DAC and then into an amp if you want the tubes to massage the signal.

This is just a clean way to transmit digital audio around a stage or studio. That's good, not bad.

Re:Technically superior?

[tshak]

Here's something I haven't understood about digital sampling rates and "analog" sound. If your final format is CD, then won't you loose the same "coloration" of the sound if your guitar/keyboard/mixer is digital? In which case, as long as your equipment has a high quality A/D converter, it really shouldn't make a difference.

Of course, this is all speculation. I have a VirusKB "Virtual Analog" digital keyboard, and I have a Juno 106 Analog keyboard. As good as the Virus sounds (great, actually), there's definatly a "phatter" sound coming from the Juno.

Re:Technically superior?

[KidSock]

Digitizing at 16bit/44.1khz "CD quality" commits absolute horrors on the subtleties of good tone

Actually, according to the spec you can negotiate up to 192kHz at the expense of only four channels as opposed to 32 at 48kHz. No matter, I agree, as a programmer and owner of a Les Paul 59 Reissue plugging into a Marshall and cutting loose is what it's about and always will be. However, if you're experimenting with digital effects, or want custom setups for the road, I would imagine just having a linux box connected to a hub of intruments and a mixer connected to your PA might be a rather pleasant setup to work with. I would consider this progress. And the spec looks very genuine. I wonder how long it will be before there are linux drivers so you can just plug right into a hub on your LAN.

Re:Technically superior?

[Just Some Guy]

If your final format is CD, then won't you loose the same "coloration" of the sound if your guitar/keyboard/mixer is digital?

The idea is that each component that modifies the digital signal slightly degrades the sound quality. If you turn the volume down on a digital mixer, then you're effectively throwing away the least significant bits of the audio stream. The goal, then, is to sample your sound at a high enough resolution that even after all of those lossy transformations, you end up with enough bits left over to fill the CD master's dynamic range.

Re:Technically superior?

[rasilon]

It is exactly because of the subjectiveness of music that valves vs. solid state is not one of objective quality. They are different, not better or worse. Using ethernet will result in a _different_ colouration and whether this is better or worse depends on the effect you are trying to acheive. I'll bet that ther are many guitarists who will look at this and go "Cool, what can I make this do?" and that is what drives music forwards. You don't have to lose the tone you have, you can just add a new one to your collection.

Re:Technically superior?

[Weh]

Here's something I haven't understood about digital sampling rates and "analog" sound. If your final format is CD, then won't you loose the same "coloration" of the sound if your guitar/keyboard/mixer is digital? In which case, as long as your equipment has a high quality A/D converter, it really shouldn't make a difference.

It's not about recording sound, it's about producing sound. Digital recording does a good job of recording sound. However most components in a typical guitar system all produce a specific sound; pickups, amp, speakers, etc. If you bypass all those things you will lose a lot of the sound color because it is never produced.

Re:Technically superior?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?

The bias for tube instead of transistor amplifiers stemmed from the crossover distortion of early Class-B transistor amplifiers. Tube amps also had Class-B output stages, but the crossover cutoff in tubes is smoother and more linear, handing the current from one of the output tubes to the other more cleanly. There was also a different sort of distortion in the Class-A preamp stages, resulting from the nonlinearity of the response of transistors to input voltages.

Later generations of amps have improved the situation, and no doubt substuted (or exposed) other, more subtle, distinctions in how they distort (and thus "color") a signal.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the effect you want is out of reach, or even expensive, with this system.

If you cleanly digitize an audio signal, with a sampling rate high enough to keep "images" out of your ear and a word size big enough to keep quantization error below the noise of the analog components (or at least below the threshold of hearing when the instrument is silent) and with extra room for roundoff error in later computations, you have a faithful digital representation of the original signal.

You can then DIGITALLY apply any "coloration" distortions that would have been applied by a tube amp, transistor amp, mismatched cabling/load impedence, blown-out speaker cone, or whatever floats your band's boat. Also echoes off the back of the speaker cabinet, the walls of a virtual "concert hall", the T-shirts of the front row of groupies, etc. Also a whole floor covered with virtual wah/fuzz/you-name-it boxes.

About all that's missing is the ability of the sound from the speakers to drive the strings of your axe, to pull Hendrix-style feedback guitar effects. (And I have a few ideas on how that could be faked up, too.)

So if your "effects mixer" throws a little CPU power at the problem you can get the same effect you would have gotten from a tube amp. (First-order distortions can be handled by a table lookup or a very simple function.)

Throw some more CPU power at it and you can do everything that's ever been done in a concert or studio, plus a lot of new stuff that was just too complicated to do when it was build-a-box, but is trivial when it's write-a-few-lines-of-code.

Of COURSE you won't put Ethernet in your (existing) Gibson - though I bet you'll plug it into an analog-guitar-to-Magic adapter box, if only to check that they got it working right. But I won't be surprised if the bulk of the next generation of instruments has Magic, or something like it, onboard, and makes music at least as wonderful as (if perhaps slightly different from) what we have now.

This is an enabling technology. Once music is running down the cable as open-standard UDP packets, a whole generation of music hackers can start hammering it into any shape they want.

Re:Technically superior?

[Doctor Faustus]

The only thing "technically superior" about digital amps is that they are cheaper to manufacture.

Solid state amps are cheaper to manufacture. Adding digital processing is a more recent development that makes solid state amps (theoretically, any amps, but I don't think tube amps have been done) more interesting and more versatile, which I would have to put in the technically superior category, at least over other solid state amps.

like mLAN?

[version5]

Sounds like Yamaha's mLAN, which is based on IEEE 1394 (Firewire) and carries 100 audio signals, and 4096 MIDI channels, although I think its proprietary. The TechTV website has no mention of clock information being transferred through Gibson's protocol, or even MIDI. I will be very disappointed if they didn't put those into the spec.

If hardware manufacturers actually support this protocol, it will be a huge boon to the home studio hobbyist. Imagine, a 32-in/32-out soundcard for the price of an ethernet card! My money is on Yamaha. They already have hardware that supports their standard, including a couple of digital mixers. If only Gibson and Yamaha would work together on this, we might have a slight hope of interoperable standards.

cool!

[MarcoAtWork]

this looks pretty cool: instead of having a mess of cables going everywhere and having to figure out where to plug what in the dark, you could just have a couple of hubs and *one* cable going back to the mixer.

Regardless of the hub you plug your instrument in, the mixer will 'know' it, and map you to the appropriate slider/controls, which really helps if, say, you have set an input with gain/eq/etc. for your bass drums and some dolt swaps it with the singer's mike just before the set starts...

This will make set-up and tear-down a total snap for the average working band (the 2-3 pub gigs a week kind).

For the 'tubes sound better' audiophiles, let me let you in on a big secret: the average pub-person couldn't care less about how your amp sounds, or the brand of your guitar or what kind of mixer you're using, especially as the evening goes on (and the beer goes in) not to mention the fact that you can't control the acoustics of the pub or the sometimes not-that-great FOH that you have to use...

Re:cool!

[pigpen_]

For the 'tubes sound better' audiophiles, let me let you in on a big secret: the average pub-person couldn't care less about how your amp sounds, or the brand of your guitar or what kind of mixer you're using...

This is true, but there are musicians that will always be fanatical about their sound and the gear they use to get it.

Next step is digital sound to the speakers

[ickpoo]

Did it occure to anyone that this is the first step of digital all the way to the speakers?

Can you say mandated on all speaker manufacturers? This is not good.

Timing and network latency

[Phillip2]

It makes me wonder how you cope with any network
latency. I'm not sure what level of delay can be coped with. I did some rough testing the other day, and I know that I can hear differences of 50ms in the placement of the note very easily. I never got round to testing it below this point.

All of this places a practical limit on the distance that the musicians can be apart. Under the circumstances I wonder what advantages this has over a fairly standard jack plug....

Phil

No way this will take off

[Anonymous Coward]

As a guitar player of 15 years and the proud owner of a ton of bizzare equipment (and the proud ower of a B.A. in Music Composition) I can say this will bomb. There are very, very subtle electrical interactions that happen between an amp (or stomp boxes) and the pickups in the guitar. You think that there isn't a forward or backward voltage bias that effects the sounds? You think this stuff is so simple you can just digitize it and expect the magical ethernet to handle it?

No, kids. This is the wild and wooly world of magical analog electronics and while digital makes leaps and bounds, I honestly doubt it will quite match the lovely interaction between a classic Les Paul and a Marshall stack. The would be a GODSEND for MIDI, but as another poster noted, Yamaha already has a way of doing this over Firewire, which is a vastly superior technology for this kind of time-sensitive thing because of it's isochronous transport layer. Ethernet with it's packet collisions will just simply not do. (not to mention the joy of potentially having firewire powered synth modules without the pain in the ass wall warts)

And finally, latency is the death of electric/electronic instruments. Can they guarantee the (nearly) zero latency that I can already get with my analog gear?

Re:No way this will take off

[Phoukka]

Idiot, read the article first. The new protocol takes care of latency, timing issues, packet collisions, etc. Did you honestly think that Gibson would be stupid enough to release something that doesn't address the fundamental flaws of Ethernet in regards to the problem domain?

gibson's magic , was Gmic (gimmick ?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts:

1)
Magic is a spec, and a set of prototypes.
It's not an industry wide,accepted standard-
even though ethernet is.

2)
Last I heard, gibson's patented (well ,
applied for) aspects of it, and that they
won't disclose to OEM's even what that was.

3)
Cirrus logic (a chip maker of codecs)
bought peak audio (a real time audio over
ethernet company) last year. Cirrus can
easily promote an ethernet/audio standard
with orders of magnitude larger market than
Les Pauls with RJ45's up their rear ends.

