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

Does this mean....

[levik]

Does this mean that roadies will now need a Batchelors degree in Information Systems?

Re:Does this mean....

[roseblood]

This guitar uses Cat-5 cable to plug in. Imnagine that. Just plug this into your router and DOS the entire network with some speed-metal riffs!

Re:Does this mean....

[ziggy_zero]

Well, maybe to set up a studio with stuff like this you'll need to be a network technician - I mean, each instrument would have it's own IP address, and so could mixers, computers, effects generators, etc. and you'd need a hub or a switch or something....hmmmmm.

Re:Does this mean....

[pete-classic]

I mean, each instrument would have it's own IP address

The article is Slashdotted, but MaGIC doesn't sound like IP to me.

Ethernet does not imply IP.

-Peter

Re:Does this mean....

[ziggy_zero]

I watched their little MaGIC video on their site after posting, and what I gathered was this - that you connect a piece of MaGIC equipment to the network (e.g. guitar, mic, PVR, security camera) and the device automatically starts broadcasting what it is and what it can do - "so anybody can do it." It might not have an IP address per se, but it certainly has a name or number or something.

I was wrong, since the one guy in the video said that you shouldn't have to configure anything, just hook it up. Interesting stuff. What worries me is that MaGIC sounds eerily like that "magic box" that allowed data to be transferred over ordinary power lines - hopefully this stuff actually works.

Re:Does this mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that Yngwie Malmsteen will be uber-1337 now? Oh, wait, he still plays Fenders.

Re:Does this mean....

[hackstraw]

Ethernet does not imply IP

Nor does CAT5 imply ethernet.

Re:Does this mean....

[pete-classic]

Nor does correlation imply causation, but is that relevent?

See the title of the third hit at http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=gibson&op=stor ies&author=&tid=&section=&sort=1, a story entitled "Gibson to Embed Guitars with Ethernet".

Thought you had me, didn't you? :-P

-Peter

Re:Does this mean....

[JebusIsLord]

I'm not familiar with this particular implementation, but fender has one coming out too, and it is fully ethernet compliant. The layer 3 protocol is proprietary though and I don't think gibson's is compatible.

Re:Does this mean....

[Czernobog]

No, but it could mean trouble from educated, opinionated groupies....

Re:Does this mean....

[Pharmboy]

Found on ZDNET....

Symantic released its first verions of Norton Anti-Virus for Guitar today, due to the recent flood of attacks by Fender users. The latest virus, "Head Banger" delivered a payload that caused the guitars to play John Tesh music, and spread through the PA to infect other instruments. It was estimated that within 10 minutes of its initial release into the wild, over 10,000 band's were infected....

Re:Does this mean....

[Lord_Slepnir]

Just wait until Lord_Nikron Hacks your Gibson.

Re:Does this mean....

[damien_kane]

It was Joey (Dr. Doom, Ultra-Laser) who originally hacked the Gibson...
Ld. Nikon was one of the first ones booted in the hack-a-thon at the end of the movie...

Re:Does this mean....

[unitron]

"The layer 3 protocol is proprietary though and I don't think gibson's is compatible."

Of course not. Otherwise you'd be able to use a Gibson guitar in a Fender amp or the other way around instead of being locked in to one manufacturer.

Re:Does this mean....

[jarrell]

I read the specs a while back. They're interesting reading for anyone who's done a little network programming - you can get the pdf off their web site.

Basically, it's their own protocol with ethernet framing, which will allow them to use switches and such. 3com's customized some of the asic's.

When you plug a device in it has a specific sequence of events that happen, that get the network master to issue it a magic id, and allow it to introduce itself to its neighbors, and find out what functions they have, and tell them what functions it has, and that properly gets passed up the chain so that the appropriate devices find each other. That allows you to plug a magic guitar into a magic amp, for instance, and have the guitar automatically map its volume control knob, for instance, to control the amp. On a more complex level, it'd allow "Bob's Guitar" to pop up as a channel label on the mixing boad automatically, with the board recognizing it, and firing off a set of presets to a known state automatically. The master node (which is selected through an unambiguos set of rules, which handle networks dividing and recombing well) is responsible for assigning numbers to everyone, which can regularly and easliy change - it just walks the network tree and and everyone assigns themselves the next number, and is also the master timing source.

Re:Does this mean....

[benedict]

This sounds like the kind of thing that Rendezvous
was designed for. My guess is that Gibson doesn't
have open-source religion, and also that design on
this thing started before Rendezvous made the scene.

Maybe Apple will come out with an iShred. ;-)

Re:Does this mean....

[Peartree]

He plays Carvins too

My guitar gently weeps

[corebreech]

It just won't be the same. No way.

Re: My guitar gently weeps

[Black Parrot]

> It just won't be the same. No way.

Now guitars will console themselves by downloading p0rn off the internet.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[r33per]

Too right: if there is one thing that the world can do without it is more guitar with more crappy transistors. anything to do with guitars that involves transistors just makes the guitar sound like a bee in a can.

Bring back vacuum tube PC's: they might be bigger, hotter and more expensive to run, but I bet M$ will be able to implement P*ug & P*ay tubes that blow every 6 start ups.

Linux will have a much better implementation of tube device drivers, but it will only work on certain tubes

Plus your PC will sound infinitly better.

Digital sucks. Analogue Rocks.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[Anonymous Coward]

It blows me away how many people on Slashdot are ultra-luddites when it comes to certain things. Of all the places i'd expect people to bitch about a digital guitar cable, Slashdot is the last.

Think about it: when you record your album it's going to be 44k1/16bit anyway, so anyone saying guitars should use vacuum tubes and run through crackly cables is kidding themselves. It's the same crowd who think spring reverb or analog synths are useful. Yes, they're all much nicer to play/use in real life, but once it hits the CD everything good about "the sound, man" just disappeared.

Personally i am VERY excited about this. Note that this isn't a MIDI guitar, it's digital audio. It's not about playing synths with your guitar, it's about getting the cleanest possible sound quality from the notes you play, through your effects, into the mixing desk. And each string is processed seperately! An absolute BOON for EQing, and i'm sure the best guitar players will meticulously tweak their other settings so playing the same note on two different strings gets hugely different effects.

Think about it - the next step here could be to quantize the notes or transpose them. Imagine hitting your foot pedal to transpose to a certain scale - you could continue playing the same lick and have it sound different. The point? If each string is processed differently and you have some mega fat bass sound on the bottom string, you don't want to lose that effect when you change to the 5th string... sooo foot-pedal - TRANSPOSE +5 and bam. You could even take it to the point where each fret is processed differently, so riffs could be set up to take advantage of different effects depending on where you played them.

Damn people, be creative. Sure it's not going to change anything for your average blues guitarist, but for people who are really pushing the envelope, virtuosos like Steve Vai or Satriani, for experimental guitarists like Buckethead, or even for your average studio guitarist this has the potential to be huge.

Re: My guitar gently weeps

[unitron]

"Why did my TV suddenly decide that I wanted to see three specials about Michael Jackson every week?"

Just be glad it was only your TV and not your Tivo.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[unitron]

"anything to do with guitars that involves transistors just makes the guitar sound like a bee in a can."

Back in the '70s I rewound a Telecaster front pickup for low impedence and installed a one transistor lo-Z in, hi-Z out pre-amp. Went from muddy to mellow.

That separate pickup for each string idea ain't new either.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[NulDevice]

Well, this is entirely dependent on the quality of the ADCs in the guitar. Yeah, analog gear is limited by the CD format, but if you've got the right gear for doing the analog-to-digital conversion, you lose a lot less. This is why a lot of pro systems are sampling at 96-bits and 192khz - it's absurdly high resolution, far beyond the ear, but it's much nicer if you're going to be doing any processing on the signal. Your fidelity loss is minimized.

If you're working an analog-to-digital converter into a guitar that runs off a 9-volt, chances are it's going to be pretty craptacular. They say MaGIC is capable of 32-bit/192khz audio but they don't say that that's what the guitar is using. What you're more than likely to get out the back end is a thin and very digital sound. And if it's only CD quality, then what's the point? You're much better off getting a good mic'ed amp, getting some decent character into the sound (I don't care what anybody says about analog hardware - it's not the "warmth" of the sound that's the payoff, it's the odd little extra overtones, detunings etc that give you a good sound) and then run that into a really good ADC. Your end product will have much more going for it.

There's also questions about the internal signal path of the guitar - how hard is it going to be to wire in a good set of pickups? Say you want to swap in a set of EMG's or Seymour Duncans for a different tonal characteristic - can you do it with a soldering iron and some tape like you can now, or will you need a degree in electronics and a good logic probe?

The Hex Pickup is nothing new. You can get 'em for bass now, you can get 'em for guitar, and I've even seen comparable systems on violin. Sending on separate channels isn't a big deal. You can do cool stuff with it right now in terms of transposition, etc. The ARP Avatar guitar synth (the beast that killed ARP corporation) could do that back in 1978. That was synthesis, but even with the more recent hex-pickuped modelling effects units (Roland COSM for example) there's still some latency. It's not bad if you're just effecting a signal. It's if you want to manipulate the pitch, timing, attack or whatnot that the trouble occurs. The problem has always been one of tracking; pitch isolation is pretty slow no matter what signal format you use - there's elements of crosstalk from other strings, there's overtones to worry about, pitch "deformaties" from picking, issues with bending and portamento etc etc.

And the final problem is this - how well is Gibson going to provide this format to other vendors? Will you be able to get a MaGIC Fender? Or buy a synthesizer that speaks MaGIC? Will this have significant advantages over existing digital audio and sync formats? Will you be locked into Gibson gear? Gibson's track record for technology has been awful - they pretty much killed the ever-promising OMS MIDI-routing system when they bought Opcode (right when the PC version had started to mature) and refused to release the sourcecode to developers despite a large petition. Really, the last thing the music world needs is a closed format for recording, especially one limited to Gibson-and-affiliates.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[p7]

And it can go farther. Who needs the pedal, have triggers, think regex for chords. As the processor senses each trigger it launches effects on each individual string.

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[j3110]

I like my Strat... I was just thinking about putting an ATMEL in my Fender and replace at least one of the knobs with a digital button-knob to adjust effects that I put on it's EEPROM. I just don't know what I'm going to do about a UI for now. Maybe I will use a serial terminal to control the guitar... You can do that from a handheld! If I wanted to throw another 300$ at my beloved Fender, I could put a full blown hand-held in it for processing.

