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Gibson has been making game attempts at pushing the envelope in the last couple of years with the self-tuning Robot guitar and the HD.6-X Pro Digital Guitar with its computer connectivity.

Those two strands of technology, plus some new tonal capabilities, have now been incorporated into the new Dark Fire, which the company, perhaps quite rightly, is calling "the world's most powerful analogue and digital guitar."

All the new technology is incorporated into what is undeniably a Les Paul, albeit one with a stunning dark red maple top plus some other slight cosmetic changes and a white fitted case to mark its limited edition status.

For a good overview of what the Dark Fire can do, Guitarist's Simon Bradley presents this video walk-through of the instrument's main features:

Electronics

We get a P-90H in the neck position and a Burstbucker 3 at the bridge, chosen to give the guitar the widest range of tones available when partnered with the onboard Chameleon Tone technology – a switching matrix that offers various combinations of the two pickup's coils (series/parallel, phase, north coil, south coil), along with eight different four-band Parametric EQ curves.

On top of that there's more tonal variety from the piezo pickup in the bridge, which can be used independently or blended in by the use of the central stem of the pickup selector switch – ingeniously engineered as a mini knob by Gibson but still nowhere near as clever as the single knob that controls all of the guitars other hi-tech functions.

That is the Master Control Knob (MCK) in the position of the bridge pickup's tone control (and it actually carries out that role when not being used for its other functions).

The MCK is, in fact, an ultra-sophisticated pull/push knob with a multi-coloured illuminated display when pulled out. It can be twisted to one of 11 positions and addresses various functions with light, short or long presses on it.

The MCK calls up the various preset Chameleon tones and initiates the self-tuning mechanisms. Dark Fire is fitted with second-generation Robot Guitar tuning technology with motorised machineheads (Powerheads) and is equipped with 18 tuning presets, in three banks of six, ranging from standard tuning through all the popular open tunings down to extreme lowered tunings such as B baritone.

There is also the facility to store a Chameleon tone and an altered tuning together as a 'sound' in one memory position so that they can be called up together for, say, a particular song in the set.

The Dark Fire runs from an onboard battery that, when fully charged, is good for 500 tuning operations. The battery is charged via a stereo jack lead from a wall wart-powered plastic box that can be kept in line while you play so you won't have to worry about flat batteries.

The box has two jack outputs, one for the magnetic pickup sound and one for the piezo output, and you can have the piezo as a separate signal rather than blended with the magnetic sound.

The third high-tech aspect of the Dark Fire is its computer connection, courtesy of the Robot Interface Pack, comprising an interface box and its associated software that, unfortunately, Gibson had not released in time for this review.