New technology created by an ISU alumnus has helped to create a revolutionary guitar that can be plugged into a computer. Guitarists will be able to record its high-quality digital signal directly onto hard drives and manipulate the signal with unique digital effects.

The guitar uses technology developed over the last three years by a team of engineers at Gibson Labs in Sunnydale, Calif. The new networking standards and hardware, which Gibson calls MaGIC technology, can transport music from guitar to computer over an ethernet connection like the one students use to connect their personal computers to the campus network at Iowa State.

MaGIC, which is an acronym for “media-accelerated global information carrier,” allows digital signals to travel over ordinary 100-Mbit ethernet cable with both high speed and high quality.

“It’s a really big step forward for music technology and especially for the electric guitar,” says Jeff Vallier, a senior audio hardware engineer at Gibson Labs. “This is just a starting point for the MaGIC technology. There’s so much more you can do with it.”

Gibson will release the first guitar with the technology, a Les Paul model, in the next six months, Vallier said. The technology is expected to add about $300 to the cost of an electric guitar, according to BBC.

Vallier, who grew up in Ames, won the Design News magazine Engineering Quality Award for helping develop the technology. His parents, Fred and Jane Vallier, of Ames, traveled to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in February to see him receive the engineering award.

Vallier was nominated for the award by a Design News writer who saw one of the four prototype guitars with MaGIC technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January.

Vallier said the Design News awards are the “Grammys of engineering.” There are several categories, and the Engineering Quality Award is one of the top three awards, he said. His award includes a $20,000 educational grant, which he has designated to go to Iowa State.

“We’re still working on how,” Vallier says. “I want it to go to a student who wants to get involved in both music and engineering.”

Vallier had an early interest in both. When he and his brother Rob started a band with friends when he was 13, Vallier was the one who fixed up their used equipment.

Vallier graduated from Ames High School in 1986 and attended Iowa State from 1986 to 1988. He returned to Iowa State as a grad student in 1991, winning a national research grant in 1992, he said.

“As part of that grant, he was appointed an ‘Assistant Scientist’ in Music,” says Sue Haug, professor and chairman of the music department. “I always loved that title.”

He also held a collaborative appointment that allowed him to team-teach courses in electronic music and assist David Stuart, associate professor in music, with Music 104, History of Rock and Roll.

Now Vallier’s MaGIC technology is making history in the rock and roll world.

If they catch on, digital instruments will make the noise distortion associated with traditional analog signals a thing of the past.

Earlier systems “didn’t have the warm analog sound that people wanted,” Stuart says. He says people have been trying for years to devise a digital or electronic system that could mimic flanging, that “swirling sound” heard in pop music, without a hot electric sound.

The research grant Vallier won while at Iowa State was for a chip that could mimic that warm analog sound, Stuart said.

The first guitars with Gibson’s MaGIC technology will still have analog pickups in addition to ethernet connections, Vallier said. Musicians will be able to manipulate the sound of each individual string and control amps and other hardware from the guitar’s knobs.

Vallier says the digital instrument revolution is coming, but that Gibson may have to convince guitar diehards to pick up the pioneering digital guitar.

“Generally, guitar players are slow to adopt new things,” Vallier says. “They’re notoriously slow. It’ll take a while to take off.”

When it does take off, he says, “it’ll just make life so much easier.”