I know what you mean about the whole tube arguement. Tubes sure sound great, but I bet I could make a guitar sound identical to tube amplification by measuring frequency responce of the tube and doing my own EQ.

Anyone know of a good way to compress audio with only 10-20Mhz of power? ... real-time streaming... didn't think so :( Maybe I could use the USB-ATMEL's and make an "Audio device" out of my guitar. With a good SB card, you can do real-time effects. I guess I should settle for a good 16bit DAC (18-24 bit, but drop the bottom bits) and just send the data over USB uncompressed. I could easily do 100Khz sampling to interpolate data.

If I were just going to make it an audio device, I could get off the shelf USB headphones. I want to be able to record all 4 pickups seperatly. I would have to play with the pick-ups too much to actually record each string seperately. Just imagine a digital whammy bar!!! They don't get strings out of tune. You could have them do wah-wah effects as well. You could select which strings/pickups are effected. I guess I'll have to play with the pickups after all. :)

Re:My guitar gently weeps

[LR_none]

Gibson's digital pickup technology is interesting, and perhaps even promising given that electromagnetic pickup technology hasn't really changed in fifty years.

Damn people, be creative...for people who are really pushing the envelope,...this has the potential to be huge.

OK, but since when have creative geniuses been in danger of getting caught sitting on their hands waiting for technology to arrive so they could make art for the rest of us? One of the hallmarks of great players is that they "push the envelope" by transcending the available technology in pursuit of the music in their minds' ears. Hendrix didn't learn about the whammy bar in the Fender booth at the NAMM show. Santana didn't begin using distortion when he got his first Mesa Boogie.

I used to play guitar for a living, and for a while was a national clinician for Ovation, performing on their acoustic/electrics with integrated hexaphonic pickups, MIDI controllers, and synthesizers--a decade ago. I also used computer sequencers extensively to write music, score videos, etc. My experience with digital controllers, synthesizers and computers in composition and performance is that these tools are powerful, fun to use, but extremely difficult to transcend for serious creative work. The proliferation of these technologies has brought popular music to a state where much of it sounds the same, a natural result of musicians tending to use the same samples, synth patches, sequencing and editing systems, pitch quantizers, and amplifier simulators.

As a guitarist, you make a conscious choice as to how much of your "sound" you wish to be dependent upon your rig. You may be a wonderful player, but if you're using a digital delay, amp simulator and a PA system, probably almost any guitarist will sound a lot like you if he picks up your axe on the bandstand. I now play (almost exclusively) a nylon-string classical acoustic guitar, usually unamplified. The sound it makes when I play is completely mine, the result of twenty-five years playing the instrument, not available in a box. Other people playing my guitar sound like they are playing a different guitar.

The number of guitarists I know who have hours out of the day to learn the nuances of digital audio so they can set up separate effects and EQ for each string is nonzero, but very, very small. Most of us would spend our time better by learning good right hand (pick and fingerstyle) technique, studying chord voicings, and transcribing McLaughlin's and Scofield's guitar solos.

Journey?

[WickedClean]

Its kind of hard to read an article when the first sentence mentions somebody from Journey.

"Steeeeeeeeeeeeve PERRY!"
"Dude, no more Journey psyche outs!"

Still, I am surprised it took this long for them to realize this idea. But the question is - will it change anything? Will it bring back the long lost guitar solo?

Re:Journey?

[SlashdotLemming]

But the question is - will it change anything?

Better link here

Some of the highlights:
A guitarist can run a cable over 2000 meters with no loss of audio quality.
and
The best part of the Gibson Digital Guitar system is its delivery of signal processing on a string-by-string basis, providing increased quality and flexibility.

In simple terms, you can do more stuff better. Reminds me of S-Video.
My mind is spinning.

Re:Journey?

[WickedClean]

Yeah but if the guitarist sucks, then having 2 kilometers of cable won't make up for it. So what if the guitars are capable of producing quality sound, it still takes somebody to play the damn thing. What, are we gonna hear Creed's power chords more clearly now?

Re:Journey?

[NetGyver]

Your right of course. NOBODY in bands you hear today plays guitar like they really mean it. I have a alot of songs from the 60's/70's/80's where they really really made it scream and sing, practically giving the guitar a life and voice of it's own.

I don't know if this digital guitar will change anything. Personally, I believe it has alot more to do with how the labels find bands. There are quite a few people out there who can rock a guitar like you wouldn't believe, but when it comes to getting them into bands, I don't think the RIAA really cares about a band or artists musical talent like they used to. After all, that lack of talent can all be made up for with pre-processed effects and sampling these days.

It's a shame really.

Re:Journey?

[scott1853]

Yeah, that was a stupid way to phrase it. I was trying to simultaneously complain about two different factors in popular music and I wasn't paying enough attention.

Re:Journey?

[Wumpus]

Your right of course. NOBODY in bands you hear today plays guitar like they really mean it.

http://keneally.com

Some MP3s from fan-recorded shows are here:

http://mktrading.org

Re:Journey?

[Kizeh]

2 kilometers? I don't think so, unless they have version with 100FX. Copper ethernet stops at 100 meters. Then again, even that would make for a pretty big stage... But just wait until someone
figures out that this would be a perfect application for wireless. And power-over-ethernet seems to have found yet another application.

What I really want out of this are crush-proof, silicone sheathed ethernet cables that are easy to spool.

Re:Journey?

[Hrothgar The Great]

Late post, but turn off your radio - you're right, there's really nothing too great on there - and listen to some REAL bands. You need a good dose of Slobberbone

a digital ax

[hatrisc]

i can just see commercials. DIGI-AXE! new from Gibson!

Benefits?

[MankyD]

What are the benefits to this product?

They say it's compatible with existing equipment. Wouldn't this neccesitate a D/A converter, thus negating the effects of a digital guitar to begin with?

How much does it cost?

Re:Benefits?

[MankyD]

Another quick question:
This product would seem to go "anologue-digital-analogue", two conversion processes on top of whatever effects/amplifcations are being applied. Wouldn't this hurt sound fidelity? I certainly don't see how it could benefit.

Re:Benefits?

[Katalyzt]

they say "This provides unprecedented control with the ability to adjust volume, pan and equalization of each string individually."

once someone learns how to handle this it should extend the range and sound of a single guitar enormously!

Re:Benefits?

[Webmonger]

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.)

Re:Benefits?

[MankyD]

What about shielded cables? Using on the fly A/D conversion assumes that you have a very accurate converter. The cost on a product like can be quite high, for a good one.

While 32 bit depth will allow for a good range of amplitudes, 48khz still misses the mark for the frequencey spectrum. Yes, it covers what is considered normal human hearing, but their are still frequencies that can add to a listening experience outside of what is considered audible. This is why DVD audio, and the likes, are upping the sampling rate.

Would you not agree?

Re:Benefits?

[neclimdul]

The advantage spans not only from the ability to cut out interferance(the age old bane of the electronicly amplified musician), it also come from the imidiate ease of adding digital effects. each effects you added to your sound before was most likely gaing through a/d->effect->d/a and eachtime adding a little bit of "quality loss". Your setup might in the end look something like a/d-effect->d/a->a/d-efect->d/a->etc but now it could look like a/d->effect->effect->effect->d/a. Now the advantage becomes more aparent. Course this means all new equipment but theoreticly it shouldn't be a difficult transition for manufacturer's assuming gibson get's the product of the ground.

Re:Benefits?

[pyite]

What's funny is that previously, the guitarist was expected to do these things, with I dont know, his fingers. Great, now we're making it easier for people who suck to suck even more.

Re:Benefits?

[RTPMatt]

I guess this is kind of worthless to the whole "tuble amps are the only way to go" crowd

Re:Benefits?

[Webmonger]

Even shielded analog cables are a pain.

I think 48 kHz is good enough for one component of a mix. Hell, it's still got more fidelity than a CD, and people are buying lots of those. There are tons of people who don't even hear MP3 artifacts.

In any case, it turns out the MAGIC standard supports rates as high as 192 kHz. The first source I found for that info was a little less than complete.

Re:Benefits?

[Webmonger]

No, it's not worthess. Analog & tube fans always say that analog equipment adds pleasant distortion, while digital is too crisply accurate.

No one's saying that digital distorts the signal. So you can use digital as an intermediate format.

If you use cat5 to get the signal off the stage and into your sound system, then use tube amps from there, the effect is of plugging your guitar into a hum-and-interference-free analog cable that's plugged straight into the tube amp.

Then there are the analog folks who say that hum and hiss improve the signal... this is probably worthless to them.

Re:Benefits?

[thebigmacd]

Yes, 8 channels bidirectional (yes, 16 channels total!) of 192 kHz 32 bit audio per cable.

Re:Benefits?

[Chris Johnson]

Of course digital distorts the signal. The types of distortion are very well understood. Assuming we're talking about linear PCM encoding, the quantization noise is a measurable amount below digital full scale.

Given that this can be pretty far below full scale, this might not seem to be a problem... until you crank up the amp.

How many db of gain do you figure you're adding to that noise floor by a good high-gain saturated guitar tone?

This is why modelling systems like the Line 6 Pod don't really work. Ideally you'd add the gain before A/D conversion to avoid the problem.

Quantization noise at -12 db (that would be a REALLY high gain distortion) does not sound impressive. Or 'interference free'.

Re:Benefits?

[darien]

They need to get it up to three if they want to compete with the Fender Strat though. That, or start publicising "the pickups myth."

Re:Benefits?

[Wumpus]

The guitarist was never able to pan strings arbitrarily and separately in the mix. If nothing else, this should make some pretty weird mixes possible. I think it was Adrian Legg [*] who said that mono is like a handshake, but stereo is like a hug.

[*] ...who doesn't suck.

Re:Benefits?

[Moofie]

Throw away your keyboard and start chiseling your messages in stone, you elitist troll.

Who the hell appointed YOU the arbiter of artistic ability?

Re:Benefits?

[pyite]

My point being that the spontaneous nature of music is disappearing. Real musicians don't need fancy crap to sound good. They just do if they have talent. Notice over the past few decades, music has gotten significantly worse as a whole following one of the largest creative peaks ever. Less is more. People need to throw out their synthesizers and get down to the real deal.

Re:Benefits?

[Wumpus]

I disagree on a couple of points: All music, except purely vocal music, relies on fancy crap to sound good. For some reason I get really pissed off when people suggest that acoustic music, for example, is somehow a more "pure" form of expression than rock music (with electric guitars, electric bass guitars etc.)

