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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — 'The defining moment will be when a certain lick in a popular song is out there, and it can't be done with anything else but a digital guitar (search),' Juszkiewicz says. 'It only takes one example to really inspire people.' That, Juszkiewicz hopes, will usher in the age of the digital guitar — much the same way as the Beatles (search) and Rolling Stones inspired a generation of young people to pick up a standard electric guitar in the 1960s. 'It opens a whole new palette of possibilities,' Juszkiewicz says. 'It's a little bit like hearing stereo as opposed to mono.' Juszkiewicz knows guitars. A Harvard MBA who played in garage rock bands, he bought Gibson with two buddies for $5 million when it was struggling in 1986 and built it into a company with annual sales of $250 million in 2001. At one point, Gibson had fewer than 60 employees. Today, Juszkiewicz says it has 3,000 worldwide. In the waiting room of his office at Gibson's Nashville headquarters, the walls are lined with guitars and photos of Sting, Neil Diamond, BB King, Madonna, Hank Williams Jr. and Brooks & Dunn. His secretary answers the telephone wearing dark lingerie and black boots. The advantages of the digital guitar come down to sound and control. For 70 years, the electric guitar pickup has translated string vibrations into an electrical signal fed to an amplifier. The player can control the tone and volume, but output is limited to a mono or stereo signal. The signal itself is noisy by today's standards, and stray frequencies often cause an annoying hum. 'Some of the guitar pickups popular today go back to the 1920s,' Juszkiewicz said. 'We have not changed a lot in terms of the instrument.'
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