Thoughts:

1)
Gibson, especially Gibson, can't impose a
standard on the industry

2)
They have not shown anyway that ethernet
improves the playing experience (well maybe
one that I can't discuss ;-))

3)
When Cirrus is on board, I'll know it's real.

There's a long history in this

[Anonymous Coward]

Gibson and their CEO have been at this for a long time with practically zero result. They burned a lot of people with the way the dealt with Opcode, and in fact, they may have destroyed Opcode just to get this stuff (previously called GMICS I think) working.

Gibson has made their money since Henry took over making increasingly expensive and increasingly nostalgic high end guitars. He doesn't strike me as visionary or technical at all, so I'll be surprised if this gets any traction. However, SOMETHING like it will, some day. It may be mLan (though even its inventors have yet to release a stable, usable device on which it works), or it might be something else, but I'll be shocked if it's this Gibson stuff.

Read the article...

[BrK]

"We have put software on top of Ethernet that basically synchronizes those packets to a master clock"

HACK THE PLANET!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit.... I was planning on getting that reference in first.....

Ummmm.

[lumpenprole]

"As soon as you plug the guitar in to the Ethernet port or whatever instrument it is, it'll come up 'Nate's guitar,'" Yaekel said. "Just like in Ethernet, when you plug into an Ethernet hub, you're going to see your computer's name on the network."

When's the last time this guy tried to set up a network in real life? And where the hell does he think he's going to get ethernet savvy roadies?
The last roadies I worked with exposed a port every time they bent over to tape down a cord, but it wasn't ethernet.

"Gibson, the country's second largest guitar..."

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, they are second because they refuse to put the Gibson name on cheap crap. Compare the least expensive Gibson to any Fender Squire series. Thank you, Gibson!

Already happens

[FrankNputer]

I do this all the time. It's called S/PDIF. I take the digital out from a processor pedal, & go right into the S/PDIF in on my sound card.

All digital.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

[Anonymous Coward]

4000 guitars connected to each other... Can play whole hendrix recordings under a minute.

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[The Cat]

Or, by reversing the process, a Postscript file can become an eight-minute fusion solo...

Re:"Gibson, the country's second largest guitar...

[HCase]

umm... to make the comparision more meaningful trying comparing the lowest in epiphone to the squier.

Nope, will not work

[cheezit]

Guitarists are VERY conservative when it comes to gear. I worked as a vacuum tube tech for a while working on guitar amps. Guitar amps are the only place in electronics where you look at an RCA manual from the 1930's to find out what the specs are for something.

The digital amp-modeling units have had some succesd---I have a POD that I play almost exclusively. But guitars will NOT change. The iconic image of a rock star holding a Gibson or a Fender is embedded in the minds of too many middle-aged guitar players.

They only way this could happen is if the plug looks exactly like the current 1/4" model (another product from the 30's). Oh, and it has to be compatible with existing analog gear.

Re:Nope, will not work

[vanza]

Aside from what has already been said about the sound from vacuum tubes being more "warm", a teacher of mine mentioned once that one other reason musicians like vaccum tubes is that there is no transistor today that can match the signal/noise ratio of a 12AX7 tube. I can't say how much he is right or wrong on this, but he has always worked in the area, so...

Re:Nope, will not work

[xgauzex]

i agree that this wont work, i have some experience in this area and a *decent* da converter tends to be very expensive, like around 400-500 dollars. Sice you need one of these in each guitar i dunno just sounds like a alot of hot air

Re:Nope, will not work

[cheezit]

Yes and no. For specific applications vacuum tubes are objectively better, and certainly there are lot of people who feel subjectively that they are.

But there is a LOT of variability in production quality and usable lifetime. One downer is that the high B+ voltages (350v to 500v+) require huge power supply capacitors, which are themselves prone to noise and require periodic replacement. So your TCO for a high-performing tube system is high.

One nice advantage tubes have is that they are highly resistant to radiation. Transistors are not. I'm betting some of those hollowed-out mountains in Colorado have plenty of tube-based equipment, just in case someone drops The Big One.

Non-Digital, you say, offers better sound?!

[MindPhlux]

you know, I see the millions of people getting all huffy.. "analog is better... amps never succeeded digital... I like the fuzziness of my guitar"...

heh... if you would re-read the article, you would see that this is merely a digital *audio connection*. You can still keep your analog amps and such. I'm sure they'll tack on a digital out to an analog amp. And besides, the world does exist outside of guitars. just because gibson came up with the idea dosen't mean it's only for guitars. I'd love to have a digital out on my synth... it'd cut down on tons of midi hassle, and improve the sound quality too!

carrreful... careful careful careful!

solid state reborn

[pohl]

That's not quite the case. Guitarists rejected solid-state amplifiers that get their distortion by
driving transistors beyond their operating specs (similar to overdriving a tube, but producing unpleasant harmonics). Now there are some very nice amplifiers on the market, however, that run their solid-state power amplification entirely within specs, with the distortion produced digitally to simulate the characteristics of overdriven tubes. The result is very nice, and is growing increasingly respected. Tube nazis had their last gasp.

Read the manual on this beast. Very cool.

Soz - cant help myself.....

[Marcus Brody]

-Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! Rock on, baby....

-Does anyone know where I can download Gibson-Linux?

-"Yeah dude, we were like ROCKING wembley stadium... But then we got slashdotted"

-Cant play tonight.... guitar got a virus.

-This Guitar has caused an illegal operation and will be restarted.

-"Hi, looks like your trying to play Johnny B. Goode. Would you like me to help you with that?"

-This guitar sucks. It only has two notes: 1 and 0

-Hey, I cant get broadband. Do you think they will release a modem version?

-Token ring on the guitar string?

-Packet loss during the thrash-metal guitar solo?

Was the big bang louder than drum & bass?

Re:Soz - cant help myself.....

[pmancini]

>-"Hi, looks like your trying to play Johnny B. Goode. Would you like me to help you with that?"

The sad part is this is both funny and so believable. Imagine the interference self-appointed "Guitar Ghods" could wreak... Frightening!

Even worse you are playing and then out comes "Hi Room, M 21 lookin' to hook up!"

Re:Soz - cant help myself.....

[nexex]

*Error* The song you are trying to play is owned by the RIAA. This guitar will cease to function until you pay the required fee & you convert this guitar to Windows Media Format. (You will be automagically billed in 10secs...) Any attempts to circumvent this process will result in irreversible damage to said guitar. Have A Nice Day.

Re:Soz - cant help myself.....

[sfraggle]

I guess now you really can "hack the gibson"!

Re:Soz - cant help myself.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be "Imagine a Steppenwolf cluster of these?"

Br0n to be wiiiilllld....

how about remote mixing?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all those jet setting rock stars that don't want to come home to lay down their tracks. Just plug your guitar into a prepped network jack and lay down your tracks in LA from club med and head back out to the beach.

ob:Hackers the movie

[drivers]

"You want a righteous hack, you gotta hack one of those Gibsons baby, oooh ya."

It wasn't that good as GMICS either

[Anonymous Coward]

Gibson Goes Digital with GMICS

Give it a month and it'll disappear and resurface in a year with a new engineering team and engineering team

Gibson is way ahead

[pmancini]

I moved from Boston, MA to Nashville, TN a few months ago and work about 2 miles from the Gibson HQ. I know some of the people that work in their custom shop and this company is way ahead in customer service. Imagine calling Dell or Compaq and asking for a custom made computer with a really custom and artistically rendered case... they'd hang up on you. Gibson however knows no bounds when making that custom fit guitar for your Country-Metal-Christian sound.

MIDI needed to be updated - this new standard is way ahead of MIDI as it should be. MIDI is so old there is hair growing on it. In the vein of the "yo momma" jokes: Yo MIDI is so old it farts dust!

Anyway, back to your regularily scheduled slashdot postings.

Spinal Tap 2003

[micromoog]

"These go to 802.11!"

Re:Spinal Tap 2003

[Mignon]

Oh, that's great!

I actually went to see Spinal Tap a few months ago at "Carnegie Fucking Hall," as Derek put it, and Nigel's guitar was a masterpiece. On the body, under the strings, was all pickups - probably a dozen (sorry, eleven.) Below that were a speedometer and tachometer, and the body also had exhaust pipes pointing to the other end.

Monster Cables won't hold up

[wembley]

Monster instrument cables are severely overrated.
I had a right-angle plug on a bass cable die within a month.

Of course, I did get another monster cable free b/c of their lifetime warranty...

Re:Monster Cables won't hold up

[Loligo]

>Monster instrument cables are severely overrated.

Sure, and horribly overpriced, but people will still buy them. Especially when the salesman fixing them up with their equipment is on commission and sees the chance to sell $300 worth of cables to go with the amp.

But people will buy anything if an "expert" tells them it's better. Look at the green marker CD enhancement kits, Slick 50, any number of body detoxification "systems"...

Snakeoil will ALWAYS sell.

-l

Re:Monster Cables won't hold up

[Anonymous Coward]

i bought a monster cable because of the warranty. i just had a few cables break, and i figure a monster cable will be no worse, plus it has the lifetime warranty. I've heard the monster cable ends are slightly larger than standard and might wear out some jacks, but that doesn't seem to be true

Neat, but I have to ask,

[A_Non_Moose]

How long before the RIAA requires that these digital signals become encryped to avoid "single note copywright violations?" Hummm?

Forgive my further cynicism, as "I'm a technician, Jim! Not a musician!".
Gibson already has had discussions with companies like Intel, Sony, Philips, and networking giant Cisco Systems.

