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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.