The way I see technology and music, it took 10000 of technological innovation to get to the classical guitar, and then a mere 50 to go from there to a Fender Strat, another 30 or so to MIDI guitars, and 20 years later we have a digital system that can make musicians' lives easier in many ways, while making them sound better under the conditions that most working musicians have to deal with in order to get their music to audiences. The big leap, as I see it, was getting to the acoustic instrument. The guitar of 100 years ago was a technological marvel that required countless bits and pieces of machinary and knowledge to make, not to mention the social structures that would give people the time and the incentive to deal with making instruments and music in the first place.

A lot of real musicians understand their gear, and put it to good use. Don't knock the delicate interplay between the sound a musician produces and the inspiration she can get from it. Sure, Jimi Hendrix could play a beat up $5 accoustic guitar, but at least some of his uniqueness came from the exploitation of technology, and putting the "limitations" of that technology (feedback, clipping) at the service of his music.

The second point I disagree on is that music is getting worse. It isn't. Granted, commercial radio is at an all time low, but that's a process that's driven by the way the music business is structured, and it has nothing to do with the technology at the disposal of musicians today. If anything, today's cheap recording technology can make it possible for musicians on a budget to create a product that's on par or better than the big labels' multi million dollar productions. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're selling something. Probably studio time.

You obviously care about music. You wouldn't bitch about it otherwise. There's good music out there, but you have to do some digging. A lot of bands try to get the word out about their music by using the web. Look them up. There are so many of them out there, that I find it hard to believe that you won't be able to find at least a couple of artists that you'll like.

One last point: You suggest that people throw out their synthesizers, and get down to the "real deal". For some people, the real deal is simply out of reach, as in 50 piece orchestra out of reach. Synthesizers are just instruments, and damn fine instruments, at that. For some people, they're the only means of getting their art to be heard by people who can't read an orchestral score.

Damnit!

[DaPhoenix]

What I really wanted was an ethernet port on my toaster...

Oh well... Imagine a beowulf... No no... i'm not going there. :)

Re:Damnit!

[FCAdcock]

Wouldn't that be called a band?

Re:Damnit!

[SILIZIUMM]

Here we go for the toaster ! (Well... kinda...)

Re:Damnit!

[benedict]

Paging Glenn Branca.

It goes to 11!

[aiabx]

but since it's digital, that means it really only goes to 3.
-aiabx

Re:It goes to 11!

[orange_6]

Er...it would go to 2.

Later
Josh

Re:It goes to 11!

[Maddog Batty]

Your not too hot on your Spinal Tap trivia then?

N is for Nigel, whose amps go to 11

(either that or your binary has failed you)

Re:It goes to 11!

[Snork Asaurus]

Actually, having volume dials that go to 11 (on amplifiers) is an old guitar players' joke that pre-dates Spinal Tap by many years. I can't remember who was first well-known for doing it and I'm tempted to say Eddie Van Halen ca late 70's, but something is nagging me in the back of my brain that says it goes back to Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page in the 60's.

Re:It goes to 11!

[stud9920]

He was right, 11=3 in binary. Thanks to binary I can count to 1023 on my fingers!

Well my answer to you is (to put it in decimal) : 132 !

Re:It goes to 11!

[pyite]

Because I'm sure you're such an authority on music. If Jimmy Page hadn't a single original idea in his head, then no one ever did. Music is an ever evolving thing, everyone knows that. Jimmy Page loved to play in alternate tunings and explore different music tapestries. Exhibit A: The Rain Song. Exploration is all about using old ideas to create new ones. Here's a quarter, go buy a clue.

Re:It goes to 11!

[Snork Asaurus]

I sense that you're trying to tell us something - could it be that you don't care for Jimmy Page?

Personally, I think that Jimmy Page has a lot of talent as a producer and arranger, and also as musician when he's "on". I have to agree that his playing can be terribly sloppy but often wonder whether there weren't substances involved. Led Zeppelin's live album was truly a showcase of sloppiness (the same could be said of Aerosmith's first live album). I often wonder if they weren't terribly embarrassed by it. But I have a tape of a live BBC session that I recorded eons ago off the radio (come and get me Hilary). In that, his guitar work really shines as it does on all of Zeppelin's studio albums.

Jimmy's talents were well recognized in the early to mid-60's when he did session work on literally hundreds of popular recordings. At one time he was the most sought-after session guitarist in England and he is considered to be the most recorded British guitarist of all time.

The real sin that Zeppelin committed IMO, which apparently started when Jimmy was a member of the Yardbirds (initially as a bass player along side Jeff Beck (who had replaced Eric Clapton), later briefly playing guitar beside Beck and ultimately replacing Beck when he left the band), was ripping off and re-spinning numerous old blues tunes and failing to credit and compensate the origianl composers. That is what I was alluding to in my comment. Still, some argue that it was that very blatant borrowing of the blues that led to a large upsurge in the popularity of the form, which ultimately did financially benefit some old blues artists by causing people to go back to the roots of blues and thus old blues artists for more. For me, that is precisely what happened. I do not think that I would be the huge fan of the blues that I am today, had it not been for my exposure to the form through bands like Led Zeppelin.

Again, while his playing could be terribly erratic and self-indulgent, I believe that Jimmy Page made huge contributions to music, music production and the recording process (he was an early pioneer of recording "studio work" outside of studios). But like most creatives, he is an enigma - talented and at times brilliant, but erratic as a performer and peculiar (his obsession with Aleister Crowley, for example). Still, one cannot argue rationally that he did not make large contributions to the advancement of rock music in the 60's-80's.

Re:It goes to 11!

[dave1212]

I can see your point, I guess my opinion came off a bit harsh.. oh well. Aleister Crowley was an interesting man, his "Diary of a Drug Fiend" was a decent book.

Re:It goes to 11!

[Erik Hollensbe]

A good zeppelin fan would know that zeppelin offers no quarter. :)

Big Whoop

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Big Whoop

[self assembled struc]

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.

Re:Big Whoop

[adrenalinerush]

The grateful dead have had midi/pickup hybrid guitars for years.

You're missing the point: the guitar isn't doing MIDI. Its signal out is entirely digital, as in, the difference between CDs and analog tapes. A major advantage is less noise in the system, regardless of which cables are used, and how long they are.

Re:Big Whoop

[Anonymous Coward]

No, your original post is still wrong. This guitar transmits the actual sound generated by the strumming of the strings as digital information instead of analog information, like a traditional guitar, as opposed to a MIDI guitar, which only transmits information about the notes you played, pitch, duration, attack, etc. It's the difference between a recipe for cake, and the the cake itself; MIDI is the recipe, this guitar is the cake. So put that in your hash pipe and smoke it, you dirty hippy.

From the (Google cache) Gibson site : Gibson's MaGIC - short for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier - makes standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable act like a super cable, capable of carrying up to 32 channels of 32-bit, 48 kHz uncompressed digital sound in both directions (64 channels total), with a control stream 100 times as powerful as MIDI over a single wire. It eliminates latency and jitter, allowing professional real-time sync of hundreds of instruments and devices (250 s point-to-point latency over 100 meters).

Re:Big Whoop

[Wraithlyn]

It IS very different, but not for the reason you mention.

It's not "ENTIRELY DIGITAL". The strings produce an analog signal, which is measured by pickups, same as any other electric guitar.

The difference here is that each string gets its own digital channel, which is source pure, and can be individually manipulated. A MIDI pickup would just reduce the signal to a pitch, duration, volume, etc, it wouldn't be a real "recording" per se.

I wonder what a chord with alternating clean/distorted strings would sound like? :)

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

The "digital guitar" can not actually be used for making music, as new legislation prevents the exact duplication of music ("digital copies").

Re:Unfortunately

[kfg]

Finally, a guitar that can violate itself instead of waiting around for Pete Townshend to do it.

KFG

I can hear the sound checks

[apeleg]

Roadie - "I can't ping the guitar! Better reboot."
Guitarist - "Man, that's kill my uptime."

Re:I can hear the sound checks

[Chocolate Teapot]

Testing ... one zero one one one zero...

Pretty cool

[Hao Wu]

But it's not the first!

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?

Re:Wireless ?

[pyrote]

I can see one, a fan with a palmPC shows up to a stones concert and starts broadcasting Kenny G on the guitar channel.

On the otherhand, a fan can show up to a kenny G concert and broadcast stones music on the Mic channel....

Re:Wireless ?

[mshultz]

Have you guys watched Spinal Tap lately? There's that scene where the guys are playing a gig at a military base, and Nigel Tufnel's (a.k.a. Christopher Guest) wireless RF guitar system starts picking up the military base's radio broadcasts...

insert...

[huhmz]

..."hack-the-gibson-joke-here"

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.

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[SlashdotLemming]

Endless possibilities here though. Example: for rookies who can't tune worth shite (like me ;) it would be huge for a tuner to get a direct feed from the exact string I'm trying to tune.
Hell, why not a self tuning guitar. Fixes itself during a show. Or even have a two way link and the board guys 'reconfigure' the instruments remotely.

As for broken cables, gonna be a big problem. That better be an industrial strength cat5 port, cause you're gonna bust cables ends much more often than strings.
Maybe wireless, but that could lead to a whole new quality of bootlegs ;)

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[Steveftoth]

A self tuning guitar? What about a guitar that switches from tuning to tuing based on a foot pedal? Now that's a cool idea.

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[Pharmboy]

A self tuning guitar?

dont have a link, but it has been done over a dozen years ago. guitar body with dc servos, you set to tune mode and strum lightly. It wasn't a production model, but it really HAS been done.

Now, just imagine a Beowulf of those......

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[pyite]

Been there, done that. Transperformance makes them, except there are buttons on the guitar rather than a foot pedal. Jimmy Page uses one during a song on the video No Quarter.

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[Kaz Riprock]

Speaking of cords...wouldn't a digital guitar have only one cord?

Unplucked = 0
Plucked = 1 ...and you just have to strum it...really fast.

Re:Broken cords anyone?

[gregmac]

One of the first things I thought of with this setup is simple panning - playing some riffs with the strings all panned differently could sound really cool (and you wouldnt have to multitrack). Or putting an echo/octavator on only the high strings, etc. Wonder how long it is before someone comes out with a cool effects board for this?

