Stuff I Saw at NAMM That Surprised Me
Striking up conversations with strangers at NAMM is incredibly easy and natural. And not just the salespeople, whose job it is to greet you by name with a big smile, but everybody. Standing in line for a $15 hotdog, standing in line to get Joe Walsh's autograph, standing in line to use the escalator, standing in line to hear Eddie Kramer give a talk, standing in line for a Shure T-shirt. Most-used opening icebreaker: what's the best thing you've seen so far? Every time I'd do that I'd have to make another note on the must-see list I kept in my back pocket.
Of course, there are the usual gimmicks designed to draw a crowd. Yamaha's decahedral drum kit, Pearl's oversized bass drum and glow-in-the-dark congas, no less than two circular keyboards, Moog's artsy desert-themed display where you sit on pillows to play every Moog product ever designed. And when you think there's no new ways to dress up a slab of wood, guitars so beautiful you'd hang them next to your Picasso. Saxophones you could not look at without sunglasses, microphones with light shows built in, 8-feet by 30-feet walls of studio monitors. But I wasn't there for any of that stuff. I was there for the software.
This year about about 15 or so small vendors went in on a separate room, a much better venue for them than the cacophonous main halls. And a great convenience for me (it took me an hour to find Indiginus, incongruously located next to the disco light shows). It also meant I got to talk to folks I might have otherwise walked past, and look at products I might not have considered interesting. This thread is about stuff that surprised me, things I would not have considered worthy of spending my all-too-limited time on.
1. Black drums from Chocolate AudioI made a point of stopping by Chocolate Audio's booth because I wanted to meet Simone Coen. Partly because I gathered from our correspondences that he was an interesting guy, and partly to ask about a library he'd sent me months ago for review that I could not get to work properly.
Unfortunately, Simone was off skulking around the show, so I talked to his booth partner, David. But all David wanted to show off was their new drum kit. (You might already know that drums are Chocolate Audio's forte, having made several kits for BFD).
Oh no, I thought, not another Kontakt drum kit I'll have to feign interest in.
Turns out, it's very good. Whether you're a metalhead or not, you'll love the fat kicks and snares that come out of this thing. And a usable sequencer for quick fills. Includes kits for both Kontakt and BFD3. Looking forward to playing with this one.
The next day I went back and had the good fortune to meet Simone. As I suspected, he was indeed an interesting guy I could have hung out with all day. If only NAMM were two weeks instead of 4 days.
2. Boz's new compressor It's called the
Manic Compressor. Not a name that would normally draw me in, on the assumption it was meant to appeal to the steamroller school of compression. Plus who cares about yet another frickin'
compressor?
But I wanted to say howdy to Boz, and he had a chair that was calling out to my feet, so I walked over and asked "what's new?". We ended up talking for half an hour, and I left quite impressed with the new plugin. It's got that nifty Fabfilter-type scrolling graph, but mainly it's got a knob enigmatically labeled "Loud Relief" that delivers the magic ingredient. (It alters the attack curves.)
And yes, it's meant for extreme squashing, but in parallel. And six algorithms. Fabfilter-ish indeed, but Pro-C does NOT have a "Loud Relief" knob. I checked.
3. Tracktion's new synthI really didn't expect to like this synth as much as I did. It's called
BioTek (sounds like a biological weapons manufacturer) and it's a sample-based synth. You might have noticed there have been a lot of these over the last year or two. I'd figured BioTek for another me-too product. It isn't.
If you were to use this live onstage, you'd want to project its graphics on a screen behind you - it's cool.
In some ways, it's another take on what Omnisphere and UVI Falcon are already doing, but with very complex modulation and movement options. And a different slant on base samples. Where Omni is mostly synth-oriented, BioTek is more organic, featuring things like wind sounds as the basis.
4. Straight Ahead Samples brassThese guys make expressive jazz-oriented Kontakt libraries, including drums (brush & mallet) and acoustic bass. But it's the horns that make them stand out. You get solo instruments (trumpet, sax and trombone) plus ensembles and lots of helpful canned phrases. Although this horn library ain't cheap ($300) it's definitely got a very good bang:buck ratio considering all you get with it. The ensembles are real ensembles, played by 4 or 5 players.
5. ROLI multidimensional polyphonic expression controllersOh yeh, that's a mouthful. I assumed it was a gimmick, but I came away believing it's the start of a revolution.
First impression was a goofy-looking keyboard that would be hard to play, with keys that feel like thin packing foam. Then somebody explained what it was about, and then it was...oh.
Imagine a keyboard that takes the idea of aftertouch to a ridiculous extreme. This thing responds no only to pressure, but rocking your finger side-to-side and front-to-back, while you use your thumb along the bottom. It would surely require some practice to get comfortable with, but if you're one of the people saying the 300-year-old controller we've been using for synthesizers is obsolete (Bob Moog himself said it) you really need to find someplace where you can try this out.
A whole new addition to the MIDI spec has been created just for this. David Baer (dmbaer) and I got to hear about it from the guru himself, Jules Storer, who was nice enough to come out into the hallway to chat with us.
6. Audible Genius Syntorial synth tutorialsNot a new product, but it's been enhanced since its introduction. What this is is a tutorial series on how to program synthesizers, from beginner to advanced. It's hard to describe their process, but it's very easy to grasp. If you're not a synth guy but would like to get your feet wet, this'll get you there with minimal effort. If you're a synth user who mostly just uses presets and would like to learn how to roll your own, this will teach you what you need to know. And in the end you get a usable synthesizer to add to your collection.
These are just the things that came to mind this morning. Others will emerge once I've had time to go over my notes.
But one other product deserves mention, although technically not in the "things that surprised me" category because I'd known nothing about it prior to the show. And that's Indiginus' new Telecaster library,
Renegade. What was surprising, though, is how excited I got hearing it. I mean, it's just another guitar library, right? And I'd just bought a Tele lib recently from Ilya Efimov that's pretty nice. But I guarantee Renegade is one you're gonna like, especially if you're a fan of Renaxxance and Torch. And of course it'll be fifty bucks like most of Tracy's products, further enhancing the like-ability factor.