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....

[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....

[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....

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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]

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?

It goes to 11!

[aiabx]

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

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.

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.

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").

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...

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 ;)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

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.

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?

That was quick...

[mooniejohnson]

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

;-)

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.

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).

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: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: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?

[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)."

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: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.

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.

Not the first, and not extremely different either.

[109 97 116 116]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writing is on the wall

[wondafucka]

Two things:

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

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

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!?

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.

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...

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.

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?

It just means that...

[Nick Driver]

...this one goes to 11Mbps

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.

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.