Gibson Digital Guitar: The Next Step Forward
While guitar gear has been improving steadily over the years, with a few cool innovations stepping in from time to time, guitars themselves have barely changed since a decade ago. Indeed, in most cases, you wouldn’t want anything to change. Heck, there’s really nothing to improve on an acoustic.
And you could argue that manufacturers have at least been trying to improve electric guitars – improving tone, comfort, style, and more. But electrics still have a lot of room for improvement, and we’ve seen nothing really groundbreaking, until recently that is – when the Gibson Digital Guitar was unveiled.
It is the very first electric guitar to feature an on-board Ethernet port – allowing digital output to be sent to digital applications, e.g. digital recording apps or even internet streaming. And that’s not all. Gibson has attempted to go even further with its MaGIC (Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier) protocol, which will allow bi-directional transfer of data over a conventional Ethernet cable.
While there’s no ETA on the commercial release of this guitar, it is surely an indicator of the future of electric guitars. No longer will guitarists be limited by analog signals. Ten years from now, techy guitarists won’t be able to live without their digital guitars the same way techy pianists are inseparable from their digital keyboards now.