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

whee

[VAXGeek]

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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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 :-)

The Spec

[d5w]

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

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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

[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

[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...

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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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:The Gibson Les Paul

[Bob McCown]

But this one goes to 802.11!

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.

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?

Spinal Tap 2003

[micromoog]

"These go to 802.11!"

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

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.

The new sound checks

[Sabalon]

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

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.

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?