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

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.

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: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.

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.

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.