January 25, 2002
Winter NAMM Report What's New
As I was cruising down to NAMM, I was eagerly contemplating what new possibilities technology could bring to my music. I was also looking forward to seeing friends I hadn't seen in a while. Well, I wasn't disappointed. The show was a whose who of the music business this year. The energy was really high and I detected an air of positive energy from everyone who attended.
It was great to see some of my old friends. I met up with Nathan East, Michael Boddicker, Troy Luccketta, Ricky Lawson, Matt Forger, Roger Linn , Allan Holdsworth and many others to numerous to mention. It was great seeing you all and now that I am in LA, I am looking forward to working together with you all again.
I would like to mention briefly some of the gear highlights of the show that I think are very cool.
Audio Ease: A great MAS plug-in for convolution reverb. This plug-in sounds stunning and you can sample your own rooms. Runs on a Mac G4. Very cool and a steal at $499.00! A must have!
Native instrument's Kontakt: A new and very powerful sampler with very low latency. It features up to 256 voices; it is 16-part multitimbral and has 32 outputs per instance. It can be used as a plug-in or standalone in any format. It is compatible with PC or Mac.
Bitheadz Unity Session: Another great sampler featuring up to 256 voices, 32bit 96 Khz sound quality and runs on OS 10.1 and OS 9 on a Mac G3 or G4. It is Giga compatible so you can have access to all the great sample libraries that are available for gigasampler.
Tascam GigaStudio: As you all know, a great sampling system! Enough said!
In the guitar department there were many high quality guitars shown this year among the notable companies were Paul Reed Smith, Brian Moore, Warrior (they had a very hip 9 string bass!), and Carvin. I will be reviewing some of these guitars in the near future so check back.
Pro Tools HD:Yes, a whole new system by Digidesign. All new hardware and software featuring up to 128 tracks of simultaneous audio at 24 bit, 192 KHz sampling rate. This is THE system!
Metric Halo's Mobile I/O: This is a great box for getting eight channels of audio in and out of your laptop. It features eight channels of analog i/o, eight mic preamps with phantom power on each channel and supports up to 24 bit 96 KHz sampling rates. It also features ADAT Lightpipe, SPDIF, AES/EBU i/o and word clock. It has great metering and is only one rack space high. It is the perfect size to set your laptop on. But the really cool thing is it is connected and powered by firewire . It allows you to go in the field and do multi-track recording. The drivers will basically support any format and will work with both PC and Mac. I will be doing a review on this soon for Recording and MusicoPro magazines. I can't wait to hook this up to my G4 Titanium powerbook!
Adrenalinn by Roger Linn Designs: Hip name Roger! This a very cool stomp box for guitar that features groove filter effects, amp modeling and a drum machine all in one. Roger gave me a demo and I was amazed! Some very cool sounds came out of this box. And the price was really cool too. Only $399.00.
Roland V-Bass: This is the bass guitar version of the VG-88 guitar processor. It supports 4, 5, and 6 string basses. A special Roland pickup is used which then feeds the processor with a 13 pin cable. The sounds coming from this system are amazing! When I audition bass players he will have to have one of these as a prerequisite to playing in my band!
There were many more things that were cool but I wanted to highlight a few things that I thought were exceptionally hip.
Christopher Currell