For the lover of musical instruments and technology, southern California’s NAMM show is a giant toy shop. It’s work for many of its attendees, of course, but we know many of our readers dream of the objects that will make their next creations. And sure, inspiring lust is not our aim; on the contrary, there is some love that goes into these things. In the ideal, that’s the relationship of creator and consumer. These are things not to be bought and discarded, but kept and really used.

So, we have a different look at the NAMM show, through the lens of CDM contributor Marsha Vdovin, who has been at this show more times than she might like to count. I’ve added some comments about what these devices are and why they’re important. And the next time we see them, these inventions pictured in silence here, we expect them to be working hard on music far from the din and flourescent glare of the trade show floor.

As always, click for larger images. Photos by Marsha Vdovin; words by Peter Kirn:

Roland’s V-Guitar marks a surprising collaboration, bringing the famed American guitar maker Fender together with the Japanese electronic maker to make an “electronic guitar,” merging the two company’s tech on a digitally-augmented Stratocaster. More on this soon – but the extended playing techniques won over many guitarists.

The Danish design aesthetes of AIAIAI have improved upon their TMA-1 headphones with a studio model. Same drivers, same basic design, but a “flatter” response to sound (rather than beefed-up, DJ-ready bass) and closed ear design. It’s impossible to hear anything at NAMM, but I can attest that the new design is far, far more comfy to wear. Actually, if I could have kept these on the whole show to drown out the sound, it would have been great.

An easy place to spot a talented celebrity was at the Dave Smith Instruments booth, at which artists clustered around Dave and Roger Linn. They were on-hand with plenty of tweaks to their stellar Tempest drum machine.

Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 grew up, with new features (drum sounds! MIDI sync – at last), and grew out, with a companion product for connecting sensors and USB host mode that could be a boutique item for music DIYers. We’ll go hands-on with each this year, and while readers were disappointed on a lack of some details (will the OpLab be open source?), we expect to get more details from the Teenagers when the product is ready in the coming months.

Readers of tech blogs (ahem) may miss out on the fact that the vast majority of NAMM is really for guitarists, drummers, and traditional instrumentalists. And yes, that includes glittery, pink products from Daisy Rock Guitars. We’ve concluded this model will be perfect for Sparkle Pony. (And really, if you’re not watching Portlandia to get that reference, get on it. Also, Jenny Conlee is crazy awesome.)

Thin, responsive, and expressive, the QuNeo from Keith McMillen – funded on Kickstarter – proves it’s really happening. With continuous pressure response on its touch controls and bi-directional control, it could be the most anyone will ever have gotten from a US$200 controller. Yes, we’ll be watching.

Pioneer wasn’t showing anything new at this show — they timed those launches over the fall with new controllers like the Ergo. But they did have a glossly all-white lacquer set of limited-edition devices that looked absurdly gorgeous. Now if I want to do my flat over in the style of a Stanley Kubrick set, I know what DJ gear I’ll be buying. (If you don’t know what I mean, watch the end of 2001 again – or the living room in Tron: Legacy, which is more or less a copy.) White is the new generic-dull-charcoal.

Akai’s MPC Renaissance is unlike any other mass-market controller we’ve seen. It’s actually substantial, something that feels like a vintage MPC even though it’s designed to work with software (pictured). The audio circuitry is straight out of the modern MPC, but there’s a switch for “vintage” modes – think 12-bit output when the MPC60 is enabled, for instance. Akai told CDM they built the software in-house, but we also learned at NAMM that they licensed time-stretch tech from iZotope, giving their upcoming MPC software generous audio-manipulation abilities.

The Renaissance will cost you, with a street expected well over a grand, but that makes it even more welcome that the same superb pads and response curves are also on the maker’s MAX49 keyboard and cheaper MPC Model.

Just expect to wait: these were prototypes, and there were still some bugs to work out.

