RE: The 100-Megabit Guitar in WIRED

["AvgJoe" <paul_sanders@adelphia.net>]

Screw that. If we're hitting the net, let's go state of the art. 10Gigabit
over Fibre! I mean hell, I want humbucker sounds too! 

So, do you think the Guitar players and Bass players will have their own
seperate VLANs? :)

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: RemyC [mailto:remyc@prodigy.net] 
> Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 9:38 AM
> To: Loopers Delight
> Subject: The 100-Megabit Guitar in WIRED
> 
> 
> Wired magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/guitar.html
> 
> The mercurial CEO of Gibson Guitar Corporation wants to shove 
> Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world.
> 
> Issue 12.01 - January 2004
> 
> The 100-Megabit Guitar
> Gibson's maverick CEO wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and 
> rock the music world. By Greg Milner
> 
> Before rock and roll had a past, Les Paul shaped its future. 
> In 1952, the Gibson guitar company worked with Paul to help 
> design a solid-body electric guitar. What he gave them wasn't 
> the world's first, but it was the best alternative to the 
> hollow-body instrument that had become the industry standard. 
> The 12 pounds or so of thick mahogany gave the revamped ax a 
> chunky, rich tone that prefigured rock and roll. Dubbed the 
> "Les Paul," the instrument would become the primary source of 
> rock's power-chord crunch, a legacy that stretches from Jimmy 
> Page and Neil Young through Aerosmith's Joe Perry and Guns N' 
> Roses' Slash. The guitar's noise-canceling humbucker pickups 
> provided a clarity that helped Jerry Garcia sculpt his solos 
> when he wasn't playing custom guitars.
> 
> Through all this musical history, the Les Paul has remained 
> virtually unchanged, because no one would dare change it. 
> Except for Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson's mercurial CEO. He 
> wants to shove an Ethernet cable into it.
> 
> The technology inside the electric guitar has been set since 
> the 1930s: Magnetic pickups convert string vibrations into 
> electrical impulses. Gibson's new Les Paul, with proprietary 
> Magic technology, does something else altogether, something 
> no other guitar does. An audio converter inside the 
> instrument's body translates string vibrations into a digital 
> signal that can travel over a standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable. 
> The company will continue to sell traditional Les Pauls, but 
> Juszkiewicz thinks it won't be long before all guitarists go 
> digital. "We're improving the electric guitar for the first 
> time in 70 years," he explains.
> 
> Why mess with perfection? The Stradivarius violin hasn't 
> changed since the 17th century, so why should the 
> Stradivarius of guitars? "That's like asking, Why progress?" 
> Juszkiewicz says. "Progress will happen.
> 
> If Henry Juszkiewicz didn't build a digital guitar, I can 
> assure you the digital guitar would still happen." Like Sony 
> and Philips with the compact disc 20 years ago, Gibson is 
> making a big bet on Magic, whose success hinges on nothing 
> less than the reinvention of an entire industry. But unlike 
> the recording business, which has a history of using 
> innovation to fuel growth, most guitar companies live 
> comfortably in the past. "The business is incredibly 
> conservative," says Adrian Freed, research director at the 
> Guitar Innovation Group at the UC Berkeley's Center for New 
> Music and Audio Technologies. "One thing I can say about 
> Henry without reservation is that he desperately wants to 
> introduce some innovation."
> 
> The desperation isn't driven by sales. In the US alone nearly 
> a million electric guitars were purchased in 2002 - three 
> times as many as a decade ago - to the tune of $477 million. 
> Most of the guitars - roughly 85 percent - were knockoffs of 
> the Les Paul and its only real competition, Fender's 
> Stratocaster. And since Juszkiewicz took control of Gibson, 
> in 1986, revenue has soared. The Music Trades, an industry 
> journal, estimates Gibson's annual revenue increased from $12 
> million to $130 million in 2002. (Gibson, a private company, 
> will not reveal figures.)
> 
> Despite sales success, Juszkiewicz says there's more work to 
> do. The Les Paul may not be connecting with the generation 
> whose idea of a garage band is a kid hunched over a laptop 
> with Pro Tools. Since Guns N' Roses imploded in the mid-'90s, 
> no Les Paul player has commanded the cross-genre visibility 
> of Slash in his heyday. Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Weezer's 
> Rivers Cuomo, both Les Paul players, don't have Slash's 
> following or showmanship. Juszkiewicz is banking on his 
> digital strategy to reignite excitement for the Les Paul.
