While IHR has been unable to attend the annual Summer NAMM Show musical dealer conference in Anaheim for the past couple of years, we always have Barry Wood’s NAMM Oddities list. Definitely some weird, and some very cool, stuff this year.
Add comment February 5th, 2009 by Derek
Via Music Thing, here are some Winter NAMM ‘08 highlights (check it out: Yamaha has joined the flash recorder fray).
As we mentioned before, we’re not able to go to NAMM this year, but we do recommend coverage from Sonic State and Gearwire, both part of the Home Recording Network.
Add comment January 19th, 2008 by Derek
For the past two years, Inside Home Recording has covered the annual January Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, California live from the floor. Our NAMM podcasts, photos, and blog posts from the event have been some of our most popular. The NAMM Show is one of the world’s major music gear conferences, where manufacturers, distributors, developers, musicians, and music dealers gather to ogle the latest stuff and make deals.
This year, Paul and I won’t be able to attend in person. I can’t go because of my cancer treatment. Paul has to miss it because of a long-planned family vacation (celebrating a birthday number he’d probably I rather not mention).
We’ll still be watching the Web for news from NAMM, of course, and we recommend you check out some of the other sites in the Home Recording Network that will be sending staff down to California. Coverage from Sonic State and Gearwire was particularly extensive last year, including lots of video—those guys know how to do it.
We hope to get back to NAMM in 2009, or maybe the Summer NAMM 2008 show might be fun if I’m feeling well enough. We’ll keep you posted.
3 comments November 14th, 2007 by Derek
I was pleased not to have to stay overnight following the first surgery in my colon cancer treatment. I was back home earlier today, and the painkillers are working nicely. If all goes well we’ll have a new episode of IHR up in the next couple of days too!
In the meantime, some yummy links I’ve been accumulating for a few weeks:
Okay, back to the painkillers now.
2 comments February 20th, 2007 by Derek
The latest Sonic TALK podcast from Sonic State has a great roundtable discussion about highlights from the NAMM Show, as a supplement to their excellent blog and video coverage, with over 70 videos and 200 posts. (And yes, Nick, we do listen to the show, so hello back!)
Non Eric, one of the panelists, has a podcast in German about the return of Waldorf Synthesizers—apparently all their new models (Stromberg, Blofeld, etc.) are named after villains in James Bond movies.
Add comment February 1st, 2007 by Derek
The latest podcast from MacNotables features Macworld’s Jim Dalrymple giving Apple-focused coverage of the NAMM Show.
While Macs were ubiquitous at NAMM, Apple did not display or announce anything all that new at the show (not even a new version of GarageBand), other than Apogee’s Symphony Mobile ExpressCard interface—the main highlight was demonstrations of Logic Pro.
Dalrymple does explain what the NAMM Show is all about for a non-music audience, and he and host Chuck Joiner have their own take on the event. One thing Dalrymple mentioned that we forgot to note was that Roland’s booth was full of iMacs—even iMacs running Windows using Apple’s Boot Camp! Worth a listen.
Add comment January 29th, 2007 by Derek
I used the Zoom H4 portable recorder for all the interviews I did at the NAMM Show. Yet somehow I neglected to photograph the prototype $200 USD Zoom H2 on display at the Samson-Zoom-Hartke booth. It’s a smaller recorder, with an integrated three-capsule (!) microphone that should be shipping later this year.
Create Digital Music did get a couple of photos of the prototype in its display case with its basic specifications card. I hope we can get one for review in a few weeks or months. I quite like the H4, and this unit could be a worthy little sibling. While it doesn’t have XLR inputs like the H4, it is much smaller and has a more flexible setup with its built-in mic—and will sell for half the price of competitors like the M-Audio MicroTrack (which Paul used at NAMM) and Edirol R09 (which I did photograph).
2 comments January 27th, 2007 by Derek
There was a plethora of USB mics at the 2007 NAMM show in Anaheim CA. One mic in particular that “just made a lot of sense” was the Samson G-Track.
It’s a USB condenser microphone AND and audio interface all built into one unit. The cool thing is that it allows you to record a vocal and an instrument at the same time OR a stereo instrument onto a stereo track in your DAW.
