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.

Big Whoop

[Anonymous Coward]

The grateful dead have had midi/pickup hybrid guitars for years. Jerry Garcia (may he RIP) often made his guitar [dozin.com] sound like an entire orchestra.

Pretty cool

[Hao Wu]

But it's not the first [karelia.ru]!

Re:Journey?

[SlashdotLemming]

But the question is - will it change anything?

Better link here [gibson.com]

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: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

more useful link

[carpe_noctem]

Here is a more relevant link [gibson.com] 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 [planetshell.com] and one of the original, too [planetshell.com] (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 [line6.com] guitars, which also use a hex pickup and do analog->digital conversion on chip inside the guitar (there's even some OSS software [sourceforge.net] 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.

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: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: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.

Big Whoop!

[beaverfever]

Midi guitars [epix.net] 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: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: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: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: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 [slashdot.org], 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: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 [216.239.57.100] : 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: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: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.

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: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.

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 [themomi.org] in the Dangerous Curves exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

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.