Royalty free, eh? How long will that last?
Intel p4 only instructions. Clock for clock music timing only available @ 2Ghz and above.
Sony/RIAA...encryption of all signals no matter what its origin.
PHilips...dunno, at a loss.
Cisco. Many specs to choose from, all incompatible with each other. Won't connect to "unauthorized, non Intel, Sony, RIAA approved devices."

Yes, it has been pointed out that "most musicians" will probably hate this new standard, but, if it does take off and is accepted...what do you want to bet that I am dead on with the RIAA's "potential" actions, at the very least?

Think about it. It has happened with DV streams, I certainly think future "AV" streams will suffer the same fate.

In other news . . .

[DeadMeat (TM)]

I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound ... well, just as bad, but digital.

In entertainment news today, it was revealed that CmdrTaco is in fact the new lead guitarist for Limp Bizkit. Widespread rumors suggest that Jon Katz may be Fred Durst in disguise.

Douglas Adams?

[Triv]

Ok, I know Douglas Adams pops up in most threads around here, but...anyone remember "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency?" A computer programmer created an app to map graphable data to a musical scale, (as well as to any graphic you wanted - something about a flock of geese representing a company's net earnings as I recall).

I don't know where that was going, just an odd connection in my head. Anyone want to run with it?

Triv

Re:Douglas Adams?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

for those of us musicians with day jobs as software engineers this is a nightmare come true!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!! great, now we can get entangled in hubs, switches, cat5 with rubber booties, more 9v batteries, in addition to instrument cables, speaker cables, mutrons, phasers, tuners and that ernie ball volume pedal no one uses. And as an added bonus, recording will be returned to the days of that mid-seventies sound smash as such you might find on sly's fresh album, any Qj record, that 'feelings' 8-track sound where all life is drained from the tone and the suck knob is turned up to 11. But wait, that's not all, our DSP chips are gauranteed not to yeild a high bit rate, and you will need our proprietary codec that must first send the audio to the FCC and DoJ to make sure there are no terrorist connections in your music, then gibson holdings will copy the audio to their servers where they can file and claim royalties later on your earnings. All hail technology, the english, MTV, Al Gore, and Britney Spears!!!

Nothing new here...

[Anonymous Coward]

DA over ethernet is nothing new. While Gibson is trying to pass off their "magic" tech as something unique, all it does is compete with existing technology that does the same thing. The Cobranet technology has the same capabilities and has been around for a few years now so you can actually get equiptment based on it from various pro audio vendors. I'm designing an installation around it right now and it was used in the Sydney olympics extensively. Here is the outfit that pioneered the technology:

http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/

Various amp manufacturers offer plug in modules for their higher end amps to allow direct connect to Cobranet including CROWN:

http://www.crownaudio.com/iq.htm

QSC audio has some excellent DA routers based on the technology:

http://www.qscaudio.com/products/amps/rave/rave. ht m

The ones I will be working with are the CAB series from Peavey and are integrated with Peavey's very robust "MediaMatrix" system.

http://mediamatrix.peavey.com/

Happy reading:)

-RobertB

Now what we need...

[seanmeister]

Now what we need is some kind of Napster-type client so we can bypass CD's and steal Metallica tunes directly from James Hetfield's guitar!

hackers

[brer_rabbit]

I guess my license plate reading "I hacked the Gibson", in reference to the awful movie Hackers, will have an entirely new meaning.

Ethernet ports?

[BillyGoatThree]

Why? Why not wireless networking? That would make setup even simpler.

Re:Ethernet ports?

[dkh2]

Why not? Granted, 802.11b would never be sufficient for Pink Floyd or Metallica but, if you went with 802.11a you might have something going.

On-board you would have to take the native analog signal and digitize it but hey, isn't that what MIDI is for? Build in a few extra synthesizer channels and you can make that Stratocaster sound like the Boston Pops.

On the networking side, config your network to be restricted to the actual hardware addresses of the WNICs in the equipment inventory and you should be able to lock out most or all unwanted activity.

Latency v throughput (...and getting off topic)

[broter]

• Wouldn't the throughput in your example actually be measured as 5 exabytes per 3 days, since you wouldn't actually be receiving 34 GB/s in San Francisco, it would just be all at once.

Well, no. Throughput is the expected (or average) data you will see per time unit. In probability terms, this can either be the given data each and every time unit, or it can be huge spikes of data once and a while. It's all washed out in the average.

-RB

The new sound checks

[Sabalon]

circa 1983: "check check 1 2 check check 1 2"
circa 2005: "traceroute traceroute"

Please ignore this imposter

[tswinzig]

The REAL Bruce Perens has a helpful signature that tells us what the REAL Bruce Perens's slashdot ID number REALLY is.

Obviously this is a fake.

good for digital equipment, but not guitar

[Pinball Wizard]

Digital needs to get much better before it can replace tube guitar amps. None of the modeling amps sound as good as an all-tube Fender or Marshall.

For a digital amplifier to truly replace tubes, the current state of DACs and ADCs just don't cut it. There needs to be a much higher resolution in these devices, perhaps 128 bit or even higher. Then, these devices need to learn to react to the dynamics of the player well - a good tube amp can go from a soft passage to full-tilt scream by playing harder and hitting the volume control. Finally digital amps need to be able to do feedback - i.e. interact with guitar pickups in such a way that will interactively produce feedback at different harmonics of the original signal depending on the angle and proximity of the guitar to the amplifier.

Until that happens, I'm sticking with tubes. Perhaps a better application of digital tech to the world of guitar would be to simply make tubes work better - more reliably and consistently.

That said, I'm all for ethernet replacing MIDI. But that's an entirely different proposition.

Re:good for digital equipment, but not guitar

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I agree. 99.9% of these posts on this topic are obviously by non-musicians, and the rest are probably mediocre musicians at best. Every guitarist I know (including myself) appreciates the simplicty, responsiveness, and warmth of the historically analog setup. Guitar -> cable -> tube amp -> speaker. Though I'm very appreciative that Gibson is trying to improve upon the analog status quo, they're going to have a very hard time selling *musicans* on this new scheme.

Slashdotters are notoriously thick headed (while remaining staunchly arrogant) when it comes to quantifying aesthetics. The plain truth is that their minds are incapable of processing the information responsible for human artistic expression. To their minds, art is a "solution" to a "problem" that can ultimately be broken down to "ones" and "zeroes".

A musician is an entirely different beast from an engineer. Engineer: "Why would you want your sound to be distorted? That's ridiculous!" Despite that, Link Wray punched holes in his speaker cones. Engineer: "Why would you want your instrument to feed back? How absurd!" Yet, Jimi Hendrix twisted and "misused" the technology and "perverted" it into something beautiful and musical.

The single unifying thread is that musicians enjoy the warmth and responsiveness of analog technology. The best sampled piano is still a sampled piano. The best sampled, triggered bass played by Bootsy Collins is no match for Bootsy Collins playing his analog bass setup.

What about Balanced Cable Connect to Guitar?

[Cygnus v1]

This idea is silly. I can't think of any good reason for this from a recording perspective; A/D convertors in guitars would be an unwanted variable in trying to get a consistent, quality recorded sound.

Why not leave A/D conversion outside of the guitar, and outfit the guitar with a balanced analog connection using TRS 1/4" or XLR jacks? This would theoretically cut out most of the noise picked up on the unbalanced guitar cables in use today. Plug the balanced connection into and analog or digital mixer or audio interface and go to town...

24 volts across pins 7 and 8

[asmithmd1]

It looks like all they are keeping from "ethernet" is the plugs. If you read the spec they have added 24 volts on pins 7 and 8 limited to 500 mA. Unless you are sure your switch/hub can handle that I wouldn't plug it in. They also say that the MaGic application layer that rides on top of the physical and link layer needs the full 100 Mbs, so no adding a guitar to an existing LAN. Not much here really.

Re:24 volts across pins 7 and 8

[Anonymous Coward]

This is similar to the VoIP phones that need to get power from the network. Cisco has pushing this for a while and even makes 6500 switches that will provide power on pins 7 & 8.

-Fernando

Guitarists, no. Bassists, yes!

[wembley]

Gibson also makes basses, and that's where their early adoption will come. Throw this stuff into some of their Tobias or Steinberger lines, and it will sell. If it's truly open, companies like EMG and Bartolini could take it and run with it.

Most guitarists, who can afford it, are 'purists'. This means guitar (with 50's-era electronics) -> tube amp (with 60's-era electronics). Granted, digital amp-modeling has taken off recently, but basically as a cheap way to get tube tone.

Guitar effects? What's the most popular stompbox? Probably the Ibanez TubeScreamer... 70's technology.

Other musicians, including us bassists, embrace new technology very quickly. Things many bassists use, that are different from 50's, and adopted much quicker than guitartists:

• Active electronics in bass. Do you know any guitarists with active pickups or preamps? When was the last time anyone used the Tone knob on a guitar? I'm all about the 3-band EQ on my bass.
• Extra strings (5&6). The 7-string guitar is just starting to catch on, b/c Limp Bizkit made it popular. Steve Vai was using them 5+ years ago. I've had a 5-string bass for 10 years.
• Solid-state amps. Ampeg SVTs are frickin' heavy.
• New speaker sizes. Most guitarists still play through 12" Celestions, bass players have any combination of 10" to 18", with tweeters and porting.
• New pickup types/shapes. Guitars are single-coil or humbucker, like 50's Strats and Les Pauls. Bassists are using soapbars, MM-style, different amounts of polepieces in J's and P's. Some even use that new Lightwave optical pickup system.

