Summer NAMM is once again upon us! As always, your intrepid NAMM Report crew is bringing you all the latest and greatest from the pulsing heart of the show floor in beautiful downtown Nashville.
Despite the suffocating heat and humidity combined with an extremely high concentration of country music, we never fail to have a great time in Nashville. They don’t call it Music City for nuthin’, folks (and just kidding about the country swipe, okay? Many of us not only like and listen to the stuff, we also play it).
Your NAMM Report crew will be here for the entire show, traveling from booth to booth and gathering all the information we can on this year’s new models. What’s the latest buzz? What’s going to be on everyone’s wish list this year? What new music technology will shock us with its power, leave us breathless with its innovation, and infuse us with that particular condition known as “gear lust”? It’s all in the NAMM Report.
Though we try to cover as much as we can, the NAMM Report is not intended as a complete listing of every single piece of new gear debuted at NAMM. Nor is all of the information here guaranteed to be 100% correct; in many cases, manufacturers are still solidifying things like price, availability, and features. We gathered all we could from the things that caught our eye, the things we thought you’d be most interested in hearing about, and some stuff that we just thought was cool.
Most of today’s NAMM Report focuses on a few things that weren’t going on at NAMM exactly, but still concern exciting announcements from some of the leading music technology designers. As we said above, some of this stuff is pretty new, and we may not have all the details yet, but we’re working to get them to you as soon as possible. We hope you enjoy this sneak preview of new releases.
DIGIDESIGN
We visited Digidesign, who weren’t at NAMM exactly but in their own little world a few miles away in one of Nashville’s many famous recording studios. For a short while Paragon Studios was transformed into DigiWorld, where we joined the crowd gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the brand new Digi 002. This has been bubbling under in the music gear industry for a short while now, and the public at large has just got their first glimpse of it this week. Rest assured that the hype is justified. The Digi 002 really is remarkable, an important new step not only for Digidesign, but for making computer-based audio production more accessible to a huge range of musicians. Part 8-channel standalone digital mixer with touch-sensitive, motorized faders, part control surface for your computer-based audio workstation, with a whole lotta top-flight effects and plug-ins ($2000 worth) thrown in for good measure, the Digi 002 is like a basic Pro Tools rig in a box – just add a computer! There are 4 quality mic pres, ADAT Lightpipe, 2 FireWire ports, and Pro Tools LE built-in, just to name a few features. And the whole thing retails for about $2499! This really isn’t the time or place for raving on and on about the Digi 002 (though we’d love to), but trust us: you’ll be hearing loads more about this innovative new product very soon!
MOTU
Continuing in the “not quite NAMM but pretty darn close” category comes a couple big announcements from MOTU. In what will be great news for many of our readers, MOTU announced that the Mac OS X version of Digital Performer is on its way and is expected to ship during the second half of 2002. Advanced word is very good, and we’ll be bringing you more on this as soon as we get it. In related news, they also just released a public beta of a Mac OS X version of ClockWorks, MOTU’s control panel software for MOTU USB rack-mount MIDI interfaces. ClockWorks gives Mac OS X users of MOTU MIDI interfaces complete access to all of the programmable features in their MOTU hardware. You can check it out at MOTU’s ClockWorks OS X download section:
http://www.motu.com/english/download/
There’s more MOTU-related news from Mackie, but more on that later…
PRESONUS
The smart folks at Presonus were showing off their FireStation ($899.95), a FireWire computer interface offering all the benefits of a high-speed FireWire connection. This is Presonus’ first foray into the FireWire arena and – as you might expect from the company – the results are awesome. Features of the FireStation include two dual-servo preamplifiers with switchable tube circuit; two 1/4-inch instrument preamps; balanced preamp sends via 1/4-inch TRS connectors; 10-channel analog mixer; MIDI I/O; eight channels of analog I/O; eight channels of ADAT I/O; S/PDIF I/O; and much more.
That’s it for our first installment of the Summer 2002 NAMM report. We’ll be bringing you more great NAMM coverage, so stay tuned.