post winter NAMM 2011

Post Winter NAMM 2011


WInter NAMM is over so now its time to recap in my opinion was the best products announced. I wasn’t able to attend but sites like gearwire.com, mixonline.com, and soundonsound.com kept me up to date with what was happening. Sad to say I still haven’t seen or heard the Slatepro Audio fox pre which Slate would be on display at NAMM, and there is still no extra info on the site. Maybe nobody has posted video of it yet. I did see a tweet from Slatepro Audio about a program called gobbler. Gobbler lets you organize, back up (50gb’s a month), and share sessions. Its almost like dropbox made specifically for pro audio. I downloaded it and first impressions are very positive. It scans all your connected drives for sessions and you can easily search and pull them up.
Presonus was selling there Studio One Artist DAW for 90% off making it only $20.11. For that price I went ahead and jumped on it. First impressions have been good. The key commands are weird to me but you can customize them so thats no problem. Its not enough to take me off of Logic, which I’ve been using since Logic 5, but its easy to use and within an hour I had a pretty good handle on it. For $20.11 I got a DAW, some virtual instruments, and a sampler. Not bad.

Here is what I found interesting at Winter NAMM this year:
Focusrite Rednet looked amazing to me. High quality a/d and d/a converters and mic pres in customizable units. Whats special about rednet is that it uses ethernet to pass audio connection. The ethernet connection can pass 128 simultaneous I/O allowing 256 total channels. The units look sleek and I’m impressed by the product design. Focusrite never disappoints in product design to me. I contacted Focusrite on their facebook page for pricing info but nobody has responded yet. Seeing the Focusrite red pre is $4,000 I’m guessing these will be what I call stupid expensive. But we won’t know for until Focusrite releases price info. Hopefully they will be competitively priced. Lynx offers the Aurora 8 for $1995, 8 channel high quality a/d and d/a converter, comparable to the Rednet 1. So I expect it to at least start there in price.

Universal Audio Satellite made a huge announcement with this one. The popular UA plugins are now available via firewire dsp hardware, similar to the SSL duende. So now you can use the UA plugins without needing a pci card and a mac pro. It was only a matter of time I felt before UA made this move.

Izotope Stutter edit is a very cool software that easily lets you stutter tracks. I was working on a mix few months ago for a client that wanted stuttering in the song and this would have been perfect. I ended up rewiring Reason into Pro Tools, sampling the vocals into the NNXT, and chopping them up there playing em back on pads of my MPK to get them to stutter. I downloaded the demo and have been playing with it the last few days. Throw it on a track and create a midi track and set the i/o and your ready to stutter. It seems to have a lot of weird left field presets that I would probably never use, but would be good to have. The intro promo price at $149 is pretty good. For as much as I’d probably use it I would prefer to pay $99 for it. The reg price of $249 is too much to me.



Other cool things was Korg Kronos, Presonus Studio Live Ipad app, and SSL’s stereo dynamics module for their X-rack series.