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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.

2 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Broken cords anyone? by RealBeanDip · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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. ;)

    --

    You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.

  2. Not the first, and not extremely different either. by 109+97+116+116 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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