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]

Gaming:
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Audio Accessories:
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Memory:
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Stocking Stuffers (War Movie Special—thank you to our troops and to all our veterans who protect our country!):

Blu-ray:
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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]

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.