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Gibson's Digital Guitar Finally Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-your-lust-on dept.

tdiman writes "The world's first digital guitar, using Gibson's MaGIC digital transport standard, was introduced February 20th at the Intel Developers Forum." We've been following this one for awhile, I'm really curious to see what something like this can do.

5 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Big Whoop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The grateful dead have had midi/pickup hybrid guitars for years. Jerry Garcia (may he RIP) often made his guitar sound like an entire orchestra.

    1. Re:Big Whoop by self+assembled+struc · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is completely different.

      A MIDI pickup can take the tones created by the analog guitar and transform them off board into MIDI signals, which then can be used to make other noises.

      This guitar is ENTIRELY digital. Not a MIDI pickup, but ENTIRELY digital.

      you're comparing apples to oranges.

  2. Pretty cool by Hao+Wu · · Score: 5, Informative

    But it's not the first!

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    I suggest you read Slashdot
  3. more useful link by carpe_noctem · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is a more relevant link than the one listed in the article. But since Gibson's site seems to be taking a good slashdotting, here's a mirror of that page and one of the original, too (sorry, no graphics...site went down before I could get them).

    Also, from what I'm inferring, this is kind of a ripoff of line6's guitars, which also use a hex pickup and do analog->digital conversion on chip inside the guitar (there's even some OSS software people have developed for the amps). So not really a new idea by any means, but certainly one that could stand to be made a bit more widespread.

    Personally, I'd rather see the guitar be something that is a purely acoustic/analog instrument (who the hell wants to 'upgrade' a Gibson when the computing hardware becomes obsolete), and do all the digital effects on an actual computer, which will probably generate better sound given the greater amount of processing power.

    --
    "Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
  4. Re:Benefits? by Webmonger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Analog cables are a pain because they pick up interference really easily. Doing an A-D conversion in the pickup should (in theory) sound better, and with a sampling rate of 48 Khz and a bit depth of 32, it exceeds the specs a lot of the equipment used for digital recording. (48 isn't all that high, but 32 bits is 65536 times as good as a CD.)