New technology is wasted on guitarists. Give it to people who will really use it!

Love, Wembley

Re:Guitarists, no. Bassists, yes!

[Mister_IQ]

Yeah, then you get to a gig, and the sound guy sets up an ornate mic rig to capture the pure essence of the beautiful tone your guitar player has achieved with his classic gear.

... and then hands you a D/I box so he can bugger with your bass sound at the board until it sounds like HE wants it.

I like a snappy bass sound. Any recordings I heard from the board at any gig has had this big thumpy thumpy bass mush.

I have never ever met a sound guy that has asked me what I want the bass to sound like, or even cared. Nice new gear or not (I'm active, parametric EQ onboard, etc etc) it sounds like the same old crap thanks to unimaginative sound guys.

Re:Guitarists, no. Bassists, yes!

[wembley]

I've been doing OK (not great) into the board at clubs. But it does cut my setup time, which makes for low-stress gigs.

However, I've always DI'ed bass for recording, as opposed to having to find exactly the right mike, mike distance, and bathroom to record guitar sounds in.

Re:Guitarists, no. Bassists, yes!

[pressman]

Actually Steve Vai has been playing Ibanez 7-strings since the late 80's.

The guy to really watch out for is Charlie Hunter who plays custom made 8-string guitars and has no need for a bassist! He does all the bass parts himself with his left hand.... AND HE'S GOOD AT IT! Scary! Every time I see him play I keep looking for a bassist up on stage somewhere and I never find one!

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[jea6]

Interesting? Informative? Jeez! Do moderators even read posts anymore? Whoever moderated this to "Informative" needs to have their User# revoked.

New OS For This

[dygytyz]

Develop a Linux-based OS around this concept. What do you call it?

Easy.

Hendrix.

Avoiding printing the guitar effects and amp.

[broter]

• I still think the best sound is a mic in front of the amp

I agree (as do most producers out there), but the thing I do see from this is the ability to record the guitars dry and send them back through the stack on mix down (which would be miced). That way you don't have to print the effects. Granted you will have to send the guitar through the rig for some tracks, you might be able to keep some avenues open to explore later in mix down.

So I guess I see this as more useful for the wealthier musician who can use 2 or 3 ADATs just for the guitars; send the raw guitar straight to ADAT, use the monitor to go through the amp during tracking and print just those effects that the guitarist needs to bring in and out while playing...

That said, I don't think I'll be buying one just yet (read as : poor).

-RB

Digital schmidgital

[8bit]

Audio should ALWAYS be analog for the best quality. Sure sure, digital protects against noise, but you'll never get the same quality. You always gotta drop information with digital music, 44000 samples a second for example.

Then again any difference between analog and digital quality is purely theoretical...I surely wouldn't notice the difference.

Re:Digital schmidgital

[Chris Johnson]

Yes, but if you plug your Gibson into a roaring Marshall stack or Boogie dual rectifier, it's intentionally being distorted insanely much- meaning that suddenly, the brush of a feather across the strings is slamming your head into the wall.

Try it yourself- alternate between live guitar into a good, utterly cranked amp, and the output of your PC with a digital recording of your guitar. I think the odds are that the difference will become huge, because that much distortion drags out the slightest weakness in the sound.

This is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I went back to playing the acoustic because I was sick of crap cabling making terrible crackling sounds...

Perfect!

High Impedance

[SanLouBlues]

Anybody who doesn't want the sound affected by the basic 1/8" cable just uses low-z mic cables anyways. Plenty of (acoustic) guitars are available which have mic-type outputs built in (washburn, for one).

Replacement for cobranet!

[statusbar]

It looks very much like this is an open source re-implementation of cobranet which is a closed source per-audio-channel license fee system used in existing installations at Tokyo Disney Seas

This is very exciting and goes far beyond just putting an ethernet connector on a guitar.

It is not just streaming audio - synchronized sample clocks are the hardest part about a system like this, since you can and do have multiple transmitters that need to be sample synchronous. That is why they have to use a 'modified' ethernet protocol.

Take a look at Level Control Systems for the type of existing high end audio DSP gear that works with cobranet.

disclaimer: I work with Level Control Systems --jeff

Re:Replacement for cobranet!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are major differences between CobraNet (now owned, along with the rest of Peak Audio, by Cirrus Logic) and the Gibson version. For starters, CobraNet can be routed using existing ethernet switches, while Gibson's is just point to point. CobraNet can also scale to 1280 uncompressed audio channels over gigabit Ethernet. There are many other advantages to Cobranet as well.

Re:Replacement for cobranet!

[statusbar]

Thanks for the info!

Looks like the Gibson version will be good for small installations only.

--jeff

I'll take my Taylor acoustic any day...

[maynard]

No thank you'ee. Never much liked Gibsons anyway... --M

Solution for tech layoffs...

[Zenjive]

Now unemployed network admins can be roadies!

Stepenwolf?

[betis70]

So if you create a beowulf cluster of these, does it become a Stepenwolf?

Re:Stepenwolf?

[Monofilament]

hehehehehe.. trolling laughter..

Home music production... with ease

[Monofilament]

instead of neading to mix everything in to your computer one at a time.... you could just network your equipment and plug it into your ethernet chord... And bam.. your computer recognizes the instruments and you can record... Now that would be awesome.. no worrying about analog sound levels being too low or weak... it'd be digital so the sound is totaly regulated by the software.. I think this is awesome

Ingenious

[TheTomcat]

This is ingenious, so long as it truly IS low/no latency.

When I set up a stage show now, I usually run 24 returns and 6 sends from the board. Industrially, that's a small snake, but it still weighs a ton. Imagine being able to run the whole thing on a single Cat5 ? _AND_ when my guys plug in their gear, there's no guessing which return they're in -- "Brent's Guitar" will henceforth always be in channel 8 or whatever.

Too bad I won't be able to afford this until the 3 next best things come out.

Sound system perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of you don't know what you're talking about. Nobody's saying that you're going to plug in an *electric* guitar directly into this (since the coloration of the amplifiers is part of the sound).

MAGIC *would* work well for acoustic guitars (which Gibson makes) and synths, though. Once you're working with digital, it's just a matter of how good the A/D and D/A converters are. You don't have to worry about the degradation of the signal going to the board (which for an acoustic guitar currently has to go from a 1/4 inch plug to a direct box to the mic cable to the sound board). Ground loops (the 60 Hz hum) would be a thing of the past.

By being able to use a hub, you can basically eliminate all the cable runs and mess that one currently has to deal with. This also is more scalable than running cables back to board (run out of channels, just add a hub on stage rather than cables back to the board). Also, a single Ethernet cable is a lot cheaper than a snake ($200 for a 50 foot, 12 channel snake) to get the signal back to the board--imagine what a 64 channel snake would cost.

Of course, this requires a lot of changes on the part of the manufacturers for everything to play together, but this seems to be heading in the right direction. I for one am looking forward to the development of this technology.

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[mandolin]

Mapping individual notes to letters/numbers/punctuation would be simpler (you could play louder for CAPS)

Your entire chord reportoire is going to be eaten up for emacs key combos anyway :)

God, I thought carpal tunnel was bad before..

MIDI connectors

[dbCooper0]

Sorry, but I have to point out that MIDI uses 5-pin DIN connectors, not Cannon (aka: XLR).

Re:MIDI connectors

[kin_korn_karn]

my mistake... I knew it used 5-pin DIN connectors but I thought that 'cannon' was just slang for any connector bigger than 1/4-inch.

Re:MIDI connectors

[dbCooper0]

Save me a research minute and tell me what a POD is? (haven't played in 5 years or more)

Re:MIDI connectors

[kin_korn_karn]

Line 6's recording processor.. it's a digital amp and cabinet modeler that allows one to get a CLOSE approximation to a mic'd cabinet sound going direct. Much better than the old way of preamp->direct box.

Re:MIDI connectors

[dbCooper0]

I C. Thanks. Previously, I'd only thought about getting back into music for fun/sex/etc. Now I might just for the technical aspects! (proud owner of a mirage, hammond L-100, Red wurlitzer piano, and countless other obsoletes)

CobraNet by Peak Audio was first

[weco713]

But this is nothing new -- Peak Audio's CobraNet has been used for several years for exactly this purpose -- moving multichannel pro or semi-pro audio from place to place in a venue. http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/ It really shines in venues like sports arenas or outdoor concerts with significant distances involved. It's much more cost-effective than long multichannel snakes. Rane http://www.rane.com/nm84.html and QSC http://www.qscaudio.com/products/amps/rave/rave.ht m Peavey http://mediamatrix.peavey.com/ (and others) even build CobraNet input modules into their power amplifiers. Now I'm just waiting for them to extend it to the emerging 10 Gigabit networking... http://www.10gea.org/ WECo.

DIgital vs Analog/Tube vs SS

[nooch]

I play a strat through a Mesa Dual-Rectifier Trem-o-verb, and get a pretty sweet tube tone. That's great and all, but what a b!tch to lug around. I recently picked up a Digitech GNX2 effects processor, and I can plug straight into that and patch that into the PA, and don't even need an amp. It has a bunch of amp models built in, as well as several effects. To be honest, the thing is damn complicated, and doesn't work well with the Mesa for sure. It is very convenient for band practices. Throw my new Samson AF-1 wireless into the mix, and I am fully digital and wireless... how do you like that? All for about $750-800, too.

Of course, those toys can't compete with the great tone I get out of that Rectifier. Even with an American Standard Strat.

As far as my take on ethernet on the guitar, I bet musicians will take advantage of either this, or something a lot like it. There are people who would like to cut down on the amount of gear you have to haul to a gig.

