Gibson's Digital Guitar Finally Released 308
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.
Wireless ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Broken cords anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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. ;)
Kinda like they have been (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Broken cords anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does this mean.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!! (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Benefits? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Some technical info on MaGIC (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Finally I Can Hear the Bar Chord in Digital !!! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Benefits? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Its all in the hands (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Not the first, and not extremely different either. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I'd be interested in what... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Its all in the hands (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Digital guitars... (Score:1, Interesting)
But a change in the interaction between an inductive load (a pickup) and an amplification circuit will change the nature of the sound. Alembic [alembic.com], 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.