I bought a Digitech RP-6 6 or 7 years ago, and besides being a really fun toy, it let me do a ton of stuff really easily. Stomp a button, and get a totally new sound.. Hook direct into a PA and still sound good. I even used it in the studio without an amp, and hooked the stereo out right into the console. The RP-12 was even more impressive (I couldn't afford it at the time), and I haven't even looked at any of the new stuff in the past few years.

But the power of an effects unit that could process digital guitar.. that'd be damn cool. You wouldn't even have to buy a new amp, unless of course you wanted to buy the 5 more and have multistring surround :)

Analog vs. Digital

[vurg]

The human brain can notice, although subconsciously, differences between digital and analog sound sources. Analog ones having very fine distortions that we humans cannot discern consciously. The concert is cancelled because someone hacked into his guitar.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Teh Gibson's been HAXORED!

[ripewithdecay]

/.'ed already?

Damn.

How well does it work?

[1nv4d3r]

Here's hoping it fares better than their website!

Why do we punish the ones we love??

more useful link

[carpe_noctem]

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.

Re:more useful link

[TotallyUseless]

The problem with going from a guitar to computer for effects is latency. magic.gibson.com is slashdotted all to hell or i could check, but I'm assuming the guitar has chips onboard to do this kind of thing, or that the signal can be routed to effects pedals like an analog guitar. This would reduce the latency to a minimal amount as opposed to feeding it to a computer for the changes to take place there, then routing the signal back out to a speaker. Yes a computer will have better processing power, but that isnt going to matter in a live show if the audio output is too far behind what you are actually playing because of latency

Re:more useful link

[Talinom]

I don't belive that this technology will be universally adopted. Why? Your analog distortion created by vacuum tubes, which is a mainstay effect of everything from rock to death metal, differs from digital or transistor generated distortion in that analog will gradually saturate and digital is instant.

For the non musical: Touching or picking the string lightly in an analog environment will result in a clean sound, pretty much no matter how much distortion you have. Touching, picking, or even breathing on a string in a digital environment will instantly result in massive distortion.

I can pretty much guarantee that artists from Eric Clapton to Metallica will stay with analog as the mainstay for their sound.

One story that I have heard is back from the early eightes during the Blizzard Of Ozz tour the entire MIDI rack crashed and needed to be restarted during one of Randy Rhoads' solos resulting in a really pissed off Ozzy. How many musicians would like to take a chance of their system crashing that hard during a live performance?

Kinda like they have been

[briancnorton]

My friend's roland GK-2 did essentially the same thing via midi. In my opinion, it was a much more versatile system running on an open standard. Sound quality was superb.

Re:Kinda like they have been

[b30w0lf]

Completely different system here. MIDI transmits performance data; when you hit a note it sends no audio but rather a digital signal that says "hit C3" for instance. This is actually sending digital audio.

Re:Kinda like they have been

[briancnorton]

While I agree that there is in fact an architechtural difference, and the novelty is neat, I dont see how the sum-total results are any different. The MIDI convereter will definitely catch the minor imperfections and inflections of a guitar player, and what you end up with an audio file that you can process in whatever software you like.

Roland VG-8

[FromWithin]

The VG-8(and VG-88) are the best things to happen to guitars for years (and they've also been out for years). They have their own pickups which transmit each individual string, although in analog form, not digital. They are truly amazing in how they re-model your guitar into any guitar/amp/brass/whatever. I can't see how the digital pickups will be any better than the Roland pickup.

Re:Roland VG-8

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, as a 5 year owner of the various V-Guitar systems, I'm looking at this Gibson Digi-Axe and saying ".....AND....."

This is not the world's first digital guitar. MIDI guitars have been around for over 10 years.

I must correct you by saying that the V-Guitar system is digital. The system does convert an analog signal to digital according to COMPONENT OBJECT SOUND MODELING (COSM). COSM allows a guitar to be transformed convincingly to any string instrument, and you can combine them into a "patch" (effect) - for example, a guitar/bass or a violin/banjo. Its important to note that this is NOT midi technology. This eliminates the limitations of MIDI (mostly the speed of "tracking")

However, the VG-series sister is the GR series of MIDI guitar effects processors. Though you still has the tracking limitations of midi, the patches are MUCH more convincing, and its compatible with most midi software.

Re:Roland VG-8

[FromWithin]

I was saying that the pickup is analog. Yes, it becomes digital once it enters the beautiful beast that is the VG-8, where the sound gets torn apart and put back together again.

I really can't see any benefits in buying a digital guitar over buying one with a Roland six-string pickup in it.

It still amazes me how many people have never heard of the VG-8/VG-88/V-Bass.

It's shocking what it can do. I still sit there playing thinking "but that's a guitar!".

Re:Roland VG-8

[curtoid]

I have the AMP version (VGA-7) with the Roland COSM technology. Very cool. It is nearly impossible to tell that the sound is manufactured.

However, a digital pickup would be one upping their system by reason of the cabling - there's a 13-pin connector on the GK input! The digital system might even be able to be wireless.....

Re:Roland VG-8

[owlicks58]

Heh, that's what kirk hammett from metallica uses. Back when I was obsessed with them I wanted one just so I could be like him... good to know it woulda been a good investment ;)

Top 5 reasons to use a new digital guitar

[Amsterdam Vallon]

5 -- For some reason, you think rock music isn't dead yet

4 -- It's something to do in between your Frost Pists!!1

3 -- Utilize the all new one-click recording feature of the GNU Radio software

2 -- Jam along wirelessly in front of the TV during the Terry Tate: Office Linebacker commercial

1 -- Gives you the chance to play along with the hottest radio songs of the day, such as the punk-rock classic "All I Have" by Jennifer Lopez featuring LL Cool J, the arena rock classic "In Da Club" by 50 Cent, and country song "Mesmerize" by Ja Rule featuring Ashanti.

I don't know about digital...

[pVoid]

Digital has its applications, but really, in the end, digital is infintely less precise then analog (mathematically speaking). It's just so much less vulnerable to interferance that it makes it a good choice for things where accuracy is required (like computing).

Now, I'm not saying that you could hear the difference, but I'm genuinely wondering what you would gain from such a thing? Is it just the cool-geek factor?

Will there be digital flash lights in the new millenium, that shine ever so precisely onto your wall, to create an almost perfect circular pattern?

Re:I don't know about digital...

[pyrote]

uh... ya
http://www.theledlight.com/onestar.html

the second one on the page (took me 20 minutes to find it but yes there will be).

Re:I don't know about digital...

[Webmonger]

Well, one nifty thing is you can apparently send audio BACK to the guitar, for the guitarist to listen to. Presumably a mix that emphasised their guitar so they could hear their own part better. You could do this before with a long headphone wire, but now you don't need to.

Re:I don't know about digital...

[PenguiN42]

Digital has its applications, but really, in the end, digital is infintely less precise then analog (mathematically speaking).

While this is true in theory, there's no thing in the real world as infinite precision, as that would convey infinite information. There's always some amount of noise, and in audio systems the ambient noise is almost certainly going to be above the quantization noise you get from 32 (or even 24) bit digital precision.

The sample rate you choose, of course, limits the frequencies you can reliably encode, and also the pre-filtering for the AD conversion introduces some phase shift at the upper end of the frequency spectrum, but nowadays we can up the sample rate so high that it really doesn't matter for human listening purposes (observe 192khz sampling for DVD audio, etc).

On the other hand, most of the noise and distortion of your signal through an audio path seems to come from the analog components. Infinite precision doesn't really matter if it's not accurate in the first place! More and more studios are making more and more of the audio stay in the digital domain, for protection against noise and distortion. My guess is that this guitar stays digital for the same reasons. (and cool-geek factor too)

Does this mean

[Tri0de]

That Green Day can finally play in tune?

Re:Does this mean

[joedavis123]

Still wouldn't stop their Californian singer from annoyingly sounding like he's from England.

Re:Does this mean

[Webmonger]

Yeah, probably. The autotune gear available these days only works for one note at a time (not chords). Since the six strings are isolated, you'd be able to autotune each string.

I know you're kidding.

That was quick...

[mooniejohnson]

Slashdotted Gibson.com pretty fast... anyone want to bet they only had one guitar serving the site?

;-)

Re:That was quick...

[mookie-blaylock]

They better get a double-neck guitar to balance the load, then.

Re:That was quick...

[KidSock]

Man I haven't seen anything really funny on ./ in a loong time but you got me with this one. Bravo.

Re:That was quick...

[Bullet-Dodger]

Slashdotted Gibson.com pretty fast... anyone want to bet they only had one guitar serving the site? ;-)

Maybe someone hacked the Gibson?

Re:That was quick...

[mooniejohnson]

What? Funny? I wasn't kidding, dude. I know that Gibson webmaster. It's kinda sad watching him play a I V VI progression over and over to keep up with the traffic...

Re:That was quick...

[tedDancin]

This gives.. err.. new meaning to being Slash-Dotted. (:

*ducks*

Not possible with 802.11

[missing000]

At least wifi wont work with this kind of application right now. The latency issues are really a problem for real-time stuff like this, and I assume the same is true of bluetooth.

Re:Not possible with 802.11

[pyrote]

like my other post, I'd avoid easy access hardware like 802.11. it's hackable and jamable. heck, a 9 volt battery and a rusty nail will give enough intererence to trash a concert.

Re:Not possible with 802.11

[jandrese]

Bluetooth has a special mode for devices like Cell phones (it was developed by Cell phone companies after all) that allow you to create a dumb device that bypasses the regular Bluetooth stack and works more or less like a dumb packet radio. It's designed for voice traffic (it has no error correction for instance), but it does have low latency and guarenteed bandwidth. It could be modified for this pretty easily.

Greatest benefit

[worst_name_ever]

I maintain that the greatest potential benefit of this new computer-controlled guitar is that computer-generated "artists" like Britney and N'Sync will finally be able to be seen "playing" their own instruments.

oh, for the love of...

[the_mind_]

so a beawolf cluster of these will be what?
an anorchestra?

burn karma, burn!

Re:oh, for the love of...

[the_mind_]

so a beawolf cluster of these will be what?

an anorchestra?


And with spellchecking it looks like this:

So a beawolf cluster of these will be what?

An orchestra?

Re:oh, for the love of...

[syrinx]

And with spellchecking it looks like this:

So a beawolf cluster of these will be what?

An orchestra?

And, obviously you didn't spellcheck enough, so let's try again:

So a beowulf cluster of these will be what?

An orchestra?

Dilemma

[nakaduct]

It's a Gibson, and it's an axe. Do I hack it, or use it to hack?

