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igital and analog technologies have long stood apart and never the twain shall meet.

The guitar is one of the major musical instruments that has remained doggedly resistant to digital progress, and, as most guitar players know, the best sound the instrument can produce comes via a tube amplifier, a technology that thrived in the 1950s.

United States guitar manufacturer Fender has, however, found new ways to harness the power of digital technology and use it to spread the gospel of rock n’ roll to a new generation of players.

Fender is the market leader in acoustic and electric guitar manufacturing. Its market share in 2017 in the US was 37.2 percent, putting it ahead of Gibson with 32.8 percent and C.F. Martin with 10.9 percent.

Guitars manufactured by Fender are the instrument of choice for some of the biggest names in music today including Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Maroon 5, not to mention legends of rock such as Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

Hendrix used a Fender Stratocaster for his rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” during the 1968 Woodstock Music Festival, which critics consider to be one of the most important milestones in rock history.

In the past few years, Fender has relied on the internet, by building a seamless network of smartphone applications and online tutorials, to encourage more players to take up the instrument.

The California-based guitar manufacturer has also leveraged the power of cloud computing to execute a variety of tasks from collecting consumer data to setting up an Internet of Things operation in its manufacturing facility.

Chief product officer of Fender, Ethan Kaplan, said that more than just selling guitars, the company had an obligation to maintain the passion that players had toward the instrument.

“Our survey shows that 45 percent of players who purchase guitars every year are first time buyers, but 90 percent of these players quit in six months, most in the first 90 days,” Kaplan said during his presentation at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference on Thursday in Las Vegas, the US.

Until recently, the existing environment did not provide enough support for these first time buyers. “The first thing that a guitar player needs is tuning, but there are more than 60 apps for guitar tuning, and none of them actually talk about tuning a guitar,” Kaplan said.

In 2016, Fender launched Fender Tune, which has become a hit and is used by millions of users. Soon after, the company launched Fender Tone, which allows players to manage thousands of pre-set guitar effects and deliver them via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to Fender’s Mustang GT amplifier series.

In 2017, the California-based company launched Fender Play, an online learning app to help keep beginners engaged and continuing to play.

“We made the online learning app as good as our guitars so unlike most video instructions on YouTube, this is not a guy on a couch, with his Go-Pro with his cat running around, this is a tightly structured curriculum, in 4K, high-quality studio-shot video, and it has instructions for 500 songs that you know and love,” said Kaplan.

Kaplan said that all the new platforms were built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform, which the company also uses to improve the production process at some of its manufacturing facilities.

AWS chief technology officer Werner Vogel said that Fender was one of companies the cloud giant worked with that used its machine learning platform Amazon SageMaker.

“SageMaker could find the best pieces of wood that will fit together to make your next generation of guitar,” Vogel said in his keynote address at the AWS re:Invent conference on Thursday.

Fender has also used Internet of Things technology to monitor humidity, a crucial factor in guitar production.

When asked if artificial intelligence or machine learning could play a bigger role in the making of art itself, Asia Pacific head of emerging technologies Olivier Klein said that the road would be long and winding before reaching that destination.

“I probably don’t have a good answer to that,” Klein told The Jakarta Post, with a chuckle.