NAMM-tastic News...

Obviously, I’m not at NAMM (what were the odds?) so I’m in the same boat most of you are, sitting back and reading the seemingly unending stream of press releases like all the other plebs. Quite frankly, this is for the better, as my temperament would probably get me in trouble were I actually to attend. So I have to live vicariously through Dave Gamble, basically.

That aside, here’s the obligatory post of Things I Find Interesting So Far in all the press releases. With one exception, I haven’t actually beheld any of these products in real life, so my bullshit detector is working at a low threshold. We’ll see how that works out. Anyways, I’ll say ahead of time that I don’t find the LinnDrum II, the MiniMoog OS, or the Virus Snow interesting, really. I have great respect for two out of the three companies, but nothing new here, really. Just old stuff re-packaged for a different price point.

Moog MP-201 Multi-Pedal: At first pale, you’re like, “oh, an expression pedal. Whatever.” Or at least I was. Then I started to think about it, and realized how slick it was. This is the Controller Pedal Of The Gods, able to do most anything. Assuming (and this is a bit of an assumption on my part) that the buttons and pedal can be assigned to any ol’ MIDI CC, this will fit in to my foot-pedaling world so perfectly I can’t really believe it. I’ll certainly be getting one as soon as they’re available.

Sonalksis Mastering Suite: These will be fairly slick. They haven’t put anything up on their website yet, but it was “announced” at NAMM. Four plugins, and to my ears much better at software limiting than other stuff I’ve heard. Dave did a hell of a job with these. And no motherfucking iLok bullshit.

Line 6 ToneCore DSP Development Kit: (Note that the link goes to Digital Pro Sound’s iteration of the press release. That site is the worst ad farm on the planet. They make Sonic State look like, well, me, in comparison.) I know this was announced last year, but it looks like it is finally gonna be released in a couple months. This is a little module that fits in Line 6’s ToneCore dock that has a chunk of blank DSP and some RAM and some knobs, so you can program your own guitar effects. I think that, for guitarists, it is a pointless product, but for those of you that get your giggles turning Furbies in to Overlords Of Sonic Death, this is about the best thing since diagonal cutters. Time will tell, but I think we’ll see some interesting things come from this.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open, but nothing else has really caught my fancy. New 3.5 OS for Eclipse makes me happy, but I can’t remember my damn username and password for the Eventide site. (And they FINALLY discovered HTML 1.1, it seems.) Anything I missed here that is on the down-low cool?