J

check out more of gibsons geat ideas

[nilsey]

For such a historic guitar company, Gibson has put out so much crap in the last ten years it's not funny. I used to work ina guitar store and have to deal with these idiots all the time. some of what they think are good marketing ideas include:

this

and also

this!

I know flaming /. editors is trendy, but...

[TMB]

I'm not sure how the impression got out there that this is about guitars.
...
Oh, wait, I actually do know how the impression got out there. Silly me, as always it involves Slashdot editors that barely read the articles they post and Slashdot readers who feel justified in commenting on them without reading them at all.

Or maybe...

• It is pioneered by Gibson, a company known as a guitar manufacturer
• There is an explicit quote in the article about putting ethernet jacks in guitars
• Every example in the article except one (talking about a drum hit) talks about guitars

Sure, this is obviously going to be a way for moving around all sorts of audio and other synchronized information when it gets going. But it's not a stretch to think that Gibson guitars are going to be the first things that have the capability.

[TMB]

Re:I know flaming /. editors is trendy, but...

[sammy baby]

Or maybe...

Add to your list:

• At the end of their promo video, you see a guy plugging an RJ-45 cable into a Les Paul.

Re:I know flaming /. editors is trendy, but...

[nanojath]

If you read the article it is made absolutely clear from the first line that this is a general connectivity solution. The post I was responding to was saying I hope they do this for other instruments - but you're right on one thing, in rereading the original post, it doesn't really say anything about it being restricted to guitars. That part I guess was just me trying to be trendy.

Actually...

[AndroidCat]

Beowulf Cluster sounds like a pretty good name for a band!

what about my real tube sound???

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how am I gonna get the amazing sound of my Marshall jcm-900 tube amp into the mix?????????????

Ethernet.... guitar? ugh. :)

[Heretik]

Disclaimer: Yes, I do actually play guitar semi-seriously. :)

I don't see the point.. I mean, for mixing boards and all of the PA stuff, sending all the signals over one cable would be a huge help in reducing stage clutter and the general confusion of the system, but ethernet on a guitar? If you're going to be plugging your guitar into a digital modeller/amp and then going direct into the PA, then I suppose it makes sense, but who the hell is going to do that? Most players want to go through an amp; a large part of a 'guitar sound' is the amp, speakers, etc. You can't just plug a guitar straight into a sound card and get a Metallica album ;). Yeah, you can emulate speaker cabs and amps digitally, but why emulate when you can have the real thing? (which _always_ sounds better, BTW).

In short, it's useless, and Just Not Rock N' Roll(TM). A guitar that outputs digital audio over ethernet does not go to 11 in any way shape or form. :)

Re:Ethernet.... guitar? ugh. :)

[pressman]

Amen! Rick Rubin would be out of work and I really do think he is one of the best producers living today and his approach is so low tech and raw. I've come to love the sound of different amps. Marshall, GK, Ampeg, Roland, Fender, etc. And then what about those crazy bastards that slash their speakers to get their sound "just so"?

And what about acoustic drums? I can see a benefit to having a digital signal going to a mixer, but does it really have to be straight out of the instrument? There really is something to be said for the roar that comes out of a mic'd Marshall Stack cranked all the way up. Master of Puppets comes to mind

ethernet out of amps?

[pressman]

I'm a bass player and I love the sound I get out of my huge ass 300 watt analog Fender combo amp with ADA MP-1 preamp. Somehow, just pumping digital signals into a mixer straight from my bass doesn't seem like it would get the tone I want. I also have a MIDI controller for my preamp and some pedals to get just the sound I want. Can a digital signal straight to a mixer really create the sound I want? Somehow I don't think so.

Plus, I'd be really bummed to go to a big show and not see walls of Marshall Stacks.

Off Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

This is kind off topic, but Gibson is buying the world's Largest Electric Guitar built by a group of students and a teacher as a mentor at the magnet school Iattend.

not to be a yes-man or anything

[motherfuckin_spork]

but you are completely correct. I was thrilled when I got an old '68 Ampeg tube amp - the sound it was able to produce was great. It filled a void that my solid state amp could not. I fail to see how an ethernet port on my guitar, my basses, or even my saxophone would be a useful thing. You want to put an ethernet port on your microphone, that might be a little more useful. Maybe putting the port on the amp would make some sense, but not on the guitar.

Maybe I'll get a 10/100 port stuck in my neck so I can transmit sound straight from my larnyx to the console...

Okay... now let's apply this back in IT.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

I can't wait to see Monster making Ethernet cables. :) Just think of it: Ethernet cables you can stomp on, twist, bend unmercifully, and they still work perfectly--and the manufacturer will replace it if it doesn't. Maybe I've been spending way too much time tinkering with computer security, but does anyone else think that this might be a really neat (if infeasible) system of biometric authentication? Example: "To enter this facility, please swipe your card or play the first 15 bars of Stevie Ray Vaughan's Rude Mood." If nothing else, it'd be a really neat hack. I'd love to be able to "bless" a workstation (we have roaming admin privileges here) by plugging a guitar into an adjacent port and jamming, rather than slipping in my smart card.

Technical Superiority

[virg_mattes]

I'm very much with you on the idea of tubes making for a great sound and solid state not so much, but I'm not so mighty about my tube amp since I heard a few effects systems on computer systems that did a passing good job of coloring a digital signal like tubes. Now, it's not 100 percent, but it was better than anything solid state that I've heard. That said, it's looking like it would be worth having digital signal from the guitar, and then running your effects afterwards. It probably won't ever please a strict purist, but it adds a level of flexibility that wasn't there before, and the best part is that one can record a pure signal and then manipulate it many different ways to find just the right sound.

Also, don't rule out Ethernet just because you're acoustic. I play mostly classical guitar, and I would love to be able to take the signal from the end-block mike and send it noise-free to the sound board. In this instance, coloring by the amplifier is a bad thing (at least for me).

Virg

the case for ethernet speakers

[option8]

i asked once a while ago - and nobody was able to answer - whether it was possible or feasible to route audio signals over an ethernet network. my goal was to be able to have ethernet speakers with a sound source plugged into the network as well.

my idea was spurred by the fact that my new office has ethernet in every room, but to get sound from the MP3 music server into those rooms, it would either require streaming the signal over the LAN (and each box would have its own buffer lag.. ugh) or else run speaker wire through all the rooms as well. why not use some portion of the ethernet standard to pump an audio signal through?

so, it looks like somebody did me one better, and made an ethernet-enabled guitar and amp.

so, when do i get to buy a receiver with 10/100 and a bunch of speakers with RJ45 jacks on them?

Re:the case for ethernet speakers

[pkesel]

RJ45 jacks are just wires and connectors. Just put a RJ45 jack on one end of the sound cable from the source and one on the end of the speaker cables. Then plug it into the wall and make the right wiring closet connections. It wouldn't be a high-power solution though. CAT5 isn't very big cable. I have heard of people using CAT5 for speaker cable, though I don't know how or why.

Yes, but mLAN *is* FireWire

[s.o.terica]

Why would anyone use this when they could use Yamaha's mLAN anyway? mLAN's based on FireWire, so it's much faster and has the advantage of having a built-in isochoronous (time-dependent) transport protocol.
It's clearly the audio bus of the future (due in no small part to the fact that it can be connected to most off-the-shelf computers these days) -- it's even already supported in Mac OS X Core Audio.

Wireless is better

[scseth]

I dont want want a cat5 jack on my guitar when I could have a bluetooth/802.11b/[insert favorite wireless transport here]. I wonder how much power the guitar needs to convert analog sound to MAGIC packets. Would be nice to run off a simple, light battery and still have nice digital audio. The guitar could continue to poll looking for network connection (speakers could become wireless access points :)

4 Reasons why this is a Bad Idea

[NulDevice]

1) Gibson's track record with technology has been awful They acquired Opcode Systems, makers of the excellent Vision sequencer and Galaxy editor and the indispensible OMS MIDI routing software. They then killed Opcode, and when petitions were submitted asking them to open source or even sell off OMS, they refused. They bought out Steinberger guitars long ago, basically forced Ned Steinberger out, and now seel much cheaper wood knockoffs of his composite designs (they're still great instruments, but not nearly as cool and groundbreaking as the old ones).

2) So what do you plug this into? You'll need effects and amps that speak this protocol. Who's going to make these? Gibson, probably. And Gibson is not known as well for its effects and amps as for its guitars. And all those wonderful vintage tube amps form the 60's, and those old pedal wahs and such are going to be useless with the new standard.

3) Will the quality be any better? This is digital, after all, so the crucial bit is the A->D converter. A good ADC, like a Lucid, is NOT cheap. Are you going to pay $5000 for a digital guitar that needs an outlet? A crappy ADC will just mean you get about the same signal as you would from an analog guitar, except with more hassle. Plus you'll need a DAC on the other end. Then there's bit depth, sampling rate, all that...pros don't use 16-bit anymore, so a cheap 16-bit ADC would be pointless.

4) Why develop a new standard? There's already existing and accepted digital standards for audio, like S/PDIF. Sure, it's not 100-channel or whatever, but it's digital, lotsa people use it, there's plenty of existing hardware, and it's pretty prevalent.

All in all, this seems like another gizmo from Gibson that's not going to go anywhere.

And I'm still pissed about the OMS thing.

Maybe some good connectors will result

[John Whitley]

While I'm skeptical as regards Gibson's market targeting with this tech, we may get some good mechanical design out of it.

