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If asked to invent a dramatically different Les Paul we doubt anyone could have imagined this utterly modern version of Gibson’s iconic guitar.

Okay, so we’ve known about the Gibson digital guitar for a while but we were beginning to wonder if it was more fantasy than fact. Gibson has finally offered it for sale and the nattily named HD.6X-Pro aims to blend tradition with cutting-edge technology.

A Les Paul to meet the new digital frontier head on and which will no doubt polarise opinion. Let the debate begin…

What it does

The HD.6X Pro does one major thing that no other guitar does: it can output the sound of each of the six strings individually. Not a very practical proposition for the gigging guitarist, but with the capability to adjust the volume, panning and EQ of each string individually, and to apply completely separate effects processing and amplification to each string, the whole panorama of guitar sound has suddenly expanded.

Separating the strings to such an extent has not been done before. There have been ‘stereo’ guitars, the most complex of these probably being the mid-eighties Ripley Stereo (as used by Eddie Van Halen on the song Top Jimmy) that fed the output from what the company said was a separate humbucker for each string via its own panpot to a stereo output.

It wasn’t an exact science; the quoted actual string separation on this Gibson is 90dB - effectively meaning that when an individual string is sent to a separate output you simply do not hear any of the other five strings.

The HD.6X-Pro is basically two guitars in one - it is a conventional Les Paul complete with a pair of humbuckers and the usual array of controls at the same time as being an instrument that can output a digital signal from a hexaphonic pickup. It can produce both sets of sounds simultaneously, in fact.

The hex pickup is close to the bridge and on the elongated silver jack plate the standard jack sits next to an Ethernet port for the digital output, a mini-jack mic input (for a headset mic) and a mini-jack headphone socket complete with knurled-wheel volume control to monitor the sound.

The technology

Onboard the guitar is an analogue-to-digital converter that takes the signals both from the hex pickup and from the humbuckers and converts them to 24-bit digital audio to be transmitted via a Cat 5 Ethernet cable to a Breakout Box. The digital signal is completely free from interference with no noise or dropouts and can be transported for much longer distances down an Ethernet cable than would be possible with a standard guitar lead.

The powered Breakout Box (BoB) is the input/output hub for the system. It takes the digital signal from the guitar and converts it back to analogue again so the audio can be sent to separate amps or separate tracks of any recording setup. There are three options available on 6.4mm jack outputs for the output from the hex pickup - each string can be sent to a separate output, you can have stereo sound with strings 1, 2 and 3 out of one output and 4, 5 and 6 from another or you can have a mono output with the sum of all six strings.