The Gibson Digital Guitar Comes to Market: A Talk with Henry Juszkiewicz

Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz

Call it serendipity. I’ve followed the Gibson digital Les Paul story since 2002 when I read in a press release what I think was the first official word from Gibson about the instrument. Over the four years between then and now I’ve read more press releases and media stories about the digital Les Paul, several of which included market release dates that didn’t materialize. Prototypes would be displayed at NAMM and various electronics shows but it never came to market.

Until now.

I was scheduled to do a telephone interview with Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz today, November 2, 2006, and had planned on covering the digital Les Paul, but only as a small part of the conversation. In fact, my plan was to begin our talk with the mention of a story I saw this morning on PC Magazine‘s website about a statement he made yesterday announcing the release of the digital Les Paul. When I saw the headline, my heart skipped a beat thinking maybe the guitar was actually being shipped, but when I read the article I chalked it up as another digital Les Paul teaser. The PC piece was primarily about a panel presentation Juszkiewicz had participated in at the CMJ Marathon 2006 event in NYC. If the guitar was coming to market surely there’d be more fanfare than that. Figured I could use today’s headline to prod a little bit about when the guitar really was going to get into the hands of players.

As you’ll see, I was wrong. The digital Les Paul, or as Gibson calls it, the Les Paul HD.6X-PRO Guitar, will ship to select dealers sometime this month.
Below is the digital Les Paul portion of today’s interview.
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Les Paul HD.6X-PRO Guitar

This morning I read a headline that said, “Gibson Guitar Releases Ethernet-based Digital Guitar”. For a moment I thought, “Oh my God, they’re shipping…”

Henry Juszkiewicz: Yes.

Any idea when they will ship? [I ignore the basic meaning of “yes”]

HJ: They are shipping, actually.

They are? [disoriented]

HJ: You can purchase one.

When did that start?

HJ: This week.

There we go. We have some news.

HJ: Yes, sir.

I didn’t know that.

HJ: Yep, we’re in production. Not a lot for the market, but a considerable number of products are available.

This is the first week? They’re now on the street? [lingering disbelief]

HJ: Yeah. I’m not really sure when the first shipment is taking place, but they’re off and running.

Well, congratulations!

HJ: Thank you.

It’s been a long road.

HJ: It’s a really intense new technology and the execution of the technology was challenging. Now we’re going to see how long it takes the market to accept something new.

Seems to me a guitar maker’s history is a blessing and a curse. You have a lot of Gibson guitar fans that want a ’59 Les Paul, but then you have other people that want something that’s more forward looking. Isn’t it difficult to straddle that mix of backward and forward mindsets?

HJ: It is. In fact I made this point in a panel discussion [Gearheads Unite panel at the CMJ 2006 Marathon] yesterday. There are a lot of people that like the traditional sounds, and those sounds are very musically relevant, but it isn’t our job to tell people what the best way to make music is and what the best instruments are, it’s our job to meet their needs. We, basically, make creative tools and we follow customer wants and desires, we don’t attempt to tell them what their desires should be. And so, in addressing new technologies what you do is you are offering new capabilities that have never been seen before.

A new capability takes a long time to get integrated into the creative process. And so, we have spent years and a considerable amount of money to get to the point where we’re shipping a new product, a new product that has enormous new capabilities and it’s really the tip of an iceberg because it can lead to so much more in the future.

But it [the digital Les Paul] is an option. Not everyone can take advantage of it, not everybody’s going to like it and it will take a considerable amount of time for people to latch into that and do something that’s really musically relevant and satisfying.

Well, thinking back to the ’30s when somebody decided that in order for an acoustic guitar to be heard in an ensemble they’d add a pickup, and how long it took for that to become widely accepted, you’re in sort of the same situation today with the digital Les Paul, aren’t you?

HJ: We are. I mean, I made a point [at the Gearheads Unite panel discussion] that the Les Paul, when it was introduced in 1952/52, wasn’t a commercially successful product until the mid-’60s. So, it took over a decade.

I can imagine acoustic guitar parlor players back in the ’30s scratching their heads saying, “Why in the world would anybody want to electrify a guitar?”

HJ: Right. Exactly.

And I can imagine people sitting somewhere in the world today saying, “Why in the world would I want a digital Les Paul?”

HJ: They are in fact saying that. The thing is that Gibson, going back to Orville and different periods of time, has always been an innovator, has taken that visionary position of introducing new things and most of those new things were intial failures in the market. Perhaps failure’s not the right word, but they weren’t commercially successful initially, and I’m not anticipating a groundswell of people demanding this new technology.

