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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.