The Renaissance is for the MPC die-hard; the MPC Studio is the model that will directly take on Native Instruments and Maschine. It’s slim, sleek, and still has great-feeling controls. And while that makes it compelling competition for Maschine, I’m gratified to see this whole market expanding, new workflows for performance and production, and a push to better quality in the controllers. The days when computer gear meant “cheap and plastic-y” are mercifully at an end. Speaking of which –

Akai’s MAX49 keyboard could be a new model to beat. The keyboard action is satisfyingly springy, with a new keybed not seen in previous models. The pads are identical to those on the Renaissance, and feel more the way proper MPC pads should. Not everyone will love the light-up, touch-sensitive resistive faders, but I found with a bit of pressure, they worked well – and that means never having to worry about a fader catching up with the value in software. You also get serious features: Control Voltage, a full complement of MIDI ports, and aftertouch. Did I mention Control Voltage? It’s nice to see a controller keyboard with a slightly premium price, build, and features.

The last surprise from Akai was this MPC DJ. The company says it’s a prototype only, and had little more to say about it, but it’s fascinating to see the MPC and turntable controls converge.

Moog’s Minitaur was my favorite synth of the show. It just sounds consistently brilliant, no matter which way you turn it or play it – and I accordingly noticed it was the synth the most people were actually playing on the show floor.

This is what a 24-karet KORG MonoTribe looks like, alongside a silver-plated model. There’s little more one can say. It is, of course, one of a kind — and already spoken for.

The other thing of beauty at the KORG booth: a limited-edition reverse-key SV-1 keyboard.

iOS accessories were numerous, but a few were genuinely useful. IK Multimedia’s iRig Mic “Cast,” for instance, is coupled with handy software for podcasters, as a quick tool for interviewing or podcast recording.

It’s not a new product, but one of the reviews to which I’m most looking forward is this Eers product. It promises custom in-ears you make yourself, rather than the enormous cost of getting them custom-made. Stay tuned on this one – protecting your hearing and making on-stage gigs go well is perhaps as essential as gear can get.

The just-intonation Hymnatron from the Dewanatron crew was one of the most compositionally-compelling instruments at the show, with a unique sound, tuning, and key layout. And it looks mighty handsome in this one-off wooden case.

LiveWire’s modular was among the many dreamy modular rigs at Big City Music and Analog Haven, two Los Angeles hotspots for analog modulars. Did we mention space was more plentiful and inexpensive, and gigs more generous, in LA than in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco? Funny coincidence, that.

Many modules graced this show, but the most intriguing was not analog, but digital – think digital algorithms in an analog, patch-cord-modular hardware workflow. Tom Erbe, maker of long-beloved SoundHack (the app, and then more recently the plug-ins) put some of his sonic wizardry into a module, collaborating with one of our favorite modular builders, MakeNoise. The result: the MakeNoise Echofon. As such, it’s a perfect emblem of our Create Digital Music, Create Analog Music philosophy. Dear Berlin friends: let’s plug this into your monster modulars, okay?

Big City Music is a wonderful place. The other candidate for best new module: brilliant creations by Metasonix, as previewed here. We’ll be watching for these to be patch-able, too.

Casio had its classic CZ-1000 synth on-hand at its booth. The Casio XW isn’t quite a successor to the CZ, though it does include some of those waveforms and phase distortion sounds. What it does appear to be is a very affordable, do-just-about-everything workstation at a fraction of the price of any of its rivals. For someone who wants a jack-of-all-trades gigging keyboard, this could very much be a contender.

Our friends at Beatport are evidently getting into the hardware business. The most interesting launch wasn’t a set of TMA headphones with Slimer-green cords (I’ll take the Studio model, thanks, or just a non-Danish set of studio cans). Instead, I was intrigued by the eminently-practical line of gigging cords Beatport is working on with Hosa. They include features live digital musicians and DJs badly need, like color-coded cords you can find easily at a show, and hinged USB cords you can cram into tight spaces. More on those soon.

