Wow, wait until you get your hands on this thing....

Folks, I love guitars. I love gadgets. I love tech stuff and most of all I love innovation. I finally got to spend a lot of quality time with Dark Fire today when we worked on some promo videos for it. I spent time with one of the engineers responsible for this modern marvel, and I got to play the guitar for a good part of the time I spent with it. Holy smokes! 

I got the grand tour from an expert on the design team, but frankly, the system is so easy to use I could have sorted it out almost immediately without cracking open the manual.

Seriously, we just pulled it out of the box, plugged it all in, and we were off and running in minutes. It honestly was that quick. But it was the serious features of the guitar that knocked my socks off, never mind the awesome inclusion of a hardware audio device, Guitar Rig and Ableton Live Lite.

Dark Fire blew me away in more ways than I ever expected. If you have the idea that this is some kind of modeling guitar, you couldn't be more off the mark. If you think its just a jazzed up Robot, you're in for an amazing amount of surprises. First of all on the Robot tech front, the new tuning speed in which this guitar automatically tunes was simply astounding. Night and day faster than the first Robot technology. It was like the difference between watching an electric screw driver turn a screw and watching a power drill spin a bit. I could not believe how much faster the tuning took place. It was dazzling. And that was just the beginning.

The new Dark Fire's next generation Robot technology takes the concept of the original MCK (master control knob) and drives it to the maximum potential in functionality. In the first Robot, the MCK let you pick the tuning mode of the guitar, and also acted as a tone knob. This time, its packed full of colorful LEDs that create images to show you the array of pickup selections your traditional toggle switch will be controlling. It was the coolest thing I ever have seen on a guitar. Seriously. OMG. You pull this knob up, it does a fast little boot up thing, then you turn it to select the kind of tones you want to get from the two pickups in the Dark Fire Les Paul. Let's say you wanted split humbucker in the back and a P90H in the front, you'd pull up the knob, turn it to the letter setting that corresponded with that pickup setting, and then you literally watch the face of the knob light up the colors that indicate what the pickups now operated as, then you tap it again to engage it, push it down and start rocking. And this can all be done in seconds. Really, its amazing.

So once you get that set, your toggle switch acts like a normal toggle switch allowing you to go from front to back pickup, but the MCK has told the pickups what they are going to do for you. Want a traditional Les Paul sound on both pickups? Pull up the MCK, dial up the setting and see the two pickups represented on the face of the MCK knob light up in two rows of green, indicating two full humbuckers. Want the rear pickup split? Turn the knob and watch the lights show up with a half green, half red LED set to show half of the pickup being hot, ie. tapped, push it in to set it and go. Wow.

Of course, it still also works to let you pick the tuning you want as well, so now one simple MCK controls a wide array of pickup options, which are further controlled by traditional tone knobs and toggle switches, allowing for an endless choice of tones from this thing, but its also still works like the original Robot in getting you setup with whatever tuning style you want. 

The tonal varieties from the MCK knob alone, coupled with astounding leap forward in speed for automatic tuning of a host of open, standard, drop and other tunings make this guitar amazing enough, not to mention, its dead sexy. The photos don't even do it justice. And given that the guitar is run through the PLEK system, giving it perfect intonation to go with the perfect tuning Gibson Dark Fire experience, this new Dark Fire is simply a dream come true for any guitar player of almost any genre (classical players need not apply..... yet I suppose, I mean, who knows what the next-next generation of the Robot will bring).

As it stands, this new Dark Fire is a jaw-dropping-finger and ear pleaser to the 10th power that's also a beautiful instrument. Up until now, seeing prototypes and hearing about everything the guitar is supposed to do was one thing, but getting to spend quality time with it and watching it actually pass serious muster, a whole other thing. I am floored.

We hooked it up to the RIP audio box it comes with, which is essentially a simple audio recording device that runs on Firewire. I plugged it into my MacBook Pro, and as I expected, it just worked. Because I use a Mac (though this thing is cross platform), and the RIP uses OS X's Core Audio drivers, there were no other drivers required. True to form with a Mac, you just plug this sucker into the Firewire port and it worked immediately. The first time. No futzing around. The Windows driver will be the familiar process of installing drivers, but that's relatively painless, though certainly not as easy as using the Mac, where you just pull it from the box and plug it in, no other drivers needed.

We opened up Ableton Live, went to the preferences menu and there waiting for us was the RIP audio interface. We used the inputs and outputs of it, running the outs to a pair of powered studio monitors, then dragged and dropped the Guitar Rig 3 software plugin onto the top of the Ableton Live set, and it was instantaneous tone heaven. So not only could we get every sound imaginable under the sun out of Guitar Rig, with the array of options for pickups native to Dark Fire all on its own, it was a day of pure, unadulterated heaven for a guitar player. Best. Tone. Ever. 

Mark my words, you are going to be amazed. I fully expect to find out people are putting their other guitars on eBay to raise funds to buy Dark Fire, which could we be the most amazing guitar ever put on the market, and the most innovative thing Gibson has ever done, and certainly leaps and bounds past anything any other guitar maker has even dreamed of doing.

Gibson, you hit a home run with Dark Fire. I want one. I have to have one. I ain't kidding. I'm dead serious. I must own this guitar. And once you get your hands on one, you'll be saying the same thing. It is all that and ten bags of chips, folks. Wow! Seriously, just wow! Ok, I'm done gushing on Dark Fire, for today. I'll get back to more about the cool things you can do with the software and more in my next postings. :)