NAMM's Got Gear

New products for deejays and producers.

NAMM is to music instruments as Adultcon is to porn; a huge convention where fan-boys get hard and industry-types stroke their egos. Basically it’s an excuse to fly out to LA, drink yourself stupid, and then expense it. Of course a lot of new products do make their debuts at NAMM. This year was no exception with some great new gear for deejaying and making tunes.

 

Propellerheads, the makers of Reason, made another weak update to their flagship product. Thor is a fugly, semi-modular synth that is anticipated to be released with Reason 4. Oscillators, filters, wavetables, and a step sequencer are routeable with its mod-matrix. Check the video of Propellerheads’ product specialist James Bernard giving a demo of the synth.

 

 

M-Audio released Torq Xponent; a “cutting edge performance system”… I think what they mean is a glorified toy so that even you can become a deejay! It’s hard to tell whether or not this will actually be a good product. The interface doesn’t look too bad, it has two “Scratch Wheels”, an X-Y controller, USB, buttons, knobs, faders, even a spot for a Kensington lock. It has its own deejay software, but for it to be an actual contender it better work with Native Instruments’ Traktor.

 

 

Bit of a surprise was that Apple had nothing for Logic users. But Apogee did have a new interface for MacBook Pro users; Symphony Mobile. It’s high quality and states 1.6 ms of latency. Connect it to a Rosetta or another Apogee converter for 32 channels of 24-bit 192K of audio.

 

Native Instruments had some new deejay gear; Traktor Scratch. This is basically a rip-off of Rane’s Serato Scratch Live. It’s an audio interface, time-code vinyl & CDs, a light version of Traktor, and the cables to boot! Nothing really innovative here, but it will certainly sell. Native Instruments could sell shit in a bag if it had their logo on it and a ‘k’ in place of a ‘c’.

 

Digidesign, the makers of Pro-Tools (maybe you’ve heard of it?) released Structure, what looks to be a great sampler workstation. It integrates with Pro-Tools’ audio database, comes with an EastWest sample library, imports Kontakt and EXS sample banks. A public beta is soon to be released.

 

 

Probably the best new product at NAMM wasn’t a new product at all. Rhodes, yes Rhodes has released the Mark 7. If you don’t know anything about Rhodes, the company was started in 1946 by Harold Rhodes making electric pianos that changed music forever. Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis all helped Rhodes earn its place in history. This electric piano has had a huge influence on hip-hop as well, with The Roots, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott all heavily using a Rhodes. J Dilla, a late Hip-Hop producer, was a well-known Rhodes player. Enough with the history lesson.  Rhodes released a Mark 7, over 20 years since the last model was released. Here's a good video of some lounge music jammed out on the Mark 7

 

There were a lot of other products and updates shown at NAMM 2007; Rob Papen’s Predator is a soft-synth to ship mid February, Muse has a more powerful version of the Receptor, Way Out Ware has a soft-synth version of the classic Arp Axxe, Arturia has a hardware modular synth named Origin, and Korg had a bunch of new products including a small battery-powered Kaoss Pad, a synth workstation M3, and the R3 -- what looks to be a new version of the MicroKorg which has helped Brit-synth-pop groups make bleeps and squelches cool again.

 

A lot of people are saying that NAMM is turning out to be a sleeper convention, with not much happening. Depends what you are looking for I guess. This year seems proved to be better than previous years, with a lot of gear for producers and deejays. Check namm.org for info on both summer and winter NAMM, and the not-for-profit organization itself.

 

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