Slashdot Mirror
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.
What I really wanted was an ethernet port on my toaster...
:)
Oh well... Imagine a beowulf... No no... i'm not going there.
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
but since it's digital, that means it really only goes to 3.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
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!
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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.
Roadie - "I can't ping the guitar! Better reboot."
Guitarist - "Man, that's kill my uptime."
But it's not the first!
I suggest you read Slashdot
Anyone who's ever owned a les paul or tele can attest to that (strats have a slightly better cord placement).
As for the usefullness of this? I don't know if having each string routed to a different amp is going to make better music or be useful at all. For one thing, I don't have SIX amps! Something tells me that a les paul wired through a marshall half stack at 11+ is still the way to go. ;)
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
Here is a more relevant link than the one listed in the article. But since Gibson's site seems to be taking a good slashdotting, here's a mirror of that page and one of the original, too (sorry, no graphics...site went down before I could get them).
Also, from what I'm inferring, this is kind of a ripoff of line6's guitars, which also use a hex pickup and do analog->digital conversion on chip inside the guitar (there's even some OSS software people have developed for the amps). So not really a new idea by any means, but certainly one that could stand to be made a bit more widespread.
Personally, I'd rather see the guitar be something that is a purely acoustic/analog instrument (who the hell wants to 'upgrade' a Gibson when the computing hardware becomes obsolete), and do all the digital effects on an actual computer, which will probably generate better sound given the greater amount of processing power.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Slashdotted Gibson.com pretty fast... anyone want to bet they only had one guitar serving the site?
;-)
Elmo knows where you live!
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.
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.)
I'm in. I'll take care of abandoning the Sourceforge site.
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....
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
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.