CES 2008: While My Guitar Greatly Adapts*

I attended a lot of demos this week at CES, some of them pre-scheduled but most of them impromptu drop-bys due to the mind-boggling logistics that would otherwise be necessary at this mind-bogglingly monstrous conference. Perhaps the coolest demonstration I saw took place at Analog Devices’ Las Vegas Convention Center suite, although if you’re not a recording engineer or a musician you might not fully appreciate the magnitude of what I heard.

Plugging a cable into an acoustic guitar’s pickup is a common way of capturing the instrument’s sound, either for recording or for live performance amplification purposes. Such an arrangement does enable reproduction of a portion of the guitar’s resonant characteristics, specifically the strings and their interaction with the headstock and bridge. However, the all-important acoustical colorations created by the guitar’s body are absent from a pickup-based configuration; to capture them, you normally need to rely on a single- or multi-microphone configuration placed nearby the instrument…a complicated and expensive approach that also forces the musician and his/her instrument to remain in an unnaturally rigid posture throughout the performance.

That’s where Analog Device’s customer, Fishman Transducers, comes in. The company’s Aura Acoustic Imaging line, as the website verbage indicates, "allows acoustic musicians to easily and accurately reproduce the sound of their instrument as miked in a professional studio." Specifically, I heard (and heard about) the Ellipse Aura, which you can either purchase pre-installed in your new guitar or later add as an aftermarket upgrade.

Ellipse Aura embeds an Analog Devices Blackfin processor, which it uses to process the sound information coming from the pickup in order to add guitar body resonance characteristics, resulting in a much ‘fuller’ and more realistic sound that greatly impressed me when I auditioned it. You can download image files created from a wide range of popular guitar makes and models….for an additional price (along with the temporary use of your instrument), Fishman will even record your guitar and create a custom image file for it. Blackfin’s low power consumption translates to an estimated 30+ hour battery life, and Ellipse Aura also automatically powers down when you unplug the cable from the instrument.

I’ve talked before about the migration of music creation from large, expensive studios to home-based setups, thanks to the increasing capability and decreasing cost of computer software and of computer and peripheral hardware, along with the in-progress implosion of major record labels and the resultant empowerment of the musician or band. Gear like Ellipse Aura is both indicative of and will benefit from these trends. Fishman’s employees are also hopeful that, after many years worth of sustaining-to-declining consumer interest in guitar-related equipment, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band phenomena will cultivate follow-through demand from gamers who subsequently become interested in learning how to play a real instrument.

*Sorry, George. If it’s any consolation, you were my favourite Beatle.