Big Whoop!

[beaverfever]

Midi guitars have been around for a long time; the grateful dead were by no means innovators in that area. Although adapters which mount on a regular guitar are common/normal, in the 80s some companies seemed to think it was necessary to design bizarre spacey/futuristic-looking looking midi guitars (I cannot find a pic of these, unfortunately), but if you remember being in the 80s and seeing a terribly ugly guitar with a big handle connecting the top of the body with the headstock, that was a midi guitar.

I don't know how much the technology has improved since those times (I have been away from music stuff for a while), but up to the early 90s midi guitars suffered from delay (lag, to most of you and me) and weren't 100% reliable in reading notes/conversion to data.

I can see digital guitars being a great innovation. Many people don't realize how heavily music recording now relies on digital equipment; the days of giant reels of tape are already ancient history (expect for those artists who specifically seek out specialty studios which use analog equipment).

Re:Big Whoop!

[Talinom]

Question. When the sales drone would show me their midi equipment at the local music store I would always overwork the contraption. Try hammering out Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor with the MIDI device set to pipe organ. The long ramp up, sustain, and decay for the organ would inevitably result in clipping.

Will this digital guitar help out the above situation?

Digital guitar with DRM support

[arvindn]

In related news, Intel, Microsoft and the RIAA have announced the formation of the trusted music playing alliance (TMPA). "We are very concerned with people playing copyrighted music on their digital guitars", a spokesman for the alliance said today. "It is a heinous crime which will drive down profits for the music industry".

The alliance is working on the trusted music platform which is expeced to be implemented on all digital guitars by 2006. Microsoft corporation (MSFT) will provide the software which will verify that the musician has renewed their subscription with the RIAA before allowing him or her to play the guitar. It will also constantly compare the notes being played on the guitar with a database provided by the RIAA. If a copyright violation is found, the guitar will immediately self-destruct and the musician's license will be revoked. A spokesman for Intel corporation (INTC) has assured slashdot.org that the guitar cannot be used without digitally signed software.

"This is a great step forward for digital music", RIAA CEO Hillary Rosen was quoted as saying. Now we will be able to protect misuse of intellectual property at the source instead of at the destination. The next step in the battle would be the development of the PTC - the platform for trusted cognition. Essentially, we will be able to monitor people's thought for intellectual property violations.

EFF director Cindy John was not immediately available for comment, but is widely rumoured to have commited suicide.

Re:Digital guitar with DRM support

[psyfir]

This is not actually a joke, if you read the description of the spec change history
(http://www.gibsonmagic.com/specification.html)
you'll see Revision 2.4: "Added copy protection bit."

Psyfir

Re:Digital guitar with DRM support

[unitron]

Not a problem. The final consumer version of this guitar will include a slot for swiping your credit card through to enable automatic billing of royalty payments.

Or perhaps to be able to play it at all. You just know that even now someone at Gibson is thinking "subscription".

Hmmmm.....

[nnet]

Connection refused.....

Is it Ethernet?

[ryanr]

The one mirror of the article I read kept referring to "Ethernet cable", and it's got Xilinx and 3com involved, but is what is coming down the wire actually 802. anything? I would tend to assume it's some proprietary digital 8-channel sound stream, that just happens to use CAT5.

Re:Is it Ethernet?

[Meowing]

Gibson are making MaGIC an open standard. At the moment it's basically an extension to MIDI, but room is left to support other protocols too. It does use the Ethernet standard, including MACs, so it should be able to work on the same LAN as other equipment. A provision is made to accommodate IP headers, but they are optional.

Re:You know what'd be cool...

[FromWithin]

You almost can with the VG-8 or VG-88.

You can turn your electric guitar into any other electric, acoustic, banjo, brass, string, pwm, bass, hammond, whatever.

Funnily enough, no matter what sound you use, it always ends up sounding like a guitar solo because of the playing style.

Yes possible Re:Not possible with 802.11

[WolfWithoutAClause]

WiFi doesn't have any significant latency issues; that's wrong; I've measured it to be under 1ms.

There can be jitter however, if there is interference or heavy usage of the wireless interface, but otherwise latency is negligable; 1 millisecond or less; over the entire range of WiFi.

People have done VOIP over WiFi perfectly well.

PC based guitar processing?

[Snork Asaurus]

do all the digital effects on an actual computer, which will probably generate better sound given the greater amount of processing power

I've been thinking about getting back into playing (at home for recreation). I still have my old and beloved SG and Strat. It's been years and the calluses and some of the dexterity are gone, so it will take a while to get back into it.

I don't have a decent amp any more (or the money to invest in one) and my Rockman died. I've been thinking along the lines using my PC for (real-time) effects and processing. It seems to me that one could run the guitar patch cord (with an adapter, which I have) into a sound card line-in as a start. I'd try it but I don't have a full-duplex sound card and I wonder if there's enough gain anyway. I'm also guessing that there might be an annoying midi-like delay. Has anyone tried this? Can anyone point to some good/free tools?

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[topham]

I've plugged a scanner (radio) into my soundcard and listened to the sound from both the computer speakers, and the speakers in the scanner, there was no noticable delay.

Once you start adding processing on top of it though there will be.

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[groomed]

You won't get rid of the delays, which are in the order of 10-50ms. It's better than MIDI though. Frankly I'd not bother with a PC except for the final recording/production work. You're much better off with a nice mixing console and some good microphones.

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[qqtortqq]

I did a half assed thing like this for my brother. Just go to any shareware site and search for "guitar." If I remember correctly, one of the programs I set him up with was called stompbox; probably for windows, but maybe for linux. It allows you to string together virtual stompboxes to get almost any effect you could think of. The latency was managable on his 500mhZ compaq, and it was convenient playing through the pc speakers. Most programs like this allow you to add percusion easily.

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[Snork Asaurus]

Thanks. Yes, I can see that there would be little (no noticeable) delay if the card's on-board DSP and other hardware is used to do any processing. But I think that to get some more advanced effects one might have to go off-board, which is bound to result in some delay. I know that how much is going to be very much system hardware, o/s, and code dependant but I'm wondering if anyone has tried/gone this route and whether it's even worth investigating.

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[Snork Asaurus]

Thanks for the info. I've had a look around and I see some options. I couldn't find "stompbox" (there was something with a very similar name for the Mac only), but I've found some other interesting stuff (mostly Windows, of course, but that's OK, I have both Linux and Windows boxes).

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[Snork Asaurus]

Frankly I'd not bother with a PC

Thanks for the suggestions. This is just a home/recreational thing and on a budget of about $1.99 . The component that I'm missing is a good guitar amp, which I can't afford right now. So I thought that since I have a good solid state amp and speakers that I run my sound card output through, how about something to simulate various tube amps and effects in real-time.

You're much better off with a nice mixing console and some good microphones.

One of my dreams for many years has been to have a really good equipment set-up and my own (non-virtual) 24-track studio. But I have to work that "first million" before I can do that (and I'm not trying to get rich in the music business - I gave that dream up a long time ago).

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[groomed]

Didn't mean to post that anonymously, oh wel...

Re:PC based guitar processing?

[Snork Asaurus]

Yes, my "budget of about $1.99" statement was said tongue-in-cheek and I see your point that a useful set-up can be put together relatively cheaply. I really have to explore whether this is just a passing fancy or whether it's long term, but right now I'm excited by the prospect and itching to get (back) at it. Thanks for the suggestions!

hrm...i'll pass

[i7dude]

for the past 15 years guitar has been my escape from the regualr world and a life with responsabilities. when i think of gibson i think of smokey bars, jack daniels, and good ol' blues and rock...just the kinds of things i seek out when i want to relax/escape...

i dunno...but for me...it sounds like a detraction from the imperfections, the feel...the soul of guitar.

i'll probably be proven wrong, and end up appreciating this tech on some level...i was the same way about all digital hd recording...but for now...i'll stick with whats worked for decades.

dude.

Re:hrm...i'll pass

[King_TJ]

Mmm... I have mixed feelings myself. I've been playing electric guitar for over 10 years now (although lately, just on the rare occasion that I get free time and feel like plinking around on it), and I can understand both sides of an argument like this.

I think the bottom line is, as long as the instrument still has 6 strings and is played by hand - it will only be as good (or bad) as the abilities + imagination of the person playing it.

The primary "benefit" of going digital with any of these things is to clean up background noise.
I've sure had my share of hassles with guitar cables going bad and causing loud buzzing/humming sounds through my amp, or intermittently cutting out. By changing the signal path to digital, at least you'd have much more of an "either it works or it doesn't" situation. A bad cable would mean no sound at all.

On the flip-side, I don't think I'd pay a premium price for a guitar just because it converts analog to digital and back again on the other end of the cable. This seems like just the type of thing that allows Gibson to boost prices on their guitars, and pad their wallets.

The thing Line 6 was doing with their "digital guitar" appears to be much more interesting and useful. They're basically taking what used to be an external effects processor and integrating it into the guitar, so with a twist of the dial - you can make their generic guitar emulate the tone of many different popular guitars. Of course, that also means your Line 6 instrument has no unique, defining "character" of its own. That automatically makes me, as a musician, feel like I'd only want it as a second (or third) guitar. Not my *only* guitar.

Re:Linux?

[ubugly2]

send me one and i'll see what i can do with it.....or not

Nope

[missing000]

At least as I understand things this is not true.
I just ran a ping test for yahoo.com from 2 machines using the same link. The wireless one has initial ping response times in the 130ms range, while the LAN connected machine on the same switch consistently gets initial responses well under 90ms.

I neither have high usage or interference on my 802.11b network. Unless I don't understand something basic here, the results I just observed would indicate a ~40ms latency on the wifi connection.

Re:Nope

[WolfWithoutAClause]

So, you're saying that you've tried it once, with your hardware, and it didn't work, therefore it is impossible? It's perfectly possible you have interference you're not aware of, or else, maybe the protocol stack that came with your WiFi is pants.

Well, my laptop PCMCIA slot is screwed at the moment, so I can't retry it; but last time I tried this, I got something like:

a) laptop to google 121ms (over WiFi, then through PC, then through ADSL)

b) same PC to google 120ms (ADSL)

There was some variability- actually the lowest ping time I found was from the laptop ;-), but the results were typical.

This was with actiontec wireless PCMCIA card to a actiontec wireless PC card.

Re:Nope

[NetGyver]

I dunno, maybe i'm out of my league here, but we're talking about guitars running on wireless technologies to connect instrument pieces together.

