I've been asking about Fender's intentions to create a digital pickup for Strats on these forums, and I'm not getting a lot of support. I can't imagine that this would be a strange idea to guitar craftpersons at Fender, but I'm going to put in my two cents' worth for the benefit of musicians that use Fender products that don't know a lot about guitars and that might be getting robbed. My background is mostly software development/architecture and some computing hardware experience. I'm a newbie to guitars myself, although I've grown up listening to Metal and I have a lot of heroes among Strat players.

A digital pickup not only makes it possible to provide inputs to the PC from each string using a single cable, it has huge implications for people that value intellectual property rights. I can easily see a lot of guitarists that go into a recording studio to get something done professionally and they would just get ripped off. With a guitar that has a digital pickup, you can use your PC to record at 24bps resolution - that's studio quality. Its just like when digital cameras appeared on the market, you process at home.

If Fender can go further and invent strings that are digital devices, it becomes possible to actually capture the soul of the guitar. With digital strings, you would be able to control lights on stage and all kinds of pyrotechnics using the guitar by playing a sequence of notes that can be interpreted as commands. The guitarist would truly own the stage.

Well a digital pickup with all the ideas suggested sounds very futuristic however for direct to pc recording you can do amazingly well with today's passive or active pickups... also the tube amplifiers are awesome ... a digital pickup sounds probably good for stuff that goes beyond "being a guitar player" .... like a circus performer as stated

Sounds like playing guitar hero gone mad. Digital instruments sound like computers. No thanks. Theres plenty of recording software to keep your music from being ripped off.

The VG strat with the Roland pickup is about as close as I want to get to digital.
And I am not fond of that guitars sound on the Roland pup.

Digital can do a lot but it is still an imitation of the real thing.

But then what do I know, most people seem to like the clipped, squeezed and compressed sound coming from CD's and mp3 players.

Although some of the newer blu-ray concert recordings I've heard lately are pretty impressive.

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Keep on Truckin, Going full speed ahead down the highway to hades.

Those Blu-ray discs most likely use a lossless HD audio codec for storing audio on them such as Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio. They use lossless compression and when sent through HDMI to your TV/receiver the audio is actually uncompressed.

And for the other folks that think of circuses and digital pickups as the same thing, it looks like you haven't evolved in a long time. Although the earth looks flat, its actually sphere shaped.

Or perhaps you are the people that are ripping kids off at all the recording studios, so kids using their PC to record at 24bps resolution may not work for you.

I just dont think the climate is right at the moment for such a thing. Consider the typical VG strat player, not all but most certainly plug into the archaic technology of valve amplification.
Didnt fender develop the Eguitar some time back, a telecaster with internet access and a usb out?

http://www.fender.co.uk/news/index.php?display_article=86

I reckon after a good gig the screen would be shattered. Still i'd like one just so i could log in on my tele. Rather than plugging the pc into my tv. [/url]

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They ditched the VG Just after the release of the Vneck deluxe model too. It cant of been selling well.
I find it a bit ironic that gibson release the darkfire 18 months after the VG then fender say 'ah we cant be bothered with that anymore'.

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No no and no

I guess then you can plug your guitar into your computer and it will play your guitar and you will consider yourself a musician like alot of kids who play guitar hero.

I've never had a problem with plugging my strat into my sound card and getting studio quality out of cubase.

Metal Enthusiast: there is already a hexaphonic pickup that fits on Fenders( developed by Roland) called the GK-3. Anybody can have one if they want one, and it came pre-installed on the Roland-Ready Strat and the VG Strat, which Fender fans voted on by not buying them in droves.

But you certainly don't need one to record to your PC in 24-bit rez. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to achieve that goal, including several USB interfaces made for guitar.... ordinary guitars without "digital" pickups.

And you don't need 24-bit recording to protect your IP. Pen and paper, a cassette, anything will do.

And nobody is getting ripped off in modern recording studios. Rates haven't gone up anywhere in the country in over 15 years, while technology and client expectation have both surged forward. WHat most "kids" are paying for studio time barely covers the cost of the guy turning knobs.

In short, here's a little tip for the future.... when you try to sound as if you understand a lot of things that you actually don't, people can tell.

Double post mistake. Oooops.

The studio is undergoing a bit of a dilema in recent times. I still know of a couple of good studios that use sound engineering students to engineer recordings that you can get for £120 a day. Most places are charging £40 per hour. The last album i recorded took 4, 9hour days to record and we went in tight as hell at playing the songs. £500 instead of £1440 without mastering. For £500 you can pick up a pc a mike and a interface quite easily. Is it any wonder their dying out. Modern technology has killed em. I remember the first time i recorded to pc in a studio, my first thought was 'any mug can do this'. Well not quite, but you can get close with patience and practice.

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I feel that once everything is technically possible, I (at least) find it hard to come with a reason why I should do anything. The more limitations I have, the more creative I become in my attempts to get around them.

In real life I am a 3D medical animator, and I'm constantly exposed to the latest and supposedly greatest gadgets in that field. The components of a good animation, though, are the same as they've been since shortly after the invention of celluloid -- timing, composition, timing and..erm... timing... techniques that have been in development for well over a century (in film) and of course for many centuries before that in one form or another. You do need a passing familiarity with the tools of the trade, but it would be meaningless without an understanding of the underlying principles. Anybody has been free to work on those anytime since the late 19th century!

I've been doing this computer stuff now for long enough to know that I won't look back when my time comes and say to myself "if only I'd spent more time in front of that monitor!"... I work as hard at this as I've ever done at anything, but really I find that digital imagery is simply not as likeable as my old 16mm stop-motion films. People are always blown away by that stuff, in much the same way as they are when I hit them with some clean strat through my Swart Space Tone (come on, you knew I'd get there eventually)... it's just too much work to digitally model something to produce the kind of visceral response you can get from gear that responds instantly to human touch.

On an electric guitar, you can bend a string and... well, I happen to think that's about the most unique feature of an electric guitar. And that's all it needs -- you can spend a lifetime working with just that, let alone all the other possibilities a stringed instrument presents. Unless digital technology can improve the experience of bending a string, it's not actually going to advance the art of guitar playing. It can certainly improve the art of recording music, and of the things you can then do with that recording (as has been pointed out already)... but on the whole guitarists have got their hands full trying to get the best tone out of gear that was around in the '50s.

I don't want to come across as being opposed to technological progress, or (worse) to pretend that there haven't been significant advances in the past 60-odd years... it's more like -- if I have someone bobbing up and telling me "I can't believe you haven't looked into the possibilities afforded by x, y and z" when I'm still busy wrangling a, b and c, and will be for a few more decades... I wrap my paw around my club-like C-profile neck and retreat to my cave...heh.