[OT] Winter NAMM

[Nicholas Thompson]

I just went to winter NAMM in LA.  Lucky for me Apple are a member and it's
only a 5 hour drive from here :)

Of course NAMM is not *so* much interest to DIY peeps but I thought I'd tell
a little of some of the great things I saw.  If anyone wants more details
then please let me know.

Big Briar was showing something that really might be of interest to the DIY
community.  There is a new MonoSynth, they are calling it the performance
synth.  It looks very nice, a Mini Moog size keyboard, and the control
surface looked very MM like, but there are more modulation routings, MIDI,
on the back there were about 10 or so jacks to allow some kind of
rudimentary patching and interfacing with other modular gear and the
MoogerFooger pedals.  The price.  Well, sadly "Under $2000" so I think for
many of us DIY will still be the main source of new gear, but to control a
modular, this would be very cool.  The machine on the booth was a proto, and
I don't think it was wired for sound, but they are a really nice company,
very friendly.  Oh and yes, it comes in a wood case :)

As a side: there was a synth museum set up with some very rare stuff
(including a big moog modular).  Bob Moog was in this display on Saturday,
and there were some people playing, one was very expertly and beautifully
playing a theremin.  It sounded wonderful (I tried to play the one set up on
Big Briar's booth and it sounded pretty nasty so the technique seems to be
all important.

Alesis (yes, no typo here) were showing the analog Andromeda.  This is a 16
voice analog (not modeling) synth.  They bread boarded up "classic" analog
circuits and then made custom analog ASIC chips.  So it's basically
digitally controlled analog.  I asked if they'd sell the chips, but the
answer was as expected, and interfacing them sounded difficult, since they
have to be latched to a high speed clock.  It looks the part, but is $3500
retail, so not cheap.  The demo was odd.  The one on the booth was in a
plexiglass case, and although it was powered, it didn't have any leads for
sound.  The one inside the demo room didn't seem to get played, so I didn't
hear it.

Waldorf/TSI/Access had the Q on their booth.  I have to say that the review
of this in sound on Sound was grossly unfair, since the units on display
worked great, and sounded good too.  Also there were the virus and
microwave.  The Virus is a great sounding VA, smoother than the Q.  But I'd
love to own both of them :)

Once again Korg had for me the items of the show (but I'm on a budget).
Last year it was the electribes, this year?  The Korg MS2000 is a MOSS based
synth with knobs, a vocoder, and a step sequencer.  The keyboard version is
$1100 and it has wood end panels.  The rack is $799 which in terms of bang
per buck is just wonderful.  It sounds like a cross between the prophecy
(but of course it is polyphonic) and the electribe/a.  Also there is a new
Electribe, a sampler, and this was very cool too.  It can slice a loop into
16 and assign each sound to the pad and then sequence it like on the R drum
machine.  Very nice.

Roland's booth was a big yawn to me.  They seems to have a gadget for
everyone, the big news for them was a sampler that can timestretch for
$3500.  It didn't seem to do anything all that new, but for beat matching
samples of different tempos, I suppose it would be useful.  They had another
"Gruuuooovvvve machine" the $1000 307.  I'm really confused by them, because
they seems to charge a lot of money for things that just don't look all that
useful to me, and I have a lot of Roland stuff from over the years.  There a
new sp808 which actually did look fairly cool to me, and an awesome digital
hand drum which at $1000 seemed to be $600 too expensive.

Yamaha were keen to stress that anything anyone else could too they could do
cheaper with more features.  I liked their pianos though.  They have a new
synth, the s30 which sounded good (but why are the pianos always soaked in
reverb).  Their new samplers come with a 10 CD library, and the sCSI is 40%
faster, though the SU 700 demo took around 5 minutes to load 30 megs of
samples, so I don't know what they'd be like for live stuff.  Not much new
on the synth side, except that everything seems to come with slots for the
PLG synth boards.  That would be a good DIY project - a stand alone cradle
for a PLG-150AN board.  Awesome VA power for a couple of hundred bucks.

EMU had a number of new modules that seemed descended from the proteus
2000/audity 2000 line.  There was a lead/bass synth, an orchestral, a
hammond B3 and a new hip hop module.  They sounded great (the orch has new
samples from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra).  All seemed to retail for $895
or so, so they seemed pretty good value.  Their APS PCI card is getting a
new version in March and Macintosh support in April.  It looked pretty cool,
and again sounded really good.

Jomox were showing the SunSyn, and the other stuff that they do including
the drum machine (and 808/909 hybrid) both of these sounded wonderful.  The
sunsyn is really rich.

Studio electronics were there too with some cool analog stuff.

I'm sure I've missed some things.

On the software side:

eMagic announced 4.2 of logic and 3.0 of SoundDiver synth editor.  The big
news is the plug in sampler, which appeared to have very low latency and
seemed to do everything that I can currently do with my ESI4000 and Recycle,
so it looked very cool.  They were demoing on a 450MHz G4 and had 16
channels with the sampler and a couple of channels of audio and a couple
with the plug in synth, so it looked pretty impressive.

Propellerheads showed a stunning new application, the mutant successor to
ReBirth, and it is really cool, check their website for details.

I saw a PPG wave plugin for VST2.  Made by Waldorf this looked very cool.
Native instruments is now a VST2 plugin and there is a dedicated prophet 5
from them.  IK multimedia were showing their t-racks mastering software,
which looked good, and they have a remix app wich looked good too.  MixMan
will run as a VST2 plugin now, giving you a sampler from within a cubase
track.

There was so much stuff I could go on for ages, but I gotta wrap up now.

Regards

Nick