During his long tenure on this planet, Les Paul was something like the Thomas Edison of music—he is responsible for such groundbreaking inventions as multitrack recording, overdubbing, delay effects and, of course, the solid-body electric guitar. His work eventually earned him induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

Few names conjure up as much respect in an industry as Les Paul, and that doesn't appear likely to change anytime in the near future. Nearly all of the musicians and music lovers around today owe a tremendous debt to this man. [Yahoo]

Not only does it have his signature—there are other iPods by Donna karan, Marc Jacobs and Alice Temperley—it has ten of his favorite songs. Seeing as he's an old man and you (as a Giz reader) are probably not, your musical taste will probably not intersect with his.

Still interested? Bid here. [Ebay via TwentyFourBit via Cult of Mac via Macworld]

Think of it as the Robot plus the Moog synth guitar rolled into one. First and foremost, it's a guitarist's guitar, with three different kind of pickups—a humbucker, a single-coil and a bridge-mounted piezo acoustic—all capable of contributing their sound to an original, organic blend of totally real guitar noise.

Having anchored itself firmly in Gibson's traditions, it's also got some crazy new stuff. Like the Robot, it self-tunes (now up to 500 times on a single battery charge), and using the "Chameleon Tone Technology" it is capable of producing "every imaginable guitar sound," says Gibson.

The company is quite proud of the Master Control Knob—presumably with a bit of a Tron shoutout there—though I can only imagine that the "sophisticated full color matrix display featuring LEDs and high-tech light pipe technology" takes a little bit of a hike up the learning curve.

Those who know of Les Paul's guitar innovations will appreciate that Gibson is carrying on his tradition of complication as a necessary means for cooler guitar tech. Some of Les' personal guitars had tons of mostly unmarked switches on them, not to mention a few boxes off to the side.

Speaking of boxes, a lot of the digital mojo is facilitated by the guitar's interface, the Robot Interface Pack, which has jacks on the front for the guitar and headphones. On the rear there's a FireWire connector (hear that, new MacBook shoppers?) and a hex connector, which can be adapted for MIDI output. The good news for suckers who bought the first-gen Robot is that the upgrade will be available to them at a price close to cost. (My guess is they'll make the money on labor when you take your Robot in for the upgrade.)

Though Gibson won't promise "infinite sustain" like Moog, it does say that its body design makes "the Dark Fire one of the best-sustaining Les Pauls ever produced." Cool. [Gibson]

According to GameTank's CEO Jake Parks, the connection to the guitar would either work "via a guitar-USB adapter, a microphone, or directly to the sound card." He told us that they are planning to release for both Mac and PC.

The cool thing about Guitar Rising is that it isn't a simple videogame, but combines the fun of playing and beating scores to actually teach you how to play the real thing. While they "are in the process of licensing popular rock songs, and we'll announce them on our website as soon as we finalize the deals," there will be different songs for different levels of difficulty to ease the learning curve, as well as different speed settings, so you can start slow and progress until you master the song at real speed. In fact, they say that the song selection will include stuff easy for beginners but also songs challenging for experienced players.

In other words, you will actually learn to play guitar and try to be a Keith Richards-wannabe rather than just pretending to be Jeff Vader pretending to be Keith Richards. If you want to give it a try, they will be at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco to visit us in the OMPR/IBM Pavilion, booth 6241. [Guitar Rising]

Unfortunately, the first run of the guitar will be limited to 4000 instruments (10 units in 400 stores); and I have no doubt that when the price is finally announced, it will be far out of the range of your average garage band. Still, if you would like to take a shot at picking one up, December 7th is the day to remember. [Gibson via Electronista]

It works by using piezoelectric pickups rather than the usual magnetic pickups used on most electric guitars, and these pickups are able to isolate the sound of each individual string. Underneath the pickups is a processor that senses the pitch being played, and sends a signal to the tuning pegs at the top of the guitar's neck to change the pitch until it's all tuned up.

Even though this machine may be perfectly accurate, turning a guitar can be a subtle art, where you can slightly change some of the notes to fit the key in which you're playing. However, for musicians who like to play various songs with the guitar tuned in completely different ways for each song, this technology could be extremely useful. In fact, the $899 it adds to the price of the guitar might seem like a bargain compared with buying two more guitars, each tuned in a completely different way. [Technology Review]

That honor goes to the Monster Flying V pictured in the gallery above, built by 11 high school students in 2000. It's so big it set a Guinness World Record. It's 43 feet 7 1/2 inches long and 16 feet 5 1/2 inches wide, weighs well over a ton—and it's actually playable—well, if you don't mind picking 8-inch thick, 25-foot-long strings. [YouTube, via Music Thing, and also Gibson]

Besides that one key fact of its body being flipped 180 degrees, the rest of this ax is faithful to Gibson's original 1958 design, complete with 1957-style humbucker pickups, that strings-through-the-body tailpiece (going the opposite way, of course), and a sweet-looking Trans Amber finish. No word on pricing or availability just yet. [Electric Guitar Review]

Designed like the Gibson Le Paul Standard, this 1GB, USB2.0 flash drive screams "I'm a musician, please sleep with me" louder than anything else attached to your laptop. Unless of course you're playing your demo track called Please sleep with me, I'm a musician in iTunes. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Gibson]

Once your music finds its way into the digital realm, the included software lets you record yourself playing along with your favorite digital audio files, and it can even slow down their playback speed so you can keep up with that Eddie Van Halen solo you've been woodshedding. Your guitar, Unchained, for $199.95. – Charlie White

Product Page [Hammacher Schlemmer]

The signal is sent via a proprietary MaGIC protocol to a BreakOut Box that is the width of one rack space and half the rack space wide. The box has 8 outputs (1/4-inch jacks), one for each string, one for the classic humbucking pickup and a pass-through for a microphone. You do not need to plug this into a computer, although that will give you even more cool things to play with.

So, what can you do with all this? Add delay to each string. Then assign each string a different channel for surround sound—it's true, I heard it. Another option is to use just the first and fourth inputs on the BreakOut Box which will assign the lower four to one channel, the upper four to the other channel and give you instant stereo.

This guitar does so much that even the guy on hand to demo it didn't understand it all. There is a mic input on the guitar, for one. The Gibson Digital will be available this quarter and retail for around $3,900.