Gibson offers pre-programmable digital guitars

A pre-programmable guitar with a digital connection is going on sale later this month.

Gibson Guitars is marketing the digital guitar, dubbed the Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, or MaGIC, for about £1,700.

The guitar will look and feel like Gibson's signature Les Paul models, except it will have an Ethernet jack where the analogue connector used to be.

It will allow musicians to control each string independently for volume and tone.

The instrument will also offer a cleaner sound than analogue cables.

Inside, computer chips will digitise the strings' analogue signals, which can then be sent along the Ethernet cable into a computer, an amp, or an effects box, reports
sfweekly.com.


Here is a nice picture of the funky (individual string) pickups...



Here's the guitar for real, with the geek who's created it...



And here's the SFWeekly page, where the above article was swiped by Ananova...

http://sfweekly.com/issue...index.html

HOLY SCHMOLY...

Gibson even have a website dedicated to this thing!

http://www.gibsonmagic.com/index.html



Happy New Year to all! Hope your xmases were groovy!

Hey Man,

Happy New Year.

I wonder what this thing will sound like and (more importantly) what the price tag will be.

Slave2daGroove said:

I think the sound will be COMPLETELY different to at least the trained ear because the vibrations aren't detected by normal pickups, and doesn't get thrown down a crappy wire cable (although the guitar comes with the standard pickups and normal guitar jack anyway).

Here's what I've garnered from the hype off of the Gibson site...

Individual pickups detect both up/down movements (like an accoustic guitar pickup apparently) AND sidewards movements (like standard electric guitar pickups)..but...on an INDIVIDUAL STRING BASIS!!! (see that little pick above). Then, inside the guitar, this is all converted into digital signal which completely avoids contaminating noises like the hums you get from nnormal pickups. The 6 digital signals are then sent...wait for it...BY ETHERNET CABLE TO THE PREAMP THINGY-MAJIGGY!!! This preamp has 8 ins, for each string and a few for the normal pickups/mic/something like that...

...all this for (according to the Gibson site) 3000 dollaroonies. Yeah, I'll have ten!

As I read this page, I got to the following hyped up paragraph...


"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. This provides unprecedented control with the ability to adjust volume, pan and equalization of each string individually. Imagine using six guitar amplifiers - one for every string. Or recording all six strings individually into a computer. Or sending the six-string digital signal to a compatible guitar processor."

And then I thought...like, why the funk would you wanna do that???

But then the next line explained it all to me...

"The guitarist can have a crunch (heavy metal) sound on the low strings, medium distortion on the middle strings and a clean sound on the high strings."

Together with the new, virtually pure signal, this could give some exciting new shit in guitar music. Like, imagine doing a solo when each individual string has its own effect...I guess hearing is believing!






Ok, I'll stop drooling now!

Looks like a Variax - at least, doesn't the Variax do the same thing? Digitize the signal and convert it into sounds?

http://www.line6.com/variax/

otan said:

Hiya Otan,

I didn't know about the Variax, but I've just checked out that site (http://www.line6.com/variax/home.asp). They don't go into the giztronics of the thing like Gibson does to some extent, but I get the impression that the Variax is for guitars what the pod is for Amps in that the guitar uses digital sound processing to modulate all those different guitar sounds, just as it would in an external pod for amp sounds. It says on that site that the signal is sent via the ethernet-like cable to their 'Vetta II' amp.

So I only see two differences between the Magic and the Variax...

1. The Magic uses the individual-string pickup system, the Variax uses it's normal pickups

2. The Magic sends individual signals for each string to the preamp thingy, where each signal may be diverted to eight separate amps or channels of one amp. The Variax rather processes the pickup signal inside the actual guitar, then sends out the digital to the Vetta II.

So if the Variax is using normal pickups then even with sound processing, maybe you still get interference (hums etc.) that Gibson claims are irradicated with their flash system. To me, the Variax seems more gimmicky - the idea of amp modelling is gimmicky to me and this just seems the same but for guitars. The Gibson Magic thingy on the other hand could actually provide new styles of guitar playing (see quote re. different strings having different effects).

That's what it seems like to me, but I ain't guitar tech minded so there. I got me a Boss ME50 put on my desked today as a late xmas pressy, so my tech education begins here (I've never used effects before!!! woo woo)

Hey I should work for Gibson! I guess proof is in the pudding, so I'll just wait till some flash nob gets one of these and starts making discs.

I can see it right now: wait a second, my guitar just crashed.
Anyone remember stereo guitars?

hectim said:

What if your guitar gets a virus!!!

Taureau - the Variax uses a similar pickup system - meaning, it doesn't use pickups. If you look at the Variax, you notice there's no pickups - it's all done thru the bridge. But, yeah, it doesn't split the strings out.

The saddest thing about the Variax is that the actual guitar part is probably as good as a $100 squire - REALLY looks/plays cheap. But the tones DO sound pretty close to the real thing - I messed with one and I was pretty impressed. If I had to go on the road, I would definitely consider taking the Variax in place of 4 guitar... and the output can go into any amp.

But I'll still hold out for the Gibson hollowbody I been drooling over.

otan said:

Just checked that picture again, yeah you're right! Hah, never noticed that before. You can just see the pickup-like thing behind the bridge.