If you look at a player, you spend years to sort of get your chops together then find a trademark sound and the kind of equipment you need to accomplish what you’re trying to achieve musically. Getting to a point of accomplishment in music, there are always things you have to put together. And it’s kind of like using a word processor – you’re not inclinded to try a new one – you just figured out what Ctrl-Z means.

And so there’s this complex environment that allows you to create and it’s only natural for creative professionals to be very guarded about changing that and introducing a lot of unknowns. It’s natural and I understand it. I’m a musician myself.

At the same time, as a gear maker, we’re the guys that are charged with sort of pushing the envelope and offering new possibilities, new creative tools.

Does it seem that when it comes to technology people expect revolution instead of evolution?

HJ: It is revolutionary in a sense, but technology is only what the designer and manufacturer make of it and it can be very instrusive and unsatisfactory. Great technology, and it’s very difficult to pull this off, is nearly invisible. So, when you pick up the digital guitar, it still has a quarter-inch jack, it still looks like a guitar, still sounds like a Les Paul, and we designed it intentionally so that you could rip out all the new stuff and you’d still have a normal instrument that you’ve been used to except that it’s kind of hot rodded in a sense, but it’s still a very accessible instrument and very useable without all the digital stuff that comes with it.

I understand about the string separation capabilities, but what are some of the applications you see coming up in the future for this guitar?

Slash with Henry Juszkiewicz holding an early prototype of the digital Les Paul. Photo by Robert Knight.

HJ: Two things, and we’ve put it in the tag line to emphasize it, are immediately different about this guitar. One is, it’s a multi-channel instrument and you’re getting six feeds, if you will. Actually, you’re getting more than six because you have the traditional pickups also. Getting multiple feeds allows you to do a lot of stuff, either live or in post-production. A monophonic signal [traditional electric guitar] is just that – one signal. All of a sudden, when you can split it up, the ability to do different stuff is enormous. It’s like when hi-fi went from mono to stereo – we are sort of jumping from mono to surround [sound].

With the MaGIC technology, you have 26 more channels [in addition to the six for the string signals] available, right?

HJ: Exactly. Exactly. The current MaGIC technology is based on a 100BASE-T Ethernet. In your computer, you probably have Gigabit Ethernet [1000BASE] already. And so, the reality is our new chip is going to be Gigabit and that means you can have as many as 700 simultaneous streams happening, uncompressed, at 96 Khz, 24 bits. If you compress it, you can have thousands of simultaneous audio events taking place. So, it’s kind of mind-boggling, the possibilities.

The second thing that takes place is the fact that this pickup is a high resolution, or a high definition pickup. If you get a chance to play with this guitar in a studio, as I have, it is very intimidating because it has double-to-triple the dynamic range. And what that means is it picks up everything you do. It’s kind of like driving a Maserati – you can go into a bad zone really fast with a great machine. So, it’s a very intimidating guitar because it really captures pretty much everything that you’re doing as a player. For a great player, just like a great race car driver, that opens up whole new possibilities. Stuff that was kind of lost because of the technology’s constraints – now, you’re getting it all. Ultimately, what an instrument should be, it should give the creator, the player, the widest gamut of possibilities. And this [guitar] does it.

I’ve heard that the “clean” sound of the digital Les Paul is very clean.

HJ: It is very clean with a lot of high end. Typically, people, in the current music, like to have a lot of mid-range and so they purposefully roll off the high end and pickups that are often used were designed to roll off – that’s how they get their characteristic tone. In the future, more of the tonality of the instrument is going to be software. And so our design principle – as Les Paul said to me, several times, you can’t put back into a recording what wasn’t there to start with – what we wanted was everything that instrument was putting out. We wanted it captured. So, it is kind of a pleasant, clean, bright sound, but the point is that everything the string and instrument are delivering is captured in the stream.

Now, you may still want a lot of distortion because you’re a rock player, or you might want some phasing effect, or you might want a jazz sound that attenuates a lot of high end, you can do that because you’re starting with an absolutely high-dynamic range authentic signal. Whether you do it with software or you do it with a polytone amplifier, you’re going to get the tone you want, but we give you the option because you have everything you start with, whereas, if you’re using a pickup as a tone modifier then you’re kind of stuck with that. Then, for a different tone, you’ve got to get another guitar with another tone modifier. What we’re doing is we’re giving you the “everything” guitar. This sucker is putting out 100% of that instrument’s full range at an unbelievable resolution level and that gives you the option then to do whatever you want with it.

Does that make sense?

It does because the digital stream is preserving all the original information.

