Well, it's been an incredibly long week here at TekLab. I've got some nice gear reviews that I still have to post, and we've got some cool pictures of some of the more interesting bits to upload, but I won't get to that until tomorrow night so I thought I'd post a few points about NAMM 2000 before I head home. I just bid farewell to moron and his girl Soma, who had come down from Canada to attend NAMM and hang in sunny LA for 4 days - it was indeed very cool to see them both, and to finally put a face to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] email address. He's a very cool guy, with a very diverse and interesting music mindset and I hope to have more visits from him and Soma, and maybe even make the trek to Victoria, CA one of these days too. Thanks to you both, and of course I extend my welcome to you again in the future! NAMM this year was full of interesting twists for me. I got to meet some very key Yamaha people, whose assistance and guidance will make the process of further Disky development over the next 6 months a very rewarding experience, and I consider it a great achievement that I have been able to discuss my roadmap for Disky v2.0 (yes, *2.0*) with them and coordinate our efforts. The new A4000 and A5000 samplers are indeed very powerful sampling platforms, and I hope that I will be able to coordinate future feature upgrades of these samplers with Disky in a timely and rewarding manner for us all. In the meantime, I will be striving to do the v1.2 release without fail in the next 72 hours - so please stay tuned, and be patient. There's a lot of back-end stuff I still need to do before I can just put the binary out there, and I really want to do it properly this time around. V1.2, the new GUI, and the new plugin system is worth the wait, as you will shortly see (if you're a current Disky customer). If you don't want to wait any more, I understand. You know what to do. Just email me your details. Back to NAMM - some of my conclusions: 1. Yamaha still have the best hardware sampler platform, period. Roland's "Variphrase" thing is 6-voice polyphonic, and $3300. It doesn't have dedicated Filters, or FEG (they consider their 'filter' effect to be good enough), and its only 6-voice poly. I think that it's formant transformation/pitch shifting/time adjustment power really shines through, but its a specialty box, not a general purpose sampler. Thus, I still say that the A4000 and A5000 platform is the best choice for modern sampling hardware out there today, and it really is a great package for the price. I look forward to assisting in the support efforts for these machines in the following weeks, and I happen to know of at least 5 major 3rd-party sampler-product developers who are directly adding A4000/A5000 support to their list of priorities for the next quarter - which means we should see some very fresh (as in not stale as in cheese) new offerings for A3000/A4000/A5000 users in the near future. 2. Surround sound is here to stay. 5.1-capable systems were everywhere, and it's a foregone conclusion - surround sound mixing is getting easier and more affordable by the week. Consider going in this direction if you care about your sound quality and capabilities, as it is definitely on its way in terms of becoming standard. 24/96 is everywhere, though the 24-bit is more ubiquitous (and important-seeming) than the 96khz aspect, it would appear. I tend to agree - give us better word sizes, sample frequency bandwidth is not as key. 3. The Software synth market is experiencing a serious upheaval. Propellerheads "Reason" had a lot of companies re-thinking their strategies and development muscle - it really is a monster of a system, and the buzz around the Propellerhead product this year at NAMM was quite formidable - some of the best buzz I've ever seen at a NAMM show. However, Microsoft will probably buy Propellerheads/Cubase very soon, so this could be a serious shakeup for our industry - I predict we'll see something in this area from the behemoth very soon, and Propellerheads/Cubase are prime candidates. Microsoft reps were *everywhere* at NAMM this year. I wonder if Cubase/Propellerheads have the morality and fortitude required to stand up to the giant's offerings... we shall see. 4. Analog Synth (+Emulation) has become saturated. Korg's MS2000 is a nice addition to the arsenal, especially considering the price ($695 for the rack version, which means street prices will be around $500), and the Alesis Andromeda is *seriously* knobular. Heck, Oberheim have even *RETURNED* to this market, which I can't say I'm sad to see - if only they weren't crippled by Gibsons draconian management. I stand by the Virus however, as the nicest and best bang for the buck analogish option in this regard, and not just because I had a nice cup of coffee with Christopher Kemp and the Access crew this year either. The Virus B/KB are *fat* synths, and Access look to be continuing their successful formula of mutating the feature set of these machines (for free) with new operating system releases in the coming months. I also heard a nice bit of gossip about a brand new Access release scheduled for Frankfurt Musik Messe in the area of new product development, though I was sworn to secrecy - so all you Europeans, definitely get over to Access' booth in Frankfurt this March and let us know what its all about ... And if I'm wrong, well, hey, it was just an Internet rumour ... ;) 5. Yamaha's new AW4416 digital audio workstation is pretty much *exactly* what I'd hoped it would be, and if it makes its way onto the shelves around March/May as planned, I will probably do whatever it takes to add one to my setup. I'm tired of using computers to write music, and technology these days is really getting to the point where I don't *have* to use a PC for recording digital audio if I don't want to - so I'll be simplifying things, and making the AW4416 part of my recording arsenal in a few months. 44 i/o channels (okay, this habit of counting *every* bit of i/o is a bit rude), 16 channels of realtime simultaneous recording, sample pads, 2 of Yamaha's classy effects processors and a whole slew of cool editing features makes for a really well integrated package, and if it works as stated and doesn't crash like a PC, I'll be very happy to pick one up. 6. mLan is here, finally. It's a bit shy, perhaps, and may feel a bit exposed in parts, but once it gets out on the stage it'll definitely put on a great show. Yamaha's mLan junction box will be available shortly, and there will be mLan cards for everything from the CS6X to the S80, to the A4k/A5k and beyond ... meaning no more hassles with cables, ground loops, or MIDI timing problems. One cable, does it all, and it actually works. It was quite impressive to play with the CS6R and S80 keyboards that were part of the mLan demo, and have it all go directly digital to the 02R console - such a simple setup, and oh so clean! No MIDI hassles whatsoever. Definitely a fun one, and I suspect we'll see more tangible mLan-supporting products from other manufacturers at Music Messe this year - Yamaha definitely got the ball rolling at NAMM this year. 7. I have some thoughts on the Sampler market that I am actually going to formalize with a serious writeup in the next few weeks. There are some observations I've made about the Sampler Manufacturer/Sample CD Distributor relationship that I feel are fairly significant, and warrant further discussion by the musician community, so I'll be packaging these points up in a more formalized article shortly. I've voiced my concerns on this matter to the right people, including some very pivotal people at a certain well-known manufacturer, and I hope to be able to affect a modest degree of influence on this issue in the coming months, or at least make some noise about it. There's something afoul with the sampler market, and I plan to tell you exactly what it is, based on NAMM 2000. Formally, though, so it gets a bit more attention, so stay tuned if you're interested in this sort of thing... 8. Kyma 5 rocks! 9. The people I have come to associate with NAMM have proven yet again that such an event can be worth it in so many ways. There was a moment where I was sitting in the lunch area chatting with some crafty Germans about a nasty infectious product of theirs, and I overheard Japanese, Korean, Swedish, English, Australian, Italian and Russian conversations all around me, all of them discussing the one subject that pretty much every human on this planet can get interested in easily: music. It was a pretty cool moment - certainly, on an International level, there could be no better topic. And hey, I even got to dust off my rusty Swedish and speak a few lines with Tage from Propellerheads - Tak so mycket, Tage! Well thats it for me for now on the subject of NAMM. I'll do some more detailed articles on some of the cool things I saw later in the week - TekLab responsibilities await my attention in the morning, so I better get some sleep. I just want to say thanks to moron, zebedee, Mr. Peck, the Yamaha team at USA, the Yamaha Japan guys, and all the other cool people I got a chance to meet this year at NAMM, for making it a great show. It's inspiring to see so many very intelligent people working so hard at making this industry accessible to the world, and I'm happy to have played a very small part in it in order to have experienced it all... Now, its finally time to get some sleep. G'night! j. -- Jay Vaughan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] TekLab | http://www.teklab.com {UsePGP:[YES] ICQ:[454804] IRC:[EFNet:#teklab/Torpor]} [NetMeeting:Yes] [VideoConferencing:Yes] TekLab SpyCam : http://lab1.teklab.com/~jay/spycam.html