Thanks, all. Lastly, I want to thank everyone I got to spend time with at the NAMM show, and particularly Marsha Vdovin, who is responsible for these photos and keeping our schedule together. NAMM is always too crowded and too short, but it can lay groundwork for a whole year. And I’m excited for this Year of the Dragon. Be seeing you.

For the rest of our NAMM coverage:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/namm/

Photos by Marsha Vdovin / Words by Peter Kirn.

Can’t get enough of the upcoming drum machine, Tempest, by Roger Linn and Dave Smith? Reader Josh Decker sends in this video by Josh’s friend Rob Baker, aka Redivider, tearing up the machine as a performance instrument. Also, follow the comment thread on our previous post for some follow-up from Dave Smith Instruments to reader questions. Dave tells us there will be more to say on the machine, and that we can expect a release date that should come very close to “the end of summer.” (Watch your calendar.) The Tempest may not be for everyone – and some of us simply don’t have the scratch for this kind of gear at the moment – but I nonetheless find it inspiring to see what people are doing, especially in regards to workflow.

Product page: http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/products/tempest/

Roger Linn, he of the MPC and AdrenaLinn and Linnstrument, sends us his friendly walk-through video showing you how to get started actually using the upcoming Linn/Dave Smith Tempest analog drum machine. We’re awaiting details on when this unit is actually shipping; I’ll update this post once we hear.

What you get instead, though, is nearly twenty minutes of Roger walking you through every single function – this is as much a video manual as it is a “quick start.” It’s nice to see some clever workflow features in action, and you get some very in-depth looks at how the Tempest operates. This is documentation, not marketing, in a good way.

Incidentally, lest you think the Tempest is late — or, at least in terms of its last known shipping projection — Dave and Roger technically have until the Autumn Equinox, which in 2011 falls on September 23 inclusive, in order to ship in summer 2011. I’d go further to say that they have until the end of the date of the equinox Pacific time, which gives them a few additional hours beyond even the majority of their customer base. They’re currently listing the Tempest as due in “late summer 2011,” but unless they mean “late” as in early fall, they have until the 24th of September before they become seasonally incompatible.

I believe it’s briefly on the cusp of the Autumn Equinox on which MIDI clocks start running backwards, or vocoders talk without carrier signals, or something.

Happy Labor Day weekend, USA (and labor lovers everywhere). Happy Fifth of September, everyone. Only (??) shopping days until the Tempest ships.

http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/
http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/

Previously:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official [with specs]
The Father of Drum Machines and the Father of MIDI Talk About Design and the Tempest [CDM interview with the co-creators]

List price still US$1999.

In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it’s hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn.

Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving it its acronym), the first microprocessor-based instrument (the Prophet-5), the first programmable polyphonic synth, and other innovations at Sequential Circuits. Add to that landmarks in physical modeling research (at Yamaha) and the first PC soft synth. Roger Linn built the first programmable sampled-sound drum machine and with the LM-1, LinnDrum, Linn 9000, and his work on the MPC60 and MPC3000, introduced workflows and ideas in drum machines we now take for granted. It’s not easy to overstate the contributions of either designer.

Putting two minds like that together can easily raise expectations, but it can’t magically create a product. And so as these two embarked on a collaboration on a drum machine four years ago, the resulting project didn’t immediately get off the ground. But at NAMM 2011, the first real, functioning product – complete with a ship date this year – finally sees the light of day, thanks to a reboot that re-calibrated the designers’ own expectations and process. As Steve Jobs once infamously said, “real artists ship.”

So, with shipping in sight, what happens when a MIDI-fathering pioneer of synthesis and the pioneer of the modern drum machine work together? And what do they view as important to design? The answers were, to me, insightful, even if you don’t expect to pick up the new Tempest drum machine.

Indeed, they had so much to say, that I’m going to largely let them speak for themselves, unedited. These really speak to the core of how Roger and Dave have thought about their creation; there’s no marketing filter. Either you’ll find these ideas appealing to you musically, and it’ll be something you want, or you won’t. And unlike at NAMM, you don’t even have to hear them shout over the din of a trade show hall to listen to