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Thread January 23, 2016 editorial: comments

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1 January 23, 2016 editorial: comments

Dispatch from NAMM

It’s Saturday AM in Anaheim, and I’m preparing to go to day 3 of the NAMM show. If you’ve been following our coverage, you’ll have seen that, as always, there have been a ton of product introductions. I thought I’d mention some of the cool ones I’ve seen so far.

Celemony Melodyne 4 is really pretty mind blowing. Unlike the previous version, where you had to edit each track in a separate window, now you can edit them all together. Imagine being able to pitch- and time-correct group vocals all in one window. Also impressive was the new intelligent tempo editing, which is able to extract a click from music recorded without one. In the video I shot, they made a quantized drum machine beat fit a piece of music recorded without a click. And I didn’t even mention the new harmonic editing feature, which lets you change the level of individual harmonics within a note. Watch our video to find out more.

Also stunning was Waves NX, a plug-in that creates a virtual and adjustable mixing environment for headphones, designed to give you the equivalent of a professionally treated mix room that you can take anywhere. It features head-tracking technology that — using either your computer's web cam or an optional Bluetooth tracker — follows your head movements and adjusts the acoustic response to compensate for your changed orientation vis a vis the virtual speakers. What’s more, it even supports surround mixing, creating a 5.1 environment inside your regular stereo headphones. I had a chance to listen to it on a stereo mix, and it was quite impressive. The Waves people asked me to guess what it cost, and I said "$500?" Actually, it's only $49. That totally floored me. 

Also very cool is the Bass Fly Rig from Tech 21. Like the two Fly Rig models for guitar, it’s a self-contained analog pedal board, but this one is for bass. It features a Sans Amp, chorus, compression, distortion and even a tuner (something neither guitar Fly Rig model has). You can easily dial in a wide range of bass tones, and it even has both 1/4” and XLR outputs. 

More big news: A new DAW has been released by a company called Lumit Audio. Why does the world need another DAW, you might ask? Well, this one, called simply Digital Audio Workstation (definitely not the sexiest name) has some pretty interesting features, including being completely multi-touch enabled, so that it can run on a tablet like the Microsoft Surface as well as on a PC (Mac support is coming soon, but the developers were vague about iOS support). It also is designed to be really easy to learn (without being dumbed down), which will be appealing to many.

Because our coverage is split between Audiofanzine editors, I haven’t seen all of the noteworthy products yet, but from what my colleagues tell me there is a lot of buzz in the synthesizer area. Most notable is the Dave Smith OB-6, which he created in conjunction with Tom Oberheim. Check out the two of them talking and demoing it.

Other new hardware synths of note are the Yamaha Montage and and the Arturia Matrix Brute.

Please check back regularly on our NAMM show page for more product news. Two more days to go.

 

 

 

 

 

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Hi Mike:

My oh my! I just watched the Celemony video. I've been using Melodyne Studio version 3 version for what seems like an eternity now, and am very impressed with this latest iteration. You must have felt like a kid in a candy store with all of these presentations. Also impressive is the Bass Fly Rig. I'm in Las Vegas now attending a funeral. But, if I had a choice, I would have certainly attended the NAMM show.

Thanks for the heads up on these wonderful products. Undoubtedly, my bank account is going to be lighter; as I plan on doing some major purchasing.
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Quote:
Thanks for the heads up on these wonderful products. Undoubtedly, my bank account is going to be lighter; as I plan on doing some major purchasing.

Hi Griff, I'm glad you found the videos useful, although I'm sorry to be a bad influence on your finances. :-D