> 
> It won't be easy. For starters, the Magic guitar's Ethernet 
> output is incompatible with traditional guitar gear. No 
> amplifier or effects pedal on the market today works with the 
> instrument. For now, musicians will need to plug the guitar 
> into a "breakout box" that converts the digital signal back 
> to analog; a standard guitar cable plugs into the box's 
> output. Second, guitars that work with the digital world via 
> MIDI, the universal language of musical instruments, do 
> exist. Guitarists like Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood already 
> make all kinds of digitally enhanced noise onstage. The CEO 
> of one rival company told me, "If you can figure out what 
> Henry is trying to do, let me know." And Peter Swiadon, a 
> product manager for the Roland Corporation, says, "No 
> disrespect to Henry, but Magic looks like a solution in 
> search of a problem."
> 
> The magic about Magic is portability. Greenwood may have a 
> digital world at his fingertips, but his guitar still 
> delivers an analog signal, requiring mediating devices to 
> make it digital. The goal of the Magic guitar is to be fully 
> plug-and-play, so a musician can simply jack it into a PC - 
> no USB cables or external devices necessary. And while MIDI 
> is just a sequence of instructions, Magic transmits real 
> digital audio. The signal is digitized at the source and 
> remains digital thereafter. What you get is what you keep, 
> without the noise, interference, and other vagaries of the 
> messy analog world. "Magic just sounds better," Juszkiewicz 
> insists. "It sounds more authentic."
> 
> Culture critic Walter Benjamin famously claimed that art had 
> lost its aura in the mechanical age. But ever since the first 
> digital-analog converters for audio appeared in the '60s, 
> proponents have said the technology might recapture it. They 
> insist that digitizing sound, an inherently transformational 
> process, actually does a better job of preserving it, because 
> no information is lost from the moment audio is captured to 
> the moment it's played back. The Magic guitar, Juszkiewicz 
> says, takes the next step - it doesn't just preserve sound, 
> it improves it.
> 
> Guitars have typically been paired with digital technology to 
> create various kinds of synthesizers. More recently, advances 
> in sound modeling, using complex algorithms that simulate 
> other instruments, have created a sort of identity crisis in 
> the guitar world. In 2002, California-based Line 6 unveiled 
> its Variax, which mimics 26 classic guitars - everything from 
> a 1935 Dobro Alumilite to a 1968 Rickenbacker - with 
> remarkable precision. Juszkiewicz is taking Gibson in the 
> opposite direction. "We're not synthesizing sound," he says. 
> "We're putting out a much better original signal." His claim, 
> in essence, is that Magic makes the Les Paul sound more like itself.
> 
> Gibson appears to have solved a problem that has dogged 
> digital instrument design for years. It's not enough to 
> engineer a digital-audio converter and a delivery system that 
> can reproduce sound with sufficient nuance. The technology 
> also has to make sure the bits become audible with little 
> delay. The human ear is remarkably sensitive - much like the 
> eye - and can detect a glitch if even one bit is misplaced. 
> Magic can deliver sound a few thousand meters in 
> microseconds, and because all devices connected by the 
> technology run on the same clock, the data remains synchronous.
> 
> Juszkiewicz says he realized early in Magic's 10-year 
> development process that his research team was on the verge 
> of creating a networking technology with applications far 
> beyond the music world. "He'd come in and say things like, 
> 'This is gonna solve coronary heart problems!'" one early 
> developer recalls.
> 
> Magic, an acronym for media-accelerated global information 
> carrier, can direct the flow of up to 64 channels of 
> information, all on one Ethernet network. In a concert hall, 
> this means a bulky analog snake of cables could be replaced 
> by a single Cat-5. It also means real-time collaboration. 