Your guitar isn't going to be running on the internet. And ISP connection latentcy, site latentcy should be taken into consideration?

I figure the best way to test wireless devices like 802.11 for speed would be to do all the testing locally with two machines.

This seems obvious to me, but then agian, i never actually messed with wifi, so just take this as a friendly "huh?" and help me out.

Re:Nope

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Look, I was getting submillisecond latency when I did the test. There's no reason that WiFi should have large latency; the wireless side latency is negligible provided there is no interference/noise (speed of light is 300km/millsecond, WiFi only has standard a range of 0.1km), the protocol stack latency by all rights should be negligible; the processors I used were running at 650+ Mhz; why would it take more than a millisecond to handle a few packets?

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[op51n]

"E flat diminished ninth is ' a man's chord ' - you could lose a finger"

Will it be any easier on a Digi Gueetar!?

Yea, yea, I know that chord doesn't actually exist!
For me, I'd far rather have an analogue guitar any day, better sound, better quality. You can't get the same effect from anything but the real thing.

Re:Linux?

[Linwood]

why do you have to get linux running on everything! geez, you think MS is bad.. MS doesn't go out of there way to make xp run on an ipod, and a guitar, and other crap that just has no friggin point! if you guys used all the time you waste on making stupid shiz like that linux would be by far better than it is!

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[JebusIsLord]

Here it is folks - people saying the digital solution is inferiour BEFORE IT EVEN COMES OUT!
You sir I am sure still listen to vinyl as well, no? At least this time we've caught you're misplaced logic before you can even pretend to know what you're talking about.

Re:Linux?

[Scaba]

I'm in. I'll take care of abandoning the Sourceforge site.

Some technical info on MaGIC

[GRW]

From a story here: "Gibson's MaGIC -- short for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier -- makes standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable act like a super cable, capable of carrying up to 32 channels of 32-bit, 48 kHz uncompressed digital sound in both directions (64 channels total), with a control stream 100 times as powerful as MIDI over a single wire. It eliminates latency and jitter, allowing professional real-time sync of hundreds of instruments and devices (250 us point-to-point latency over 100 meters)."

Imagine...

[TeknoHog]

A Beowulf Band of these. Or a Beoband/Beorchestra if you like. *ducks into asbestos suit in soviet russia*

Looks like a desperate cry for attention

[Vinnie_333]

Two years and 6 million dollars in developement to come up with a lame ass toy that'll disapear a month after the produvt is PA'd! I've been playing guitar to 15 years and playing with computers just as long. This looks stupid to me. Concept-wise, mildly interesting, but as and actual instrument - stupid!

Re:Looks like a desperate cry for attention

[Meowing]

Oh gee, no, this has potential to be really nifty, probably more for recording than for live performance. This lets the physical motions of the strings get captured, rather than what happens after the pickups and amps have colored it, so you get a second (or third...) chance to capture a nice recording if the playing was just right but the signal sucked.

Re:Looks like a desperate cry for attention

[Chris Johnson]

Hey, I've been hacking guitars for many years (over a decade and then some) in attempts to get at the real essence of the physical motion of the string. At one point I was using a blade alnico magnet singlecoil low-impedance pickup RIGHT UP AGAINST the bridge. More recently I've been designing guitar DI boxes that can do full-on distortion and still have the transparency to do more complicated chords. I've discovered some things.

First- it's been done before. Jimmy Page was doing this years ago. In fact if you go to my URL there, some of the guitar sounds are specifically modelled after Page's more wiry, bright sounds, especially 'Dance With The River'.

Second- any form of getting more raw transparency and accuracy out of the guitar tone (instead of a wall of 'really cool' mud) has some VERY NASTY side-effects. What happens, and I'm not fooling here, is that your performance gets stripped naked. It's VERY difficult to perform with perfect accuracy. In fact it's undesirable and boring to do so- but here's the catch: while people who like your music invariably like it all the more when the tone is more transparent and uncolored, anyone who is approaching it from ANY sort of critical direction and finding fault will simultaneously like it less!

I'm not saying the new Gibson stuff is in fact more transparent- it might actually be worse than simple electrical wiring.

I am saying that if it IS really more transparent and a better 'image' of the guitar performance than the regular kind, that's a real double-edged sword there and you might not be ready to deal with the results.

You end up gaining the ability to have regular folks be really into it for the first time- they don't have the training to interpret mistakes and they go only by how well you can connect your musical intent to them- but you will get crucified by other artists and by anyone with the training to understand a mistake. With enough clarity into your performance, it is IMPOSSIBLE to evade criticism: even your correctly played stuff has a degree of presence that makes it seem 'wrong' compared to more colored stuff.

This has turned and bit me in a big way at times- the more I developed the tech of it, and especially when I started to mimic Jimmy Page tonal balances, the more extreme the responses were. Interestingly, I have a friend who was around when Led Zeppelin was coming out, and he tells me the same thing happened then- the critics just could not hate Zep more, anyone wanting to dislike them just went ballistic.

So- I don't know if this Gibson stuff really is better fidelity, but if it is, watch out! You'd better be pretty tough to expose yourself like that. The rewards are great but the penalties are harsh...

Re:Looks like a desperate cry for attention

[CdotZinger]

The guitar interface for the Synclavier did the same thing, back in 1985 or so. Good idea, until you tried to use it. They seriously underestimated the subtlety of "natural"-sounding playing. If Gibson's done it better, well, good, but it's far from revolutionary. If you're willing to waste a lot of time setting it up, you can already get the same result with Roland's interface, too.

And, you can already record direct pickup (and/or MIDI) signal alongside any number of differently amplified signals, then reamplify and process and combine them to your heart's content.

I don't see why anyone's excited about this. Severe tech-overkill to do a few simple things you can already do anyway, on the cheap(er).

A guitarist can run a cable over 2000 meters

[WhaDaYaKnow]

with no loss of audio quality.

So now I can finally play like McFly in Back to the Future, without permanent hearing damage.

I bet the rest of the band is going to really appreciate this feature.

Not really Ethernet

[reillyeon]

Reading the MaGIC spec I notice that it is actually only compatible at the physical layer. Therefore you can't run this on the same network as computers or even standard network equiptment. Really, it seems they only use the same type of cable and a frame-based digital transport system.

Re:Not really Ethernet

[Meowing]

TO repeat, it does respect MACs and uses the same kind of frames, so other network equipment on the same LAN can ignore it just fine. The protocool does allow for IP as well.

Not just a band ...

[A nonymous Coward]

... a BIG band! What better to celebrate the 70th anniverary of the electric guitar ...

Re:Not just a band ...

[FCAdcock]

Ever hear of the Transsiberian Orchestra? I believe that they would qualify as a cluster of guitarists. something like 7 at one point I know for a fact.

Over my dead body

[melted]

And it's not only my opinion. What's the advantage in transferring the signal in digital form if you still have to convert it back to analog to run it through a tube amp? I fail to see it. Don't tell me about all this "modelling" crap - it's nowhere near in terms of quality and depth of tone to the "old" tube stuff. Some people say modelling gear does a good job, but let me tell you this - it does a good job for as long as there's no real amp in the room.

Another thing is the quality of ADCs and DACs. A good monaural ADC can easily cost $1500 and more. A good DAC is in the same price range. Now imagine 6 of these at each end of the wire. If Gibson is planning to put crappy ADC/DACs in their gear, then no, thanks - any high gain amplifier will make their artifacts grotesque and easily audible.

In other words, I don't know what kind of weed people at Gibson are smoking, but this shit isn't gonna take off anytime soon. Sorry Gibson, I'm happy with my passive pickups, analog cable and tube amp with spring reverb.
*

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[JebusIsLord]

Analog pickups get a lot of unwanted noise and hum, and analog cables loose signal quality over distance. Neither is a problem with digital. Also if you would care to read, the sample rates involved are many orders of magnitude better than will ever make it onto the actual recording. In addition, the ability to mix and alter each string independently is a huge benefit.
The reason its taken this long to implement is because they predicted zealots like you will never accept it just because "digital sux". A shame really.

Its all in the hands

[ToasterTester]

You can give a trash guitar to a great player and it will sound good. It's all in the hands. So my concern is will all the digital gear lose the nuances that make one musician great and another so-so.

What I mean is take a group that sounds great live, and put them in the studio and record them and it sounds blan. Why because live you hear the whole audio spectum. In the studio the recording gear and process only covers a smaller range in comparison. That why recording is an art to itself to overdub more tracks and instruments to fill the sound out.

So it will be interesting to see how well these digital instrument compare to analog that transmit everything.

Re:Its all in the hands

[sabinm]

That is not quite true. While it holds that the musician is the source of the quality of music that is played, there are things that will reduce the acoustic pleasures one hears when playing a guitar. It might sound *great* to others around, but a talented player will notice.

Take for instance a guitar that is more difficult to press down on the fret board. I've played these kinds of guitars. It takes *twice* as much pressure to produce a terrible sound. The extra pressure causes more time from switching cords or notes and so you limit the versatility of the composition. Poorly constructed guitars also have poor tuning quality. A couple of strums and you can feel the dissonant tones eating into your brain. You have to tune it up even during a performance. That's lousy.

Not having an exact measurement from the strings to the fret board causes mistakes also. After playing a guitar after a while, it is not so much a heavy percussion instrument as a light tickle of the strings, almost like a harp. Hendrix described this as "jelly", when the licks come out smooth and unhindered, almost jumping from the fretboard to the amp. The seasoned guitarist doesn't want to be hindered to much with getting the exact pressure. The right strings, enough play in the fretboard and a deft touch can produce more expression in a guitar.

I'm not saying that a guitar *can't* be played well that has a lousy construction, all i'm saying is that is is more than *studio* that makes a production smooth. Good equipment is nothing to sneeze at.

6 way split

[TheGrayArea]

The 6 way split could be cool, assuming you have enough gear. Let's face it, when you're playing through a massively cranked Marshall, there are note/chord combinations that just don't work with all the overtones that are already present. By having each string distored by it's own amp or fx unit, you can play some pretty complex stuff without having to worry about really nasty beating or overtones. There have been hex pickups in the past, and the midi ones wer particularly useful. It's fun to do things like put an octave divide on the low A and E strings. Makes it sound like your playing along with a bass player when doing Chet/Merle style stuff.

