After three days of meetings, friends, dinners, and wandering the floor of the NAMM show, there’s always something that catches my eye. There are a number of great sites for complete NAMM coverage, such as Harmony Central or Sonicstate. Here, I’m just going to mention a few things that I am looking forward to as a musician and reviewer.
Vox Night Train: There are other small “lunchbox” sized amps that offer 15w – 20w of tubey goodness out there, most notably the excellent Egnater Rebel. As a big Vox fan, I was very excited to see a real Vox 15w/7.5w tube amp at this form factor. Like the Rebel, it’s also cheap (comparatively), I think it will end up costing around $500 or so new. A trade show is never a great place to demo an amp, but I look forward to getting one into my studio to try!
BTW, even in 7.5w mode, the Night Train is a real gigging amp, not a practice/bedroom amp. For that, you might want to look to another newly announced Vox amp, the AC4 (both combo and head/cab, only the combo is out now) which can go down to .25w. Trust me, even 1w can be louder than television volume, if you want a bedroom amp, 1/4w is about right.
GForce Software ImpOSCar 2: The original ImpOSCar stuck pretty close to the original OSCar, with a few software goodies to make it tasty. ImpOSCar 2 really picks up where the first version left off, adding all sorts of goodies like audio inputs, new envelopes and LFOs, poly glide, chord memory, etc etc. Watch the video in the link to get the full demo from Dave Spiers of GForce himself.
There are so many softsynths out there now it’s almost stupid, but ImpOSCar is one that we actually use in Ember After’s music, it’s got a real unique sound and manages to have tons of features without requiring a PhD in synthesis to understand them. I was thrilled to see ImpOSCar 2 keeps that brilliant tradition and adds to it with some Oberheim-flavored goodness and it’s own special sauce. This looks like another winner from GForce.
Audio Ease Speakerphone 2: Audio Ease may not be the biggest or flashiest plug-in company in the world, but they make software that has been used in perhaps many of the biggest albums and flashiest movies in the world, because their stuff is just world-class. Speakerphone is one of those incredible products. It appeals to post-production sound designers, guitarists looking for tone shaping, remixers looking for unique and creative ways to put sounds in new spaces and process them in interesting ways, etc.
Read the Audio Ease site for it’s full feature set. Speakerphone 2 enhances the UI, adds a lot more guitar cabinets (yeay!) new spaces, new ambiances and rooms, new EQ functionality—lots of goodies. Speakerphone is another plug-in that we actively use in our music (especially the new stuff we’re recording now…) and this update looks fantastic. Stay tuned!
Redmatica Compedium Pro Bundle 2.0: All those who uses samples, sampled instruments, or EXS already knows—or should know—that Redmatica makes their lives better. Keymap offers more tools, and more intuitively, to make sampler instruments than any other application. AutoSampler lets you make EXS instruments from software or hardware instruments easier than any other application. And EXS Manager was the essential tool for organizing Sampler Instrument libraries. The forthcoming Pro bundle takes it even further. Offering real sampling, multi-application support, more intuitive keymapping, autosampling, instrument management, and so on than ever before. There is so much power here you’ve got to read the Redmatica page to understand what it’s all about. Suffice to say, if you use samples at all, the definitive bundle will become indispensable.
Ableton Live 8/Max for Live: I have only two DAWs currently running on my Mac: Apple Logic Pro and Ableton Live. Ableton Live has a completely unique take on how to make music and lends itself to experimentation, manipulation, and instant gratification in a way that no other DAW does. Live 8 brings even more goodness to the party with a Warp Engine and Groove Engine enhancements, crossfades in the Arrange and other workflow goodies, new/improved instruments and effects, etc.
And in case that isn’t enough, you can now get as deep as you want with a special version of MaxMSP just for use within Live. For those who are into building their own audio and MIDI effects and instruments from scratch, or into experimental generative style of music, etc. this is the most amazing announcement of the show. I’m comfortable with the concept of building blocks for sound manipulation thanks to Logic’s Environment and I’ve always been very interested in Max; this looks like it’s going to be just what I’m looking for!
Dave Smith Instruments MoPho: Okay, this is cheating a bit. The MoPho has actually been out for a while, and in fact I’ve wanted it for a while. But NAMM was the first time I got to play with one myself, and I fell in love. My main synthesizer is already a DSI Prophet 08, and MoPho is basically one voice of the P08 (MoPho = Monophonic…yuk yuk yuk…) with added goodies such as feedback/distortion, audio input, sub-oscillators, etc—all with a 100% analog signal path. I will have one…
Of course, there were lots of other things that will no doubt appeal to other people, and perhaps when they’re in my hands I’ll fall in love with them too. But for now, these are the things that really caught my eye first time around as things I’ll actually use in my own music.
