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RE: The 100-Megabit Guitar in WIRED
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.
>
>