> Stanford staged a concert last fall that linked several 
> musicians at different locations who improvised with each 
> other over a system developed by NetworkSound, the first 
> company to build a business plan around Magic. The school was 
> so pleased that its Center for Computer Research in Music and 
> Acoustics will also tap the technology for its recording 
> facilities. "We're dividing our studios across 2 kilometers, 
> and we can just grab a fiber on the campus network and make 
> remote studios with zero delay," explains music professor 
> Chris Chafe. "It's foolproof."
> 
> When Juszkiewicz's R&D company, Phi Technologies, bought 
> Gibson in 1986, the guitar maker was so close to bankruptcy 
> that it went for only $5 million. He was just 33, with a 
> bachelor's in engineering and an MBA from Harvard but no 
> experience in the guitar world other than being a pretty good 
> guitarist himself. He immediately vowed to grow the company 
> by 30 percent a year.
> 
> Gibson's previous owner was ECL Industries (later Norlin 
> Industries), an Ecuadorian company that made, among other 
> things, concrete and beer. Not only did the quality of Gibson 
> guitars decline under ECL, but production slowed, which drove 
> up manufacturing costs just as the market was invaded by 
> cheap Les Paul copies. Juszkiewicz fired the management team 
> and set about reasserting the singularity of the Gibson 
> brand. To counter rumors among musicians that the firm was 
> Japanese-owned, he promoted Gibson with the new slogan 
> "American Guitars - Built by American Musicians." But 
> improving the quality of the guitars was only part of his 
> strategy. Juszkiewicz had lawsuits filed against companies he 
> thought were infringing on Gibson's trademark. Among his 
> targets: Heritage Guitar, which was founded by ex-employees 
> of a Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Gibson didn't win 
> any of the suits that made it to trial (after settling the 
> Heritage suit, Juszkiewicz sued his own lawyers), but the 
> litigation proved to be part of a hard-line strategy that put 
> the company back on the map.
> 
> Certainly, Gibson owes its turnaround in part to good timing. 
> The first half of the '80s was not a fertile period for the 
> type of rock associated with the Les Paul. The '70s hard-rock 
> heroes, like Joe Perry and Jimmy Page, were either in rehab 
> or on hiatus. Synth-driven music owned the charts. But soon 
> after Juszkiewicz took over, Guns N' Roses emerged, first as 
> the second coming of Aerosmith and then as the biggest band 
> on the planet. Slash was a devoted Les Paul player. Once 
> again, the world sounded like the Les Paul.
> 
> Juszkiewicz has been less successful in his mission to expand 
> Gibson beyond guitars. Trace Elliott amps, Opcode Systems (a 
> music software company), and Steinberger Sound are a few of 
> his acquisitions. None have made Gibson any money; some have 
> gone out of business and others have borne the brunt of 
> Juszkiewicz's litigious streak. A Yamaha exec jokes, 
> "Sometimes the best we can hope for our competitors is that 
> they get bought by Gibson." Other rivals dismiss Juszkiewicz 
> as a threat, referring to him as a "psycho" and a "wack-job." 
> In person, he is laid-back and laconic, exactly the 
> disposition you'd expect from someone who sells guitars for a 
> living. So when he told me, "Oh yeah, I'm very frightening," 
> I assumed he was kidding. My mistake. "No, seriously, I'm 
> like a prophet. I always get put down, and then later, people 
> realize I'm right."
> 
> At roughly $50 million and counting, Magic is Juszkiewicz's 
> biggest investment gamble yet. The real risk is his plan to 
> give away Magic technology, betting that consumer electronics 
> and music companies will build it into their products, from 
> electronic instruments to HDTVs and smart fridges. The more 
> Magic becomes accepted, Juszkiewicz figures, the more Magic 
> guitars Gibson can sell. The firm also recently launched a 
> new division, Gibson Audio, to market its own consumer 
> products, including digital versions of amps and jukeboxes.
> 
> It could all backfire, of course. Open standard or not, Magic 
> is still one man trying to convince everyone else that he has 
> the answer. "Digital transmission is the future, but I don't 
> know which system will ultimately be the future," says Barani 
> Subbiah of NetworkSound. Juszkiewicz may go down in history 
> as the wack-job who took Gibson too far down the digital 
> road, but his stubborn determination may at least give the 
> world its first classic digital guitar.
> 
> Greg Milner (gimilner @ yahoo.com) writes about music and technology.
> 
>