Satan clearly has been working overtime at Gibson. If you need further proof, look at this abomination – The Gibson Firebird X. Patches, third party apps, robo tuners, on-board effects, a fucking battery pack???!!!! What the fuck!!!! What assbag at Gibson greenlighted the development on this piece of shit?!!!!
I mean, it takes nearly fucking 40 minutes for this guy to ramble through all these crappy things that nobody asked for and a lot of it sounds like ass. I’d almost rather have someone read me the tax code for 40 minutes than suffer though this demo.
The biggest issue I have with this is that the whole idea of making an IGuitar really misses the entire point of the instrument. I have a Jaguar and it has its quirks and its sound that’s totally different than my Samick or my Strat (RIP) or my Roy Smeck or my La Boz. Why would I want something that tries to emulate a million OTHER things but doesn’t have its OWN sound and pay over five grand for it. No, I want each guitar I have to have its own little niche in what I do and most people I think approach it the same way. Each guitar is singular and has its own qualities – just like your friends. You plug them in and they just act like themselves. No muss no fuss. You like them for who they are or they wouldn’t be your friends.
So, all I can say is if you have over five grand to blow on this, get yourself a real guitar. Hell, you could buy a couple at that price and the bonus is you wouldn’t look like a rich douchebag pussy poseur half-wit playing it. But if you don’t heed my advice please….please let me know next time you play so I can “accidentally” spill a beer on your guitar while you play on stage.
Fuck you, Gibson.
Peace!
Interesting, hadn’t heard about this guitar before. I agree somewhat in that I don’t know why they made it look so stupid, why they priced it so ridiculously high, and why the demo is so terrible, but otherwise I’m not sure what’s so worthy of such scorn. Personally, I’d love to pick up one of those Gibson Robot guitars with the self-tuning feature, that’s also on this guitar. You could be playing chords with some crazy alternate tuning, then be able to play a solo in standard tuning at the flip of a switch. Another thing that caught my eye is that it has a piezo pickup that can output each string separately, which could potentially be pretty interesting.
The other main feature seems to be the built-in effects. Hopefully they can be configured to sound better than in the demo… If you don’t need or want them, fine, but I don’t get why having effects in the guitar rather than on the floor in front of you suddenly makes the player a target of spilled beer. I do also find the whole “this guitar can sound like any other guitar!” marketing thing lame, though.
Also, it’s pretty ridiculous that their DSP engine is called “Pure Analog”. Also odd that it’s only available in a limited run. Perhaps to avoid inevitably having to cancel it, given the overinflated price?
I kinda think though that a better, or at least cheaper, way to go would be to add extra controls to a guitar, but have the DSP stuff in a separate box on the floor, and have the interface to the controls standardized such that the various pedal size programmable DSP effect units recently being made by various small companies could be used instead of Gibson needing to make it. That would also reduce the amount of routing necessary in the guitar itself.
To your final point, I think the one of the ideas of this guitar is that you can have one or two one size fits all pedals on the floor controlled by the guitar so that you don’t have to bend down and reset stuff because you can have all your presets taken care of and there will be Gibson and third party apps you can buy from their store to run those effects. So basically it’s like running your guitar into pro-tools but live.
But, back to the main objection. My main objection is that it’s a guitar that has no personality of its own. It’s a guitar that is basically a blank slate for signal processing. Like if I bought a real Gibson Firebird, I’d probably be someone who would cite the sound and particularly the way they have one slab of wood from head stock to the butt of the body giving it a really nice sustain. But what can you say about this guitar in term so of its unique sound, nothing really because they’ve built in so much modeling that it.
Regardless, I think we can all agree on one thing – it is indeed damn ugly.
I guess my complaint would be that I simply refuse to believe that the same sound that comes naturally from a normal guitar due to the wood used, the body shape, the routing, the pickups, the bridge, etc., would also be able to be reproduced by modeling software. The tuning thing, okay, I can see that being handy, though I think the danger would be the same danger we run into as our phones do more and more: eventually you start to forget or lose the knack of doing things you used to HAVE to do, because the phone now does it for you. I don’t think anyone’s going to forget how to tune a guitar, but you never know. There’s a feel to it that comes with experience, and if you never ever tune a guitar again, I have a feeling eventually you’d get to a point where you might be a little unsure of yourself when handed a guitar that must be manually tuned. But the modeling thing is what bothers me. That, and being forced to pay for effects built into the guitar that I might ordinarily have preferences on in terms of what pedals I would buy instead. Sure, you don’t have to use the effects, but you’re paying for them. And I don’t care what they say about this stuff being “analog”, we all know they couldn’t do what they’ve done if most of it weren’t digital, and if your signal is forced to go through this (is it true bypass?) then you’re getting that sound in your tone. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; I have a digital pedal or two in my chain, but I choose to slip that in there, and if I choose to pull it out, I can. Not so with this guitar.