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

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[op51n]

Nope, I listen to everything on mp3 (192k true stereo), but I have done a lot of poduction and other various working on music, with various software solutions, and working digitally to an extent. And I know from this that unless they have come up with something truly innovative and new, then samples, in whatever manner, can not have as much quality, or options as analogue. Piano, drums, guitar, all have certain features in analogue that you just cannot get from digital versions (you can get close by having 50,000 samples of each, on every pitch, every style etc.).

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[op51n]

Ok so they mean digital pickup,(article has been /.'ed to hell). So it may have benefits. I'll have to wait and see. But even so, i like the sounds you can get from a tube amp, the warmth and slight distortion is a part of the effect as far as I see it.

six outputs older than most people think

[firewort]

The guitar with a handle on it you're thinking of is a 1980s Roland experiment.

And Roland has staked out the idea of individual string pickups with the V guitar pickup.

But the six individual pickups predate the MIDI era.

I have one of these http://www.si.edu/lemelson/guitars/noframes/de08.h tm a Gittler, which has six individual volumes and a DB9 port to separate all the signal out to the six different effects chains and amps.

Re:six outputs older than most people think

[beaverfever]

you may better recall than I; what was the guitar eddie van halen was playing for a while (late 80s?) - I'm not sure how the actual output was handled, but it had individual pickups and a volume pot for each string on the guitar. I also don't know if he did anything constructive with this set-up, but while it may not predate the gittler, it is another example of individual pickups.

Re:six outputs older than most people think

[firewort]

Van Halen guitars are always an interesting topic- He built a number of different strat style Frankensteins- the first was a 1961 Fender Strat that he hacked up. The others were Charvels. He took Gibson PAFs and DiMarzios, rewound them, and potted them with surfboard wax.

He really only used one pickup and one volume pot in the guitar, but when people started wanting to emulate his playing style and sound, he loaded guitars up with extra pots and pickups that weren't even connected electrically, just to confuse the public.

Of course, I may be forgetting the particular guitar you're mentioning in which case, I need to check that out.

Re:six outputs older than most people think

[beowulfcluster]

I think the intro to Top Jimmy was referred to as a sort of showcase of what this guitar could do. I may just have dreamt that though.

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.

Re:The writing is on the wall

[FrankNputer]

If it's a digital backbone you like - the writing is a bit old. It's already here, and I've been putting them into radio stations around the country for over 2 1/2 years now (and that's just how long I've been with the company). http://www.klotzdigital.com

How this translates to guitars, though, is a bit different. It's great from an audio management standpoint, but the best digital emulations of analog technology are still emulations.

Plus, they carry their own set of issues - my amps have occasionally had issues, but I've never had one crash. (All of our systems are spec'd with an analog backup line - and they are needed from time to time, in a 24/7 broadcast situation.)

Digital equipment doesn't have the physical resilience of point-to-point wired amps, either. The abuse factor is huge with road equipment - I'd want to see some truly heavy-duty computers before I'd want to depend on one for my show.

Hack a concert?`

[sethadam1]

If the guitar outputs IP over cat5, how long until it's wireless. And that will usher in a whole new era of hacking/cracking.

Imagine when you can smuggle your 802.11 handheld into a concert and hack guitar feed, playing your favorite music intead of the guitar track!?

Re:still analog

[NetGyver]

It is better that way. After recording a guitar session, you can only do so much with the mix of all the strings.

But according to digital idea, this may be a good example of a benifit:

Supposed you just recorded the guitar track of your song, and when you strummed the last chord, you get some serious nasty ass fret-buzz on one string. You could always go back and pinpoint that string by itself, and re-record just that string being played, and paste it over the buzzed string in your recording, given how your how have your recording setup, It could be done.

The idea that you can manipulte individual strings at the processing end could be very useful. Hit the wrong string in a chord? no problem, just replace that wrong string with the right one, mesh them all together. It adds alot of hackability of guitar recordings.

This may be totally wrong, I'm not quite sure, the site's dead. But could this be done?

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[JebusIsLord]

geez people i hit the "o" key twice. Would you like my address so you can come over and lynch me?

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.

Does this really matter?

[TheBigOh(n)]

I don't want to sound like a troll. I really don't, but this whole digital guitar thing isn't going to change music. It will change the way music is produced.

began rant:
Any guitar player who really understands the music itself won't waste his or her time with this. Listen to the early recordings of Muddy Waters. On some of them all you can hear is a bass drum, a bass, a telecaster, and Muddy's voice. To me that music stands as some of the most powerful music ever produced. It was raunchy and soulful. Soulful - that is the key. Music is an art form. Every piece of great art has one thing common, and that's soul. Technical wizardy maybe an alternate manifestation of soul, but it is no replacement for the inexplicable thing found in truly great music.

Listen to the things that all the great guitar players do with one note. Go ahead try it, listen to B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Santanna, or anyone else who really touches you musically. Chuck Berry used to jump on stage and never bother to even tune his guitar. It didn't matter. The kids still went nuts. Great music has something extra. Unfortunately, with Pro Tools and Digital this and that, today's pop music can't hide the fact that it is missing that extra something.

end rant.

Roland G-707

[beaverfever]

It was driving me up the wall so I HAD to find a pic of that roland guitar - and I did.

A friend of mine had one of these for a while. I felt a bit better when he finally got rid of it and just learned how to play a keyboard.

Re:Will it bring back the long lost guitar solo?

[WickedClean]

Look at it this way - you know this guitar will be expensive, so it will have to be a money band to use one. The money band are the ones who get lots of radio and video play. When was the last time you heard a REAL guitar solo on a radio station? Queens of the Stone Age show some promise, but look at all the Korns and power metal crap...its all distorted bar chords. The only one really doing any work is the drummer.

Just last night...

[gad_zuki!]

Just last night I was commenting to a friend that a the second band out of a three band lineup (ending with Damo Suzuki) literally took more time to setup than time they were given to play.

I immedialtly thought of how a digital infrastructure owned by the venue would make things so much easier for everyone involved, help create cheap digital instruments, and make expensive tube amps a thing of the past. Of course, few guitarist are going to give up their tube equipment for some wacky digital revolution, but there are some real pros here and a lot of cons related simply to the intertia of not changing.

Imagine setting up simply by putting your USB flash card on your keychain into a PC and seeing your presets regarding amp, tone, effects, etc. We're not just talking guitars here, but anything that could be digitally modeled and something that could be built like a thin client.

Its probably not practical in commercial settings, but in places where money is tight and centralization is a bit easier to manage it could bring "thin clients" to music. I'm sure this could have applications in schools with tight music budgets. As long as the physical interface isn't too weird e.g. the digital guitar still has 6 strings or string like objects, the trumpet still has to blown into, the drums still need to be hit properly, etc then these skills should be easy to carry over to "real" traditional instruments.

Re:still analog

[1nv4d3r]

Hit the wrong string in a chord? no problem, just replace that wrong string with the right one, mesh them all together.

Was it so hard to just re-record the whole chord, or even the phrase|section|song for that matter? What you're describing sounds harder than that, if you want it to sound as if you didn't make the mistake in the first place.

This use is not the 'killer app' I hope...

What Jerry Garcia really sounded like

[InsMonkey]

Dude, that wasn't an orchestra you were hearing... it was the acid.

Digital Amp

[prockcore]

I bet this goes well with my digital amp.

I have a Crate DX100 Digital Stack. It's completely software based.. you can download new software and "flash" your amp, giving it new tones and effects.

I'll bet that within a year or two, Crate will put out an amp based on their DX line that matches perfectly with this guitar.

correction

[beaverfever]

oops - my memory failed me - after a fair bit of searching (curiosity was killing this cat) I finally found that 80s EVH guitar, but my mistake is that the pots weren't volume, but a separate pan for each string. Still, it's part of the history of that individual pickup thing.

Re:correction

[firewort]

Ok, I see the Kramer Ripley with pan pots, which is news to me- but did EVH actually ever use one? My inclination is to think, no he didn't.

Man, would I like to get ahold of the pickup they used in that thing- actually, the pickup probably sounds like crud, but the notion of six outputs is still pretty cool.

Re:correction

[beaverfever]

whether EVH ever used a ripley in battle is one thing, but I know he endorsed it - the first time I saw a ripley was on a kramer poster in a music shop, the guitar being held by eduardo. There was a similar magazine cover, the name of which escapes me. Anyways, doing a quick web search for 'kramer ripley' produces returns including "...1983 Kramer Ripley, USA, as made famous by EVH back in the day with special Bartolini with 6 individual pickups (one for each string that you can pan left or ..."

I never knew much about this instrument, other than reading a brief article about it and thinking at the time it was a curiousity and questioning its practical applications, so I can't provide much more information.

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[The_Dougster]

Hmm... I just run my guitar straight into my soundcard via one of those barrel adapters. Then I use the magic of Linux sound to make some pretty crunchy rock sounding goodness using Gtk Guitar Effects Processor. I'm real happy with it. I just got an Epiphone Slasher which is an inexpensive yet pretty good quality axe with some decent humbuckers as stock equipment.

But I digress. I run this sucker straight into my SB Live! Value card on the line-in jack and use that GtkGEP program for some great sounds. You can run my Debian port of XDrum concurrently with GtkGEP so you have drum machine + guitar effects. You provide the guitar and the Linux :-)

It is sweet! Really, if Gibson has made digital guitar it should be a good thing considering you want to run clean into the computer and let it add all the effects and stuff. You can simulate a tube amp pretty well in software. Yeah I know that there are some pro musicians out there who are going to say that the only way to go is stick a mike in front of a tube amp. But music is all about experimentation. You rig up whatever crazy setup gives you a sound you like.

For the casual guitarist like myself, I have a lot of fun playing the inexpensive Epiphone and running it through Linux with all these spiffy programs, and I didn't have to spend much in the way of cash for a rack of expensive effects units.

Try it!

It's great!

[Eideewt]

I can't wait until I can put a seperate effect on every string. Anyone who has tried to play a seventh chord on a distorted guitar knows that it just won't work and that you practically have to stick to fifths and fourths to get any level of consonance. Finally I'll be able to play whatever notes I want to together. I don't mind an all digital signal from the pickups on. I happen to like the sound of a solid state amp. No tubes for me. Flame on!

