Summer NAMM, 2014 — A Quick Report
I returned late last night from a whirlwind trip to Nashville for Summer NAMM. Now that I’m back, I’ll have my nose to the grindstone (more precisely, Final Cut Pro X) editing videos from the show all weekend.
Here are some quick product highlights from the show:
After announcing three new pedals at Winter NAMM, Boss was back with three more. The company calls them “Waza Craft” pedals, and they include new versions of the SD-1 Super Overdrive and BD-2 Blues Driver pedals, and the long-out-of-production DM-2 Analog Delay. According to Boss, these pedals were re-envisioned by their “master engineers.” I heard a demo of the new pedals, the SD-1W, BD-2W, and DM-2W and it sounds like those engineers did a good job, both sonically and in terms of features.
PreSonus had two important announcements: First, they’re releasing Notion 5, a major update of their notation software, and the first completely developed by PreSonus since they purchased Notion last year. It appears that they've added some useful new features, as well as more integration with the company's Studio One DAW. Second up from PreSonus was a new line of audio interfaces for Mac, PC and iOS, which look very promising.
Although it’s still in beta, and no official news has been released about it, Eventide was showing it’s very cool new looper section for the TimeFactor pedal. It allowed for changing pitch and otherwise mangling the loops in a creative way.
TC Helicon followed up on its Play Acoustic pedal from Winter NAMM with Play Electric, a processor designed for electric guitarists who are vocalists. It not only had some mind-blowing realtime vocal-harmony effects, but also amp modeling.
I also liked the new Hammond Leslie G pedal, a digital Leslie emulation with a lot of control features to give guitarists authentic Leslie rotating-speaker sounds.
Check back to our Summer NAMM 2014 coverage regularly, as we’ll be posting videos throughout the weekend.
Have a great week!
Mike Levine
U.S. Editor, Audiofanzine