I guess I’m an old fogie, but I just find myself bothered by digital effects being shoehorned into everything. Last time I looked, it was downright difficult to find a major-name amp head that didn’t have DSP effects integrated into it. Even Fender routinely sells most of its combo amps with DSP effects. And guitar modeling? Oh hell, that just sounds like it’d sound like shit. Or at least somewhat fake. It’s not hard to tell when something sounds digitally modeled or approximated, and that in turn I find a bit of a turn-off. Maybe eventually they’ll make a guitar that will sound SO good that none of this will be relevant, but I don’t think it’s going to be one of the ones on the vanguard of this sort of technological development.
Amp modeling has been around for years along with microphone modeling. They are very effective at setting a baseline for a certain sound. The real problem with modeling is that unless you push beyond the basic model parameters, your model will sound just like everyone else’s model and that, in a nutshell is my problem with modeling. I don’t mind trying to get a guitar to sound like another guitar but the problem is that nobody’s guitar sounds like anybody else’s guitar most of the time. So what exactly is the standard for the model? Every modification that is made, every string choice, every beer spilled on it only goes toward a certain uniqueness that cannot be duplicated.
So while I am OK with modeling in general, I tend to think it is a lie that is told to “stupid rich people that don’t play guitar” in order to give them bragging rights.
Me: Check out my 1987 Vantage Ghost
SRP: Oh yeah, well my guitar sounds like that guitar and 17,000 others at the push of a button! Check out this SRV Strat circa 1989.
So this is the faux fir of guitars?
I also like the robo tuning aspect. If any guitar needs it, it’s a Gibson. The damn things don’t stay in tune for shit. And as Conor said, some of the other features don’t bother me either. Individual guitar players are the ones who decide what’s important and useful. You build the machine, and later you find out whether it’s a guitar and what it’s good for.
As with the Moog guitars, I can totally see someone making this turd into a golden egg that puts all these features into something new and great. But they’ll probably do it off stage. Cuz man, that guitar is ugly.
Nah Marshall, I was thinking more like pleather.
I have a hard time believing that this thing would stand up to regular gigging. Especially all the inboard effects. It would be really expensive to fix. I’m not sure how easy it would be to learn how to dial in all those presets while you are playing. It’s easier to just use foot pedals. I guess it might be OK for the studio but you can buy a pod to do the same thing a lot cheaper. The robo-tuning thing might be useful to me, because I use different tunings a lot. I really don’t have a problem with it in principle, but for 5 grand I’d rather just buy more guitars.
Oh, I guess it does come with some kind of footy-controller thing. But it still looks fairly hard to deal with.
That truly is the worst demo ever. They should have got some 13 year old kid “It tunes itself, dood! whoooaaaaa!”
The only thing they could’ve done to make it worse would be to stick a “Peekamoose Guitars” headstock on it.
It’s like there are psychotics running that company for the last ten years at least. Each year they could be launching really cool classic-feeling new original player’s designs that take cues from all their best stuff and it’d feel like Gibson, but instead they waste all their time with robo-tuners and laughable abominations like this that wouldn’t make it past a napkin sketch at any other company.
Call Gene Baker in and let him run the entire show — he’d have ten new badass instant-classic Gibsons ready to roll next year.
Firebird X? THE WORST. The body outline? I swear it looks like a 7th grader freehand cut the outline from blank cardboard. The headstock? The worst. The visual balance and layout? The worst. The features? Could they be more shitty and useless to a person who even dabbles in guitar? The people at Gibson are proving themselves to be entirely out of touch with musicians and even bedroom jammers. Did any of you see their Gibson Jimi Hendrix Strat? Yup. The Gibson Jimi Hendrix Strat. Idiots. They put it into production and did a press release and it and got so violently destroyed in blogs and forums that they pulled it and scrapped the whole project and scrubbed the net of any mention.
When are they going to change CEOs? It has to happen soon or they’ll continue to be a laughingstock.