JOE WALLACE: I’m Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. I’m here with Bart Walsh of Gibson, and we’re talking today about a very unique guitar. Give me a little bit of info on the HD6X-Pro.

BART WALSH: Well, the HD6X-Pro – And I’m also talking through this headset mic too. Is that cool? Okay. What this is is a proprietary system that we use called MAGIC, and MAGIC stands for Media Accelerated Global Information Carrier. Now, it’s a regular Les Paul with a hand-oiled neck, ebony board, platinum hardware, but what really comes across as being unique about this guitar is it has a hexaphonic pickup here, and these are six little mini humbuckers, one for each string.

Now, this is then brought into the cavity of the guitar. We have A-too-D converters here and it breaks it down using MAGIC on a regular CAT-5 cable. Now, MAGIC is able to transmit 32 channels bidirectionally with less than 250 microseconds of latency up to 300 m. So what that means in layman’s terms is that you hit the string and you hear the string the same way you would through a guitar amp.

Now, some other methods of doing this have latency in them. As a guitar player, you don’t want any latency. You want to be – You got to be able to feel everything you are doing. Well, from there it goes into what is affectionately called Bob, the breakout box, and the CAT-5 in, and you can have one output per string and then the headset mic is coming out of the CAT-5. You can also have a stereo return here through the back and into your monitors or anything else yo want to send back to Bob, all in one cable so you don’t have all these messy cables. You got 32 channels downstream, 32 channels upstream. We’re using eight of those channels right now with the guitar. You can also send the double humbucker over the CAT-5 too, so that makes it absolutely quiet because that’s digital. If you do this on a regular cable, you’re going to get a lot of noise. I’m stamping my foot on it right now, if you can’t see it.

So this first thing is taking the signal from the double humbuckers over the CAT-5 cable into Bob, and then we’re going out of the breakout box into the digital interface, and we’re using Sonar Cakewalk Producer Edition Software.

JOE WALLACE: Let me ask you this. Because you’re going CAT-5 into the breakout box, is it CAT-5 out or are you using SPDIF? What’s the output from the box to the DAW?

BART WALSH: The output from the box to the DAW is just analog. See, that way you can plug it into six different amplifiers or anything that you want. So here we have just the double humbuckers using Amplitube as the amp model going through Sonar.

[BART WALSH PLAYING ON THE GIBSON HD6X-PRO WITH STANDARD LES PAUL HUMBUCKERS]

Again, I’m dancing. That’s a good thing.