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[op51n]

unfortunately I'm basically unable to run a linux box atm, so the only software based effects program i have atm is alienconnections revalver. and well, the sound quality sucks. I've been running my guitar straight into both my Live and my Audigy but revalver just doesn't give a quality of sound I can use in any finished work.
I can't really run linux since atm I don't have the disk space, and the software i use (apart from all the other programs I use which are windows native, or at least the versions I have and can't afford to get others) is Reason2 (while everyone uses it for crap techno, it is actually viable as an amazing quality virtual studio with use). But having analogue equipment I just find to be more pleasing. I'll certainly take a look at that prog you mentioned tho since I am planning to set up a Linux box soon, as it would still be cheaper than hauling out to replace the equipment I have that is currently dead!

Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz

[AnalogDiehard]

Read how Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz fscked over Oberheim and Opcode, two very recognized and respected brands in the music industry. Juszkiewicz's manipulation of the law combined with his takeover tactics are well known in the music industry and Gibson's integrity in high technology is questionable. No one who has ever entered into a partnership with Juszkiewicz has profited and every single one of them have been sued by him.

Stay very far away from this serpent.

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[Sunda666]

Sounds cool, but I'll stick to my cheapo zoom 707/2, which has
a bunch of effects and electronic drums, cool for practicing.

Even if I would dare to plug guitar/amp to my laptop, the
zoom is smaller, and has that ZNR thing which is pretty much
necessary for my old cheapo strato guitar.

BTW, since we're talking about axes here, just got one very
good for heavy-metal/rock, a kramer baretta. pretty cheap and
sounds pretty good (it is an one-piece guitar, fretboard and
body are the same piece of wood). If you're into rock ya may
consider test-driving one of those.

cheers.

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[The_Dougster]

I think my Linux solution is pretty spiff. I snagged the XDrum source a long time ago. It was more or less freeware (send an email if you like it) but the upstream author seems to have disappeared. I did send him an email years ago, but since I can't get ahold of him I boldly forked the source and made some mods. I dropped Gravis Ultrasound support completely and made it so that it only uses 16 bit Linux kernel OSS output. Then I rewrote the makefiles to use the autoconf/automake stuff from GNU so that you can do the ./configure thing. And then added Debian support and built i386 and Arm packages (and the Arm port actually does work on my Netwinder).

You just can't do this kind of stuff in Windows if you are on a low budget like I am. I cannot afford to purchase MS Visual Studio, and I don't want to. Why-o-why anybody would ever want to use Windows for even amateur sound work is beyond me. There is some amazing sound stuff out there for Linux.

Probably the most amazing Linux sound app I have ever screwed with is Cecilia by the University of Montreal. This program can make really weird Pink Floyd type noises and I really can only use a fraction of its powers.

To get a really pro Linux audio setup kicking you want two good sound cards, probably SB Live! or AC97 at the least. That way you mix you audio on one and record on the other card.

For instance, if you use the GtkGEP + XDrum combo I mentioned above, I haven't figured out how to record the output yet, so I think you need a second sound card and loop the output from card1 into the line in of card2. Then it should be easy to record from card2.

Don't even piss with Windows and try to do sound stuff unless you have a lot of money and even then I'd be rather suspicious of the results. The common app that comes to mind is Cakewalk, but Linux has a mess of midi programs too, probably a lot better than Cakewalk if you are a tech-savvy musician.

Re:Will it bring back the long lost guitar solo?

[darien]

NB genres don't always have the same names in different countries. I was a bit stunned the first time I heard an American say they liked "Britpop" like the Pet Shop Boys and Eurythmics!

(The term "Britpop" in Britain generally refers to a moddish indie scene in the mid to late nineties, involving bands like Elastica, Sleeper and Ash.)

Now all we need is...

[seanmeister]

... a P2G app that will let us download music directly from James Hetfield's guitar.

Steve Howe has done it already

[PiGuy]

Steve Howe of Yes had a digital guitar custom-built by Stepp Ltd. in 1987, but he couldn't quite get the hang of playing it. So now it's on display in the Dangerous Curves exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!!

[op51n]

Thanks for the huge amount of info. We've somehow started a wonderful semi-ot but hugely useful discussion!
I'll certainly note down and take a look at many of those pieces of info, see what I can do to evolve my setup now.
I'm currently working without any MIDI, using only software synth (Reason's is essentially a freeform synth) with samplers (so I record guitar and vocals and drum lines and use the sampler to put them in) thus allowing post recording compression and effects on all. I have been very impressed by the quality of output I get from Reason, and especially since it's Propellerhead (I thought nothing of ReBirth). I use two soundcards atm anyway, a Live and an Audigy (wanted a Montego 2 but alas not in the UK), so I get ASPI and 0ms latency in Reason2, and have an external mixing desk for DJ'ing, as well as being hugely useful (it's 3 channel with 3 outputs so I can do a fair amount with it, and means i can get a live loopback to my soundcard of 2 mixed channels, allowing mp3 dj'ing (with DJS Mk1)).
But certainly if I had a linux box with 2 soundcards and another mixer (I plan to replace this one tho it still works) it would give me vast options, also allowing for the continuing use of Reason2 (which to prove it's quality is professionally used by the likes of Trent and the guys at Nothing Studios - one of the demo tracks, in fact the only good one that came with version 2 is by Charlie Clouser), with the almost infinitely extra options allowed by using Linux.

Re:Will it bring back the long lost guitar solo?

[The_dev0]

If you like Queens of the Stone Age, go listen to Kyuss. It's a couple of the members of QoTSA back when they used to play filthy hard desert rock. Jesus, did these guys know how to work their guitars. Much better than the pap they are playing now under their new guise. I strongly recommend the albums "Welcome to Sky Valley" and "Blues for the Red Sun" in that order, but avoid "Wretch" and "When the Circus Leaves Town".

Please...

[eniu!uine]

It's normally impossible to hack a Gibson, but with me we could do it in five minutes.

Re:Will it bring back the long lost guitar solo?

[WickedClean]

Oh...and all this time I thought it was what happened to Britney Spear's boobs when she jumped around too much.

Is Cat5 a good choice?

[Snafoo]

I don't know about you guys, but I find that one of the biggest problems with my guitar cords is simple wear-n'-tear at the connectors. Does Gibson really think that the mechanicals of those flimsy crimped Cat5 connectors will stand up to the (er) acrobatic needs of Joe 'Garage Band' Sixpack?

Should I trust the future of digital music...

[autopr0n]

... to people who can't even remeber to set the background color of their website? I dunno.

Cat-5 cable runs

[mboots]

A guitarist can run a cable over 2000 meters with no loss of audio quality. (http://magic.gibson.com/digitalguitar.html)

That looks like regular Cat-5 UTP to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't UTP supposed to be limited to 100m unrepeated? Regardless, what would the use be for a 2km guitar cable?

It just means that...

[Nick Driver]

...this one goes to 11Mbps

Offtopic, but speaking of guitar....

[unitron]

I'm surprised nobody yet has mentioned anything about Great White guitar player Ty Longley.

PLEASE remain calm!

[flyneye]

as /.s resident luthier i can tell you this is just a buncha smoke like the "sustainiac","compensated nuts" and" headstock weights".
analog guitar signal is BETTER than a digital signal and always will be for this application,"guitar sound".
every few months something comes out for guitars that we "just cant live without" and believe me,QUANTIZED audio signal is not one of them.
Gibson should know better.they already make an axe that cost more than christs teeth for no other good reason than the little bit of inlay at the top that says GIBSON.NO ONE REALLY CARES about innovations like this.FOr instance everyone and their uncle already got stuck with MIDI instruments and its pathetic underworkings.NO ONE is going to replace ALL their equipment,even a piece at a time for this garbage.
rock and roll will continue as always and gibson hasnt really given the world anything NEW or USEFUL since the flying V.
amen! an now turn in you hymnal to page666 for a blood stirring chorus of " i wanna be sedated" thank you and goodnite

Digital guitars...

[O'Bunny]

I'm not an analog purist; I love my CDs and my digital recording stuff and all that.

But a change in the interaction between an inductive load (a pickup) and an amplification circuit will change the nature of the sound. Alembic, for example, mounted a preamp right at the end of the pickup coils because the impedance added by wires changed the sound away from their idea of the proper sound.

OK, maybe I'm just splitting hairs here....

[Uncle Flip]

Wasn't the digital guitar actually introduced at CES? (Heck, I remember taking a quick spin on one with a lovely lil' Luka Bloom tune....too bad the supporting digital amps weren't out yet...)

Be well
-UF

what this can do

[Chris Burkhardt]

We've been following this one for awhile, I'm really curious to see what something like this can do.

I'm really curious also, though I do have an idea as to what it might be used for: making music. or something like that.

Smoke on the Water & Stairway to Heaven

[xixax]

The world would be a safer place if guitars had a "reasonable use" provision built into the DRM that would: Only let the riff to "Smoke on the Water" be played up to 3 times without a licence; Never allow "Stairway to Heaven" be played within the confines of a music shop (add Bluetooth so the guitar can detect that there are many other guitars nearby).

Actually, Bluetooth would be cool, there'd be no excuse for instruments not to be in tune with each other.

Xix.

Re:Linux?

[darqchild]

I've done it already...
i can run linux on my guitar!
I still cant get the sound to work though...

hmm

[kaens]

it seems to me like the article was more about the guy from journey then the guitar..... oh well, i cant wait to plug my guitar into a router....pointless, i know - but it will be entertaining.

Re:Why do guitars need innovation?

[vivaldi0]

This question has to top the level of ignorance. Do you know how the instruments of the 13th -16th century became what they are today...Innovation, invention and incling. If it weren't for inventors and people who actually can think, then you wouldn't be able to even play guitar, so when you ask the question "Why do guitars need innovation?", take a red one and "StFU". If you are at all interested in innovation, go here: http://www.selftuning.com

People who can't play the guitar allready:

[espenss]

Just forget it!

And people who DO play the guitar well will forget this new piece. My perspective of the future is a personal box with just one button, when pressed does "things" for you -- words like "skill" and "craftmanship" will disappear ;-)

Re:Linux?

[4thAce]

That way we could promote the combination as the Gibson "/usr/bin/less paul". Unless these guys have the name trademarked.

Slop rock dream

[PegQuin]

Hey! I said B flat major, CLICK, never mind not a problem.

Digital fingering?

[jolshefsky]

So let me get this straight: a digital guitar is one you play with your fingers, right?

Missed the beat

[Shamanin]

... damn lag!

How to moderate:

[Snork Asaurus]

Funny - moderate as Funny, do not moderate as Flamebait

Offtopic - moderate as Offtopic, do not moderate as Flamebait

Seem obvious, doesn't it?