A notorious problem for musical applications of computer-oriented communication layers (e.g. Firewire, USB, 10/100B-T, etc.) is the lack of robustness of the connectors and/or cables. Various computer music authors have written papers addressing this very issue. (e.g. search CCRMA's archives for a repurposing of AES/EBU for non-audio musical data.) Perhaps Gibson will come up with a *really* robust ethernet mechanical connector design and cabling that can withstand many harsh connect/disconnect cycles and other physical stresses that live guitarists will put on their equipment.

This doesn't sound like a midi replacement

[blueskatz]

What this sounds like is digital pickups for electric guitars. So then some controller on the guitar sends a signal through cat5 to a computer describing the name of the instrument and the raw digital audio. That's it. Definately convenient, but not a midi replacement.

Midi is a protocol for describing how an instrument has been played. A piano midi controller exports which key has been pushed down, for how long, how forcefully it has been pressed, among a few other things. Midi is not audio at all until it is translated by some sort of tone generator like your soundcard.

I don't claim to be an expert on this, so if I'm wrong about this, let me know.

Changes in Music history...

[Anonymous Coward]

You would no longer need to need to go the crossroads to sell you soul...

All you would have to do is switch pins 1 to 3 and 3 to 6...

Gibson and "Open Standards"

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Gibson the same company that bought Opcode Systems, put them out of business and then refused to release the source code for OMS? I'm not too impressed with this track record.

Bits and Pieces

[virg_mattes]

> Digital effects can match any tube amp...

It doesn't matter if you're trolling; this statement needs response. All arguments about digital effects quality aside, that's only part of the story. There's an issue with the signal generated by the instrument to begin with. Most digital samples cut off at 22,500 (20,000 for CD) hertz, which many will say is unimportant as those frequencies are too high to hear by themselves. However, those high frequencies interplay with the audible ones in ways that are noticeable when they're absent. So, even with perfect replication of the coloring, the base signal is often short of the original. Such is not the case with analog equipment. Although I tend to like digital signal myself (because of its uses in signal processing), it does make a difference to the sound, which is why so many musicians disfavor it.

Virg

Re:Bits and Pieces

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get high-quality external ADCs that sample at much hiher than 48kHz if you look at science/engineering test&measurement equipment rather than stuff targetted at sound. It will also probably be a bit cheaper and more accurate than high-end sound equipment.

This is great...

[double_h]

Now somebody will finally be able to hack the Gibsons.

Where is will really help

[andreass]

I totally agree that no guitar player will want an RJ-45 on their guitar, and probably wouldn't use it where it there. They still want to plug right into an old fashioned Marshall or Fender amp (tubes just sound better, period -- ask any pro musician)

What will be really cool, it getting the signal's back to the mixer. Right now you have connect you mikes to a XLR cable that goes to the mixer. This is fine, but if you want the mixer out in front of the band, so the engineer can actually hear what the audinece hears and mix appropriately, you need very long cables. Or get a snake, which you can plug in 16 or more XLR inputs to a box, which has a 100' or longer cable (just 16 or more cables wrapped together really into a big fat 1"-1.5" cable, that you have to duct tape down to the floor so no one trips over it. And then it gets all sticky, trampled on, and these things cost $200 or more.

Now, if that snake box could convert to ethernet, you would only have to run one, or two ethernet cables back to the mixer, then a few others (ethernet or regular coax) to get the signal back to stage where you can hook up to the power amps. That would be most excellent. Cheapo ethernet cables could be strung up anywhere, and the sound signal should be able to travel longer (though it will go quite a ways with low impedance mics) Anyway, much less cable to buy, haul around, and replace when it gets damaged.

Guitarists get to use regular old analog, mike their amps, and run through the PA, it just the A/D conversion happens at a hub on stage instead of the digital effects rack on the board. Seems to be a pretty good thing, if it can be make cheap and reliable enough.

No ethernet on my guitar, Bluetooth wireless!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like the idea of a cat 5 cable sticking out of my guitar. Wireless without buying separate plugin components that's the way to go!

This compares to the Roland Guitar Synth...

[Bassman59]

As a guitarist who's interested in guitar sounds (my Les Paul Special through a 1962 brownface Bandmaster rules), I couldn't care less about "ethernet in my guitar."

But -- this is interesting if you liked the concept of the Roland Guitar Synths (so ably used by Andy Summers of the Police, and Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew of King Crimson). Basically, the guitar is simply the "controller," much the way a MIDI keyboard is the controller. The point is NOT to make yr standard-issue Rock Guitar sounds, but rather, this (both Roland's and Gibson's) technology enables the guitarist to get access to all the same sounds that the average keyboard player takes for granted. This is especially useful if you are an excellent guitarist but can't play keyboards worth a fsck.

Admittedly, it's weird hearing a guitar make Hammond B-3 sounds...

Now, the BETTER question to ask is, how come Gibson can't ship a $2500 Les Paul that DOESN'T need a fret-dress?

---ap

Holdups

[virg_mattes]

Two things to consider: the connectors could be made to handle the abuse (think XLR-like, but with 8 prongs), and even if the cable ends break, replacing them is a snap (no pun intended). This wouldn't be much of an issue if it really caught on.

Virg

Cisco O'Reilly?

[SharpNose]

Does this mean that Roger Daltrey is going to be swinging CAT5 over his head???

Standard New Tech Jokes...

[GeekLife.com]

I'm gonna wait till someone ports MAME over, so I can play Ms. Pac-Man on guitar.

Would a 5-piece qualify as a beowulf cluster?

CobraNet RIPOFF

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, this sounds a helluva lot like PeakAudio's CobraNet technology, which has been around since 1997:

http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/

"Developed by Peak Audio, CobraNet(TM) is the industry's leading technology for distributing uncompressed real-time digital audio over a Fast Ethernet network."

"CobraNet's ability to carry 64 channels of 20-bit audio over a single CAT-5 UTP cable..."

How Does CobraNet Work? (the quick answer)
CobraNet's software implements a protocol that combines one or more channels of audio into an Ethernet packet, along with information about the audio such as the resolution. Ethernet is designed to carry bursty computer traffic. The use of Ethernet for carrying real-time audio often yields less than real-time results that you may have seen in many network multimedia applications. The patent pending CobraNet technology orchestrates data transmissions which results in real-time performance, higher utilization and a deterministic network.

The coolest part is this from the FAQ:

Can I run CobraNet over an existing LAN? - back to top
Yes. As long as you're using a switched network, traffic from other network devices such as PCs can coexist on the same network with CobraNet devices.
Networks constructed of the older repeater hubs must follow more stringent design rules. Refer to the Network Design area of this web site for additional information.

Total piracy of technology

[TheProteus]

This is nothing new - originally, Gibson invested in CNMAT, Zeta, and a couple contractors to develop an extension to MIDI called ZIPI. A horrendous name, but functionally it was much better than MIDI could ever be - and it ran over 10Base-T (late 80's, early 90's). There was a huge legal battle over ZIPI, due to some nasty contracts penned by Gibson and their lawyers, and much screwing of the developers of the technology ensued (this is where Henry Juszkiewicz issued his infamous quote "There is no right, there is no wrong. There's only who has more money for the better lawyers.").

After this bout of legal hell was completed, Gibson had their own internal engineers re-work ZIPI to work over 100Base-TX with an increased channel count and such, and named it GMICS (Gimmicks). This didn't catch on, because of the horrendous licensing agreement that companies had to sign to get access to the technical specification.

Now, this goes to MAGIC - the third re-munging of the ZIPI protocol, and essentially the same thing as GMICS, only with a much better licensing scheme. It's still non-optimal, it still can be done MUCH better, and it still has a LONG way to go in order to seriously compete with not only Yamaha's mLAN and the IEEE 61883.6 audio/MIDI protocol for FireWire.

For more info, check this link out:

Details of the accounts between Lynx Crowe (one of the developers of ZIPI) and Gibson.

No sir, I dont like it...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I dont like it one bit.

Putting an AD convertor in the guitar is going to a great way to suck warmth out of the sound. Let the signal get through some tubes before its digitized, at least.

I especially dont want to see 1/4" plugs replaced by RJ10. The smooth, heavy click of a real plug compared to an ethernet cable is like the difference between a old, smooth, well-laquered piece of maple and a nice shiny piece of plastic. Just isn't the same.

Digital stuff is great, but sometimes you need to keep some soul.

Re:No sir, I dont like it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha nice ren and stimpy horse reference, gave me a laugh....

Hey thats what I do!

[sideshow]

you now go straight into your computer

Check out pro tools: http://www.protools.com/

Some history of Gibson's CEO

[AnalogDiehard]

Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson, is an acknowledged scum of the industry for destroying Opcode, a popular MIDI sequencer. Juszkiewicz was also instrumental in destroying Oberheim.

In both cases Juszkiewicz sought to wrestle the intellectual property rights at the expense of the owners and the customers. Opcode was acquired by Gibson in the late 90s. They had a flagship product called Vision that had a large established customer base. In the struggle for IP rights Gibson pulled development and support, effectively abandoning their customers. Opcode and Vision have ceased to exist, yet Juszkiewicz is sitting on the IP waiting for it to grow in value which gives you an idea how clueless he is about software.

Oberheim was a well-known respected synthesizer brand that had been acquired by Gibson in the early 90s. Their only product during the Gibson tenure, the OBMx, was a dismal failure in the market. The OBMx was designed by Don Buchla who shares the credit of pioneering the modern voltage controlled synthesizer with Bob Moog. The OBMx prototypes sounded great but Don withdrew his design team before it reached the production stage. It was completed by an inept design team with no experience in synthesizer design. The production models sounded inferior compared to the Buchla-built prototypes, were prone to breaking down, sold poorly, and within a couple of years Gibson pulled all production & support and pretended that the OBMx never even existed. No schematics or service manuals are known to exist and owners are left with no one to fix their broken units, and legal wrangling continues with the firmware coders over IP rights.

