Computer Music hits the NAMM show!

The Winter NAMM show is the greatest music gear show on Earth, with hardware manufacturers and software developers both big and small travelling from all parts of the globe to show off their hottest new wares. The Computer Music team will, of course, be reporting from this prestigious event, held in Anaheim, California.

It’s currently 9.30am, and we’re taking it easy in the Press Room, highlights of which include all the coffee, donuts, pastries and Wi-Fi you can eat.

At 10am, the doors to the main halls will open, and Steinberg will kick it all off with a press conference at their stand – we’re hopeful that they’ll unveil some new version of their Cubase DAW, but who knows?

Ableton are also rumoured to have a new DAW version, but one thing we can be sure about is that they’ve partnered up with Akai to produce the APC40, a dedicated controller for Ableton Live. From the press sheet that’s just been thrust into our hands, it appears to be blessed with a 5×8 matrix of colourful pads for launching clips, five scene launch buttons, 16 rotary knobs, eight faders, and a whole lot more. More detailed news and first impressions will come as soon as we have ‘em!

Native Instruments are also rumoured to have a hardware product on the way – will it go head to head with the APC40, or is it an entirely different beast? We’ll know by mid-day, as that’s when Native are holding their press event.

Spectrasonics also have a new instrument, Trillian, described as a “Total Bass Virtual Instrument”. It seems to be a spiritual successor to Trilogy, in the same way that Omnisphere succeeded Atmosphere. Like Omnisphere, Trillian is based on the STEAM engine.

Right, it’s time for us to go and grab the best seats in the house at the Steinberg press conference!

Tags: Ableton, Computer Music, Native Instruments, Steinberg

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.