Ethernet output is incompatible with traditional guitar gear

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. "The business is incredibly conservative," said Adrian Freed, research director at the Guitar Innovation Group at the UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Juszkiewicz is taking Gibson in the opposite direction. For starters, the Magic guitar's Ethernet output is incompatible with traditional guitar gear. The magic about Magic is portability. Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, both Les Paul players, don't have Slash's following or showmanship." Guitars have typically been paired with digital technology to create various kinds of synthesizers. . "We're improving the electric guitar for the first time in 70 years," he explains. The Music Trades, an industry journal, estimates Gibson's annual revenue increased from $12 million to $130 million in 2002. Guitarists like Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood already make all kinds of digitally enhanced noise onstage. The Les Paul may not be connecting with the generation whose idea of a garage band is a youngster hunched over a laptop with Pro Tools. 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. No amplifier or effects pedal on the market today will work with the instrument. What you get is what you keep, without the noise, interference, and other vagaries of the messy analog world. Since Guns N' Roses imploded in the mid-'90s, no Les Paul player has commanded the cross-genre visibility of Slash in his heyday. The signal is digitized at the source and remains digital thereafter. "We're not synthesizing sound," he says. "We're putting Electric Scooters Factory out a much better original signal. It won't be easy. "Magic just sounds better," Juszkiewicz insists. The company will continue to sell the traditionaltraditional Les Pauls, but Gibson's CEO thinks it won't be long before all guitars go digital. Juszkiewicz is banking on his digital strategy to reignite the excitement for the Les Paul. 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. If Henry Juszkiewicz didn't build a digital guitar, I can assure you the digital guitar would still happen. Most of the guitars - roughly 85 percent - were knockoffs of the Les Paul and its only real competition, Fender's Stratocaster. 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. Despite sales success, Juszkiewicz says there's more work to do. "One thing I can say about Henry without reservation is that he desperately wants to introduce some innovation. Second, guitars that work with the digital world via MIDI, the universal language of musical instruments, do exist. Gibson's new Les Paul, with proprietary Magic technology, does something else altogether, something no other guitar does. But unlike the recording business, which has a history of using innovation to fuel growth, most guitar companies live comfortably in the past. And since Juszkiewicz took control of Gibson, in 1986, revenue has soared." 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." His claim, in essence, is that Magic makes the Les Paul sound more like itself. More recently, advances in sound modeling, using complex algorithms that simulate other instruments, have created a sort of identity crisis in the guitar world. And while MIDI is just a sequence of instructions, Magic transmits real digital audio.The 100-Megabit Magic Guitar The technology inside the electric guitar has been set since the 1930s: Magnetic pickups convert string vibrations into electrical impulses." The desperation isn't driven by sales. 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. Greenwood may have a digital world at his fingertips, but his guitar still delivers an analog signal, requiring mediating devices to make it digital. "It sounds more authentic