Gibson builds very nice guitars, but I seriously question their integrity in anything software or electronics related.

Re:Some history of Gibson's CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear Hear! Despite the appearance of cool geekiness that Gimics, erm... Magic displays, be VERY WARY of Gibson's forays into technology. follow the links and read how actively hostile they are to technology (and the people who develop and use it).

old news

[syrupdude]

and of course this is nothing new... Gibson announces the latest rehash of their scheme every year hoping it will stick. Never has, never will. Not many in the audio equipment business are willing to work with Gibson anyway.

The instrument isn't digital: the sound is

[BlueCoder]

For stringed instruments the individual strings are not seperated on typical electric guitars. Each string needs it's own seperate output to be turely digital. Otherwise it's little more than an instrument with a built in microphone.

A true digital guitar does not necessarily need to be tunned other than for feel unless it's acustic. Nice to be able to shift keys without changing pre tuned instruments.

Seperate pickups also make it much easier to mix instruments that usually do not sound good together as you can dynamically control the phase of the frequencies for the instruments. This applies to all stringed instruments.

SAVING SPACE AND TIME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gibson's Magic carries up to 64 signals per cable, thus saving space and time.

My GOD! Not only do they make guitars, they are bending the rules of physics!

Not content, are they?

[Atrax]

not happy with making me upgrade my damn computers all the time, now I have to get 100Mbps for my Stingray??

sheesh

But Gibson's name is mud in electronic music.

[gig]

Gibson's name is mud or less than mud in electronic music. They have a long history of buying small, innovative electronic music companies and running them into the ground and then shutting them down, like they did with Opcode recently. Opcode made OMS, which had become the standard MIDI routing app for Mac OS, but Gibson refused to open source it or even sell it to Apple when they asked. Instead, Apple had to hire the lead coder behind OMS and he built Mac OS X's MIDI subsystem from scratch, delaying that part of the OS until Mac OS X 10.1. It will be a long, long, long, long time before Gibson introduces an interconnection standard that people will build their instruments or studios around. Opcode also made Vision, one of the leading sequencers, used by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just to name one, and those users are all writing songs in an entirely new environment now. Vision is in a box at Gibson and that's that. No open source, no selling to a new development team, nothing. Music is very tactile and muscle-memory based ... it's hard for a musician to switch songwriting or production environments. Those cats feel pretty burned by Gibson't strange behavior.

Also, guitar players are the least-digital and least-wired kind of musician. A guitar player typically knows more about vacuum tubes and resistors than he does about digital audio. Even if guitarists loved this technology, they are going to need help to identify what an Ethernet cable looks like.

AND, any digital guitar connection system would have to be WIRELESS to get people to move to it. Wireless adapters are small enough now that you don't even need a belt-pack anymore, some of them are just plugs that go into the guitar's output jack. You're not going to get a guitarist to give up his wireless for a fragile ethernet cable. This is a cute trick, is all ... a me-too from a company that is well behind the curve in the industry.

Big Gimmick

[sg1q]

I really don't understand the moderation on this topic. A few people have pointed out the most important pieces of information about Magic, but none of it has been moderated up. I will attempt to reiterate...

1. Magic is not new (Magic == GMICS).
I'm not sure if the technology has been improved at all, but this is the same basic idea that Gibson introduced as "GMICS" 2 YEARS ago.
2. Gibson did not develop this.
Gibson bought and destroyed Opcode in order to get a venture of Opcode's called Zero Crossing. They are the ones that developed GMICS/Magic - under great duress. This whole mess has been the subject of court cases, and by all accounts, except Gibson's, they royally screwed the engineers at Opcode/Zero Crossing.
3. The rest of the industry is not going to accept this
Gibson has very few friends in the MI (music instrument) business. They have even fewer after they destroyed Oberhiem and Opcode. Gibson has lots of money and market share, but they are not respected in the industry. Think Microsoft - only Henry Juszkiewicz (CEO) isn't anywhere near as smart as Bill Gates.

The MI industry is notoriously slow to upgrade technology. Yamaha has competing technology that they have been pushing for years, and it still hasn't gotten any traction. MIDI has barely been updated in the last 18 years.

Gibson may be a big (biggest?) player in the guitar market, but in the synth/recording market they are an unknown. If Yamaha could somehow convince Roland (hah) to accept mLAN, it could become a de facto standard. Or, even better, and open standard under the AES (Audio Engineering Society) and the MMA (MIDI Manufacturer's Association) might have a chance.

Not so sure.... - I second that

[sonic-242]

Gibson do NOT have a good reputation in the electronic audio market.

They took a good company (Opcode) and through mismanagement / misdirection of the company and lack of understanding of the companies market they lost all the staff and all their market share.

I'm a PC user and am now stuck with an expensive 8 port MIDI patch bay from Opcode that has drivers that work on Windows 98 (note, not 98SE, not ME, not 2000) only.

I managed to contact an ex Opcode now Gibson employee regarding driver problems and the possibility of releasing their interface code to allow others to write new drivers. I was told that "Gibson is absolutely not in the business of releasing intellectual property that they own. Ever." and futhermore that "No further driver development is planned, those people don't even work here anymore".

This combined with that fact that this "new" idea of theirs seems to be simply an ethernet based poor cousin of Yamaha's firewire based MLAN - which incidentally has a HUGE list of pro audio companies genuinely supporting it, not a generic list of computer companies and home electronics manufacturers they are "in discussions with".

This product will be DOA not only because Gibson is simply no match for Yamaha, but because their product is inferior and not supported by anyone but Gibson (despite gallantly trying to push it on the Open Standard bandwagon).

Device ID is the important part

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of the way the signal gets from stage to board, the important part of this idea is device ID. As a FOH engineer for many years, the primary problem I have is not knowing what device is at the end of what cable. If I just knew what the name of the device was like "Shure SM57" (and ideally, what it was pointing at, like "Steve's Bass Cabinet"), much of my life would become easy. Those who are saying "amps sound good" are missing the point; of course the guitar would go into an amp and THEN the signal would go to the board, probably via a mic. The point is, you would know everything in that chain: guitar, amp, and mic. That knowledge enables interesting and useful applications across the board (har har).

If the devices ID'd themselves and had some notion of proximity or placement, you could construct some great products.

Consider for example, a theoretical band with ID'd devices (guitars and amps and such), and ID'd mics. They could set up their whole band before going on tour, set up the mics, and create an appropriate mix with a professional engineer. They could then save this as a "profile" which would go with them when traveling. The challenge for the audio engineer would then be to match the saved profile (including individual instrument sounds and overall mix) to the room, which is at core just a delta from Situation A to Situation B. That's what computers are good at.

The unfortunate reality is, every single device would have to buy into the system, and that's not going to happen anytime soon. In a perfect world, every device would use some open ID standard and use an actual data protocol (not just analog signal on a cable) to transmit sound back to the board; that way we could design interesting things like digital mixers that respected a pre-set sound for a given instrument; room analyzers that "listened" to the performance and attempted to tune it to a pre-set sound, etc. Until then it's just rock and roll.

The good news is, live music is good because it's unpredictable. If you got a substantially similar sound at every venue, why would you go? You could just get a recording of one show, and then bam, that's the band live. As it is I'd say we're lucky.

Music and Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

This brings up an interesting topic; of two "worlds" coliding. I always find it interesting just how many differant groups of people are into letting their "techy" side shine through. It seems its no longer becoming something for just for "nerds". A good example of this is www.unixpunx.org, spikey punk rockers that are into unix/linux, who'd a thought?

Re:Announcing CCL: The Chord Command Line Interfac

[Vess V.]

Pinch harmonics can be Shift-keystrokes... heheh.

So don't put it in the GUITAR...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

1. [most] effects boxes ... cannot be uploaded

2. the few that can have proprietary formats ...

3. the few that allow algorithm creation are like $3,000 US (i.e. Eventide.).

conclusion: the creation of a guitar you could upload effects algorithms to is unlikely.

So don't put it in the guitar. (You didn't put the fuzz box, wah-wah, pedal, reverb, etc. in the guitar, did you?)

Once the signal is a digital sample in UDP on Ethernet you can run it through a cheap PC and compute any effect you want.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'm hesitant to believe it's a good thing....

[Jessegri]

As a musician and a geek I've got to say this doesn't seem like it'll take off. I'm too concerned about the "sound" that'll be generated by GoEs TM ( Guitars over Ethernet Standard. Yes I trade marked it :) ) I personally love the sound of tube amps as opposed to digital and I'm skeptical as to how well this will perform even if the tube amp is last in the chain, remember GIGO. Though I must say I have been very impressed with the latest innovations in digital amp modeling especially Line 6's products and I wonder if modeling will now become the realm of "hackers" being done entirely in software. I can't wait to Download the latest Bass POD Warez.

more likely..

[log0n]

Every instrument that doesn't have some sort of synthesis to generate it sounds (basically, every playable musical instrument except a keyboard) is recorded using analog equipment. There's A LOT of work involved in cleaning the signal (there's a reason why music studio time is expensive - the amount of hardware it takes to make something sound nice is extraordinary).

A guitar that emits a purely digital signal (and no, not midi) no longer has any of the sound-cleaning hurdles that a traditional instrument has to deal with (A/C noise, earth noise, proper amplification/levels/micing, etc).

just as bad but digital?

[pompomtom]

The word you're looking for is worse.

What about us analog freaks?