HJ: It was really tough on me because all the designers that were working on it would take the product and try to make the digital feed more Les Paul-like. And I said, you know, we already have that in the guitar, why would you want to do that again? [Laughs] One of the channels is the exact Les Paul signal so it’s there. It’s very authentic, it’s coming off the humbuckers as it traditionally has. But, the digital signal is meant to be processed. So, we’re not claiming that the authentic virgin digital signal is the best tone known to man. What we’re saying is, it’s got everything there. If you want to accentuate any part of it, if you want to manipulate it to get the musicality that you need, it’s there for you to manipulate, and, the beauty of the digital world is once you’ve reduced it (the analog signal) to a digital stream, it is preserved as such. So, if you’re recording, for example, and you’re recording at a workstation and you get a really great, crunchy distortion, and then you think about it two days later, “You know, that distortion isn’t working anymore in the mix. I want to put in chorus,” you can do that because you captured the essence of your playing and it’s preserved, unaltered, in sort of the virgin, best signal possible, and you can do non-destructive edits, even in a live situation.

Man, you can’t beat that in terms of options.

You can get 32 channels from the 100-BASE Ethernet cable, and 700 uncompressed signals from the Gigabit Ethernet in the next chip. Are you going to embrace the new 10 Gigabit (10GbE) Ethernet standard?

HJ: You know, it’s kind of funny, because when I was doing this I was pressing for a Gigabit standard. It was the early days of Ethernet and a wired Gigabyte had just come out and was still very expensive and I said, “You know, we have to go to this, but I really can’t imagine anybody that would need that many channels.” And somebody said, “Well, when they do movie soundtracks they have over 800 channels to deal with.” That’s because every single thing in a movie is an individual track, so when you have a foot step, that’s a track, when somebody claps their hands, that’s a track, and that gives them the ability to put this wonderful story together with a lot of granularity and so you sweat every little sound in the movie.

The beauty of a network, which is something that isn’t part of the instrument, is that instruments will be able to be plugged in – and they’re going to be wireless. Ethernet is wireless today and we’re using Ethernet. Imagine walking into your home studio and the network says, “Hello, your Les Paul is there and it’s ready to go.” Anywhere you are in that room, you’re ready to play, and, you can control your workstation right from your instrument and it remembers the last patch you had. In fact, you will have some of the capabilities that keyboard players have had for ages. If you have five great trademark sounds, you can instantly dial those sounds up. All the equipment that’s involved, you know, your reverb box, your compressor, everything can automatically be set to exactly those sweet sounds that you want. So, if you’re ready to record some country lick – boom – you call up your country stuff and it automatically configures for that, live or in the studio. Once all the devices are sort of online and accessible as well as all the control things that you want to accomplish in a live situation, man, it’s going to be a blast.

While trying to imagine some of the potential applications for MaGIC, I went to the NetworkSound website. Do all of their solutions incoporate MaGIC technology?

HJ: Essentially, yes. NetworkSound was really a spin-off from 3Com. 3Com and we had a joint venture, they were very excited about MaGIC, but when they did an acquisition in China, they sort of put everything else on hold so Barani (Barani Subbiah, NetworkSound founder and CEO) spun off and the core of the current chipset is basically a proprietary 3Com device.

The solutions NetworkSound offers gave me a more concrete idea of MaGIC’s potential. Imagine recording a live performance of a large orchestra and all the mics and tracks required…

HJ: Right. Absolutely correct. And they could be wireless.

But how many people understand the potential?

HJ: It’s hard to explain because if you’re talking to guitar guys they’re not thinking about a production environment. And it goes beyond just the chipset because we’re actually working with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) to make this part of the global standard because what we have done is called “quality of service”. Ethernet is a data standard and, as such, it can have exceptionally high latency and interruptions – every Ethernet device, when it gets overloaded, puts you on hold, all these little packets, and it will buffer the packets, so if you have dozens of devices on the network you’re constantly getting interupts. With sound, you can’t have that – you’ve got to have that stream continuous and with very low latency. So that’s what we did – we introduced, essentially, a synchronous clock that can guarantee the delivery of information and dePipe latencies to as many as 65,000 devices. That’s pretty frickin’ cool. And it’s hard to do.

And hard to explain.

HJ: A lot of folks glaze over. In fact, I don’t really talk about it too much. But, the fact is, it’s a very powerful thing and the ramifications – it will change the way music devices and musicians work and it will make things so much easier. If you just look at the Category 5 cable that we use, which is an Ethernet cable, that cable is in every store in the world. I mean, you can buy cable and it’s only going to cost you a couple of bucks and you know what? That cable is as high a quality as you can get.

But, if you buy quarter-inch cable, the quality of that cable from any two manufacturers is very different and you’re going to have a hard time finding it – you’re going to have to go to a guitar store somewhere – and it doesn’t lock. Little things like that, when you’re talking about a technology that’s way, way down the technical curve, are going to make a huge difference.

And then when you go wireless (with Ethernet), you don’t even need a cable and you’re going to get fantastic, high resolution audio.