Comments by the pres. of Gibson guitars

i saw that on the gibson site. http://www.gibsonmagic.com/digitalguitar.html

and some other neat ideas http://labs.gibson.com/index.html

 

Y? What's the point of that?

 

with the exception of the ethernet thing, hasn't all that been done before? i know for a fact that manring's hyperbass has seperate outputs for each string...and alembic has been building stereo basses since the '70s...ehh...gibson...

 

It gives them even more options....I think they look pretty sweet. I'm not sure I would personally buy one.

 

I REALLY don't want Windows installed on my guitar. I don't need my guitar to network with ANYTHING. Give me a good 1/4" cable, my stack, and you'll hear good tone. Forget all this digital crap.

 

...and the integrated DRM (digital rights management) transfers royalties to the RIAA from your account every time you play the riff from Smoke On The Water...

 

well, if they do, i hope they will put CTRL, ALT DEL buttons on it, too

 

But a bit more seriously, how perfect do you want your guitar to sound? people made wonderful recordings even in the 60s and 70s with quite low-tech compared to todays and they still sound good - so what is it good for? the only thing i think is good about it that you can plug it into a PC directly. but beside that...

 

(<-- this sums up my feelings so I'm not sure what else to say).

 

I can see some benefits of this - digital signal processing should be a lot easier, digital recording too. With high speed broadband net connections, you could have virtual bands - people sitting at their home and playing together with someone on the other end of the world. On the other hand, I just don't see myself going that route, but some of the solo artists should find it very interesting.

 

what they are trying to do is this. basicly with a PA or whatever they claim you have so many different kinds of cable connectors and whatnot. anyway they want to use one kind of cable to connect every power amp and ever computer componet in the PA.

 

Mutantbassist - You can plug into a computer now. I run a line out of an amp or a pedal into the mic/line-in jack on my computer now and record that way.

Brooks - Actually, people do that now. I'm a member of the Seymour Duncan forums, and from time to time we have online Yahoo 'jam sessions'.

 

I know that you can..for some time now. But, by adding other things to the signal chain (AD converters etc), you are adding to the latency, and you are coloring the sound too. Going all digital will make things both faster and simpler.

 

bwahahahaha!

I shouldn't laugh though... because that is EXACTLY what would happen!

Also, I wouldn't want my bass getting hacked daily by some 12-year old kid...

 

Hmmm... I'm not convinced.

It's an interesting idea if you like to do lots of signal processing and switch and change fifty pedals during a tune. Somebody email Radiohead - they need to know about this. And CC Dave Gilmour. I also see how it completely sidesteps the problems which stem from the physics of analogue signal processing - impedance, capacitance, signal level and the noise floor become simply irrelevant. That's an impressive improvement, really.

Having to ditch or modify all your old amps, tuners and pedals would be a major pain in the ass though. And latency might easily make something like this totally unworkable - the virtual band thing is going to have to wait a few decades.

Still, I'm impressed that someone big in the mostly conservative music industry is open to doing things that differently.

 

System is based on Ethernet. Good Ethernet switches (ie, not Cisco) are down to below 10 milliseconds latency. Within US, with new Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbones coming up, coast to coast latency is under 70 milliseconds. That compares well with a typical PC-based digital studio setup. My 2.4 GHz PC with 512MB has about 75 milliseconds latency when recording into Sonar. With fiber spanning the globe already, and more being laid daily, we might soon see latency dropping to 70 or thereabouts to many places around the world - Europe and Far East come to mind. There's also the new 40 Gigabit Ethernet on the horizon, with even better latency figures.

Finally, with all the multicasting protocols now available, it would be possible to send the same signal to multiple recepients at the same time, thus reducing the latency even further. Yeah..this will take few years to come together, but it will come. Not because of Gibson or music biz in general, but simply because analogue in general is going digital, Ethernet and TCP/IP - IMHO.

 

75 ms in Sonar? That's a lot - I get 8 ms in Cubase (PIII 800).

But 10 ms is already something you can feel or even hear.
A lot of people don't like how a POD feels because of its latency.

 

...so, now guitarists can blame lack of ability/poor shows/botching/clams on lag?

"Well, of COURSE I missed the third bar. Didn't you hear that lag I was getting in the first bar? It was all I could do to ONLY miss the third bar."