[S_impled]

I am wondering about the rare breed of us who like to feel the warm heat of vacuum tubes. Feel the vibration of the speakers change as the cord length changes. Is Digital always better? I say no to that. Least we not forget that most high-end audio equipment is still kept analog for a reason. It just sounds better.

Gibson made a lot more than bad synths...

[LightJockey]

Ever hear of "Dawn"? That was gibson's attempt to get into the pro audio market... touted as being the "most natural sounding PA speakers" and "most technically advanced" they were ugly, underpowered and sounded like crap. Feeble low end (an 8" subwoofer for a room with 200 people.. RIIIGHT) and harsh uppers made it a doorstop...

This ends my rant, with a subject having absolutely nothing to do with the regular slashdot banter :)

Possible Uses for this...

[frenchs]

After reading the spec on the gibson site in PDF form, I realized there is an even cooler use for this than simply sending data from the guitar to the mixer. Since the system is Bi-directional, the guitar can not only send but recieve data from the mixer, other instruments, etc. I can think of a lot of uses for this aspect of the technology.

Say your playing in a big band, and every song in your 20 song set has different volume, tone, and pickup combinations. Well you set this all up ahead of time in a computer, and it can automatically send tone, volume, and pickup combo settings to the guitar.

This can further be extended by a prototype guitar by a man in Sonoma, CA. Steve Klein (helped design the Taylor Bass.. very cool), has a new guitar which can tune itself. Imagine one of these babies with ethernet capability. You could have time, or manually cued changes to a great combination of options; volume, tone, tuning, and pickup combination. This would leave the guitar player free to play, rather than have to futz around with tunings, volume, and all that stuff.

Also, throw some sort of sensor on each string and you may be able to detect string breaks before they happen. Red light pops up on the guitar tech's station and signals that the lead guitarist is about to blow a b-string. That can get swapped out before that moment when you break it in the middle of the Freebird solo.

Heck, in the future, every effect pedal could have this on it, hook it all up to a small touch screen clamped onto the mic stand, and voila, all the effects controls magically at your fingertips, rather than at your feet. The additional benefit of this is that it allows the sound or instrument technician to see the settings at his station as well for any person on such a system

Yet another idea, why not put this onto amps. Have feedback sensing, and cut the volume level when you surpass a preferred level. Hook the amp up to the touchscreen and have all the controls for it availible to the player.

Personally I would rather use this a a control mechanism rather than a sound transfer system, because I just have my doubts that they can accurately reproduce the spectrum accurately enough to satisfy me. I could see a system where you have two or more inputs into the guitar, the first being the ethernet, and the additional being a 1/4" jack and possibly and XLR jack on the guitar also. Package a system that contains a 802.11, and wireless, spread spectrum audio into a belt sized system, and I bet you would be able to rake in the cash from tech-savy guitarists(which believe it or not, is a lot of them)

Of course, you'd never see me using this stuff, I have come to rather dislike playing my electric guitar. Give me a Martin HD-35 miced into a California Blonde, and I'll play all day. I personally prefer the ability to control every little nuance of my performance by adjusting not the effects, but the way I play the instrument.

Steve

Great for Keyboards, Mixers, Digital Recording

[LoveMe2Times]

This is great for anything that can take advantage of multiple channels on the same wire. I do a lot of MIDI composing, and recording the synthesized sounds is a pain: I have to play back each track and record it individually. I've always wondered why they don't just pop an ethernet port on a keyboard and let me do full duplex 16 channel recording.

Here's my music technology wishlist: 1) a single, standard cable interfacing to a synth that handles MIDI, Audio, and data (for sample sets, setups, programs, etc); 2) an arbitrary number of channels up to the capabilities of the synth (ie, MIDI only doing 16 channels is obnoxious); 3) an uber-mixer that'll take analog and digital in, spit analog and digital out, lets me connect to my computer with ONE cable supporting 128 stereo channels and letting my computer control all mixing functions, dedicated DSP, and the ability to save setups from your computer and recall them from an LCD (like keyboards, in this respect). This way, I can plug in all my instruments into 1 mixer (1 cable for each). Plug one cable into my computer, presto, I have a recording studio. Go to a live gig, tap a button, presto, preconfigured levels and mix ready to be tweaked for the environment. If you play the same place a lot, you could even save your tweaks. This might sound far out, but I think it's a fairly natural extension of current recording studio in a box solutions.

Moot Point

[davez_not_here]

I dont believe it says anywhere, that we guitar players would have to rid ourselves of our beloved analog equipment. Go ahead use the Les Paul and the Marshal, use a couple of stomp boxes too! There is nothing that say's "You must use this directly out of your guitar".

{Snakes?! Damn dude, ever have to carry that snake box yourself?}

Next time you're out playing live or in the studio, plug whatever you're sending ( your 'analog generated' sound just the way you like it) into a RJ45 port. Now your signal ( mics, out(s) from yer rig ), gets anywhere you need it to go, sound reinforcement, recording mediums, what-ever. This includes Video and other media too.
This is where maGIC comes in...

Watch this, http://www.gibsonmagic.com/video/magiclo.wmv
Then I'm sure, you will see there is a huge potential in many aspects of sound and it's (re)production.
It's not, 'what this will do to hurt the guitar', but, 'how this helps the music get heard', Is not that, the point after all?
My mind is already racing with a thousand things I want to try.

Originally, I only wanted to post a link to further fuel this debate.

Music and tech-geek stuff, way cool.

Put it on keyboards/ mics, and don't use RJ45

[Stipe]

As a computer geek/ part-time sound engineer, this looks quite interesting. Forget guitars, though - that's the wrong place. I'd want it on keyboards (why should they have anything analog in them anyway, apart from maybe a headphone output? Digital all the way to the amps, please), and mics (digital as soon as you can and still keep the musos happy).

Guitarists like their analog setups, and you'd have to do a lot of hard work to reproduce the sound of an amp in software. I'm not against it, I just don't think that's where digital will get onto the stage first. I'd say keyboards (pretty much already digital) and mics.

The real winner for me is when you start wanting to have more than one mixing desk (maybe one for broadcasting, one for foldback, and one for FOH, and then another set of outputs for recording onto multitrack). For example, the sound setup at my church is:

• up to 24 channels on stage - mainly mics (singers, drumkit, mic'd up amps), and a couple of DI'd instruments (keyboards, acoustic guitars). (Typically, we only use 16)
• seperate mixing desk for foldback (this gives us more flexibility in the foldback mix). This is only 16 channel (the drums don't go through it)
• 24 channel FOH desk.

The splitter alone has 96 connections on it - 1 in, 2 out * 24 channels. And unlike a hub, things stop working properly if any two are switched round.

To connect all this together for a single channel, we have:

• XLR cable from mic to a stage multicore.
• Multicore to splitter
• Short multicore from splitter to foldback mixer
• Short multicore from splitter to main multicore box
• Multicore cable to desk
• Multicore end to XLR on desk.

If we could replace all that with:

• 3 hubs on stage
• another hub to connect the stage hubs to the mixers
• a single Cat5 cable to FOH desk

we would be down from getting on for 200 connections to about 30. And more siginificantly, as long as everything was connected, there's much less worry about which plug goes in which port. Want to record it all? One connection for power, one for data. Press record. Done. (at the moment, we'd have to use another 24 cables and use the direct outs from the desk to a multi-channel tape)

(On a point of practicality: we keep the splitters always plugged in; we don't have to connect them up every week. The multicore to the main desk has a big bath-plug, so it's one connection with up to 32 channels going through it). In addition to all that, we have a couple of broken connections on the desks/ splitters, so you sometimes have to swap channels round to workaround it.

The other problem I have with this is why use RJ45 connectors? It's not bad for connecting computers (even laptops don't get moved all that much), but I doubt they'd last very long when being used by a band on the road. Compare XLR connectors - look at the cable relief system built into them, and any decent XLR connector has a metal body. You don't do them any damage by jumping on them.

DI: A bass player's perspective

[Cybertect]

Your comment that nobody plugs their guitar straight into a mixer is spot on. Electro-acoustics in a live situation are the only guitars that I can think of that regularly go straight into the desk.

However, for bass players using DI standard fare.

I can't think of an occasion recently when an venue engineer has preferred to mike my amp rather than use a DI box. I've had problems in the past persuading some engineers to mike up my amplifier when I was experimenting with bass feedback (take a vintage Hofner Verithin bass, hit an open 'D' at high volume and enjoy the results:-).

Anyhow, I can see that a lot of bassists might find this rather more interesting than guitarists would. Given that Gibson haven't been known for their ground-breaking bass designs (The only SG bass I've ever played was a nasty piece of work, so maybe I'm biased) perhaps this is where they're really targeting this development?

Gibson Guitar and Ethernet

[danmitch]

Careful! While everyone likes Gibson _guitars_, the company has engendered a lot of ill-will among electronic musicians. Most recently they managed to destroy Opcode Systems, one of the first and best music software development companies. And personally I'd be really happy to see a firewire-based system for this sort of thing since firewire is already being used for other media, especially video

Music over CSMA/CD = stupid

[metamatic]

Ethernet is CSMA/CD. There's no way to absolutely guarantee bandwidth to any particular device, and as the number of devices goes up, collisions will get more frequent and glitches worse. 64 channels of 48kbps mono audio is little enough traffic that they'll probably get away with it most of the time, but still... Given the goals of pinpoint synchronization and low latency, you'd have thought they'd choose a more appropriate physical layer.

What they should have done is use Firewire, which can offer guaranteed bandwidth with guaranteed latency using isochronous transfer. Except, of course, someone's already done that.

Looks like Gibson has not only reinvented the wheel, they've also made it hexagonal.