Gibson's Digital Guitar Finally Released

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.

Comments

Wireless ?

[TheGrayArea]

This is very cool stuff, but I can't help wonder about the wireless issue for live performance. As much as possible these days everyone uses wireless connections to their amps/fx/etc during live performances for two reasons: 1- Freedom of movement and 2- avoiding a rat's nest of cable. I wonder what type of mobile wireless solutions we'll see for these?

Broken cords anyone?

[RealBeanDip]

As a veteran electric guitarist for the last 25 years, I can only imagine the number of broken plugs/cords from this configuration; digital guitar.

Anyone who's ever owned a les paul or tele can attest to that (strats have a slightly better cord placement).

As for the usefullness of this? I don't know if having each string routed to a different amp is going to make better music or be useful at all. For one thing, I don't have SIX amps! Something tells me that a les paul wired through a marshall half stack at 11+ is still the way to go. ;)

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[tlotoxl]

You can imagine, though, that one can make all sorts of interesting algorithms for generating the full mix from the six string outputs; since they'd be independetly captured digitally, they could then be used to frequency-transform each other or do any number of other bizarre things -- ultimately making sounds that are nothing like a guitar, but still take advantage of the guitar's expressivity. I'm not quite sure what algorithms they could use, but the extra degree of freedom could be quite exciting. And at least the guitar isn't what I thought it was going to be (a physically modelling guitar) -- it still plays like normal, beginning with the vibration of real strings.

Not the first, and not extremely different either.

[109 97 116 116]

First of all, since a vibrating string is probably the most simple to understand analog signal, this is basically a guitar with pickups that have an extra set of coils (This isn't the first HEX pickup in the least) to detect string height and an AD convertor or two. Or perhaps twelve. Not too difficult to design, but certainly difficult to implement in a sonically usable manner. Kudos to Gibson if it works well!

Most likely this is the patented pickup:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?U47833293

For one example of a so called "digital" guitar there is of course the Line 6 Variax.
http://www.line6.com/Variax/home.html

But that wasn't the first to meld guitar and digital conversion.

There are many previous designs, one involving pressure sensitive fretboard sections that would close switches and cause signal processing changes.

Even the Gibson design seen in this post isn't radically different than any past MIDI guitar.

It's all semantics as to what kind of signal you create or whether you performed AD to DA conversion inside or outside the guitar or on each string or the entire signal together or whatever.

Here's a very well done approach to a guitar type instrument that has since been discontinued, but is used by many famous artists. Allan Holdsworth to name one.
http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/synthaxe.html

The writing is on the wall

[wondafucka]

Two things:

1) The writing is on the wall. A digital music backbone that can be integrated with any other number of system has been a long time coming. The point isn't that it is a guitar and it's digital. The point is that eventually all the audio signals in a performance/recording will be digital. You get ease of use (plug in the jack and assign a channel digitally), clarity of sound, much easier signal processing (effects), as well as piggybacking additional control signals. As a station manager of a radio station, I would love this sort of system built into our mixing board. A physical location wouldn't necessarily correspond to a channel in the mixing board, just like a physical port in the wall doesn't necessarily correspond to a particular IP address.

2) The dinosaur analog lovers will always bitch about digital, but there will eventually be a time when digital quality surpasses analog. I still prefer records to cds because of the more continuous signal, and more physical control over playback, but digital technology isn't far off from replacing this. People talk about the warmth of a tube amplifier, but it is physically possible to model the second harmonic distortion of the tube amp much at a much lower cost. Nobody is saying that you as an analog guitar player have to use this technology. They will probably still be making analog guitars hundreds of years from now. In the future, though, if someone has a system like Magic installed, they might have a ADC hooked up to your pickup. Nobody except the top studios are going to rush out and gut their entire studio and go digital, but this will happen eventually, and this system has a good chance of surviving.

I'd be interested in what...

[Spoticus]

someone like Adrian Belew or Allan Holdsworth has to say about it. They, and others, have been working with and actively using this type of technology for almost 2 decades. Roland had their GR-707 guitar synth out back in th early 80's. Sure it was rather low-tech by today's standards, but it sure was "out there" back then.