The Mother(board) of Guitars

Over the hundreds of years guitars and their iterations have been around, not much has changed; maybe a different wood here and there, maybe different techniques to making them. With the intrdoduction of electric guitars around the 50's the first major change in hundreds of years had finally arrived.Fifty years laters, the electric guitar is still riding on the same concepts praised in the 1950's: standard electromagnetic pickups, volume potentiometers, tone knobs and such; but with the new decade comes new technology.

Gibson, a major guitar manufacturer, has already been massively known for developing "Robot Guitars", a guitar with built in tuning technology set in the headstock; pitch sensors raise or lower the tension of the string based on the desired tone. While not a major leap in technology, any new ideas are welcome in the guitar world. The hi-tech Gibson Firebird X both presents the major leap needed, and the new ideas savored by the masses.

The Firebird X is based on Gibson's Firebird model; but that's where the similarities stop. In the headstock of the guitar, robo-tuners are built in as a first measure of tech, but further down the neck, the body is an information-overload, filled to the brim with large varieties of electronics that most guitarists will recognize as normally "stomp-box effects" (Small boxes connected between the amp and guitar to utilize effects such as echo.

Inside the guitar, immedately noticable is the motherboard, not what is normally found in a guitar; this means the guitar has some sort of processing ability. An app store has already opened up for third-party developers to take their stab at whatever processing software the Firebird X posesses.

The amounts of knobs and switches on the Firebird is absolutely stunning; in addition to the standard volume and tone knobs, the guitar has a 5-way pickup selector, alowing muliple pickup combinations. To complicate the guitar further, each of the 3 pickups can have their polarities switched, be changed from series to parallel wiring, and even be switched to single-coil. As guitar player, I wouldnt be ablt to even understand half of this monster's abilities. And even when just the prevously mentioned is stated there's STILL more switches. In the picture, three effects are shown on the red toggle switch: compression, disortion, and an equalizer. On the white switch, there are three more options between PU/Prog (whatever that is, PU probably refers to pickup), piezo (acoustic guitar-style), and tuning. And if THAT was excessive, guess what: there's ANOTHER toggle switch on the top of the guitar. The blue toggle switches between different modulation effects, such as delay and echo. So if you were to mathematically process the combinations, over 2,000 combinations are possible, granted most of them wouldn't be noticeable.
And after all this, it comes to the final question: How much will it cost? Unfortunately, with 2,000 combinations comes a greater 5500 dollar price tag...enough to buy about 2200 school lunches, enough to last over 12 years of school. So if hunger isn't a main concern for you, and you're a guitar player, the Firebird X will be present if you enjoy hi-tech shiny things.