There’s even a headphone output on the mic, which allows for latency-free monitoring. There are 2 independent volume knobs for vocal and instrument levels. The little green indicator you see in the photo will turn red if the levels are peaking.
I can’t wait to try out this mic when it ships in May 2007. Retail on this mic TBA.
2 comments January 25th, 2007 by Paul
Following four days of exhausting reporting about the NAMM Show in California, Paul and I have been talking, and the topic is also something I’ve discussed with my daughters’ piano teacher: it’s all too easy for the music industry to forget that music is about joy—and that’s all it’s really about.
There is nothing sensible or rational about music. We do not know why humans make it, or why we enjoy it. Huge tradeshows full of instruments and gear and services and money, and Royal Conservatory exams like the one my daughter is taking later this week, lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America (note: the word “music” does not appear in that name)—these things can obscure the joy that music is.
But here’s what I remember best from NAMM 2007:
It’s not all the gear and software (which was great), nor necessarily the people we met from companies that make that stuff (who were cool), nor the fastest drummer competition, nor Allan Holdsworth playing impossible jazz fusion guitar voicings inside a sound-attenuating glass band box, nor the 15-piece group pounding out Stevie Wonder covers in the poolside lobby of the Marriott Hotel.
Instead, on the left is the solo blues guy from the AER amplification booth on the basement floor of the NAMM exhibit area, whose foot stomp, slide playing, and growly voice haunted me all day, and who appears in the background of parts of our Friday podcast. On the right is Butterscotch, champion beatboxer, who mesmerized an instantly-forming crowd of jaded industry veterans on the show floor with her wild beats and blats, and whom you can hear behind parts of our Sunday podcast. On the bottom are Byron Miller and friends, who grooved out funk instrumentals at the Samson-Zoom-Hartke party Friday night.
Those were the acts who brought a tear to my eye, from the beauty and joy of their music. They didn’t need much gear to do it—a few instruments for Miller and his crew, a guitar and stomp box and harmonica for the blues guy, and a mere mic and speaker for Butterscotch. And they weren’t showing off how fast they could play or how hard they could hit, simply how talented—how musical—they were.
That’s what NAMM taught me. And that VU meters are still really, really cool, of course.
Listen for free to this audio episode. Simply click “Play Now” under the blog post title. Total time 48 min 38 sec. As live as it can be: Inside Home Recording’s final day of coverage of the Winter 2007 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, Day 4 (21 Jan 2007).
A much more focused show, concentrating on what Paul calls the home recording “golden zone,” where we talked to manufacturers of DAW software, plugins, mixers, interfaces, microphones, effects, instruments, loops, and earphones. Bonuses include interviews with Paul McCabe of Roland Canada, and NBC and Fox voiceover legend Joe Cipriano. See our Day 4 photos at Flickr too.
Please note that we’re only publishing MP3 files during NAMM, to save bandwidth and time, so whether you’re subscribed to the AAC or MP3 feed, you’ll get MP3 audio. Our Home Recording Network colleagues at Sonic State and Gearwire also have excellent blog posts and video of the NAMM Show. Our coverage for the last day:
Inside Home Recording is sponsored by GoToMeeting.com (online meetings made easy with GoToMeeting: try it free for 45 days using promo code Podcast), through the Blubrry.com network of podcasts.
For NAMM 2007, we’d also like to thank M-Audio and Samson/Zoom for helping us get their MicroTrack and H4 recorders, and also to Samson for providing us with a Q8 dynamic mic to use for interviews. We are also part of the Home Recording Network.
Sounds: Our theme music, “Acidic Bond,” is by Steven Dennis in Louisiana, U.S.A., and our voiceovers are by Steve Herringer in Vancouver. Photos of Paul and Derek are by Kris Krug.
Join the IHR listener forums. Also remember that you can post your photos to the IHR Flickr Group – joining Flickr to share photos is free.
This podcast is © 2007 by Inside Home Recording under a Creative Commons license creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5
Add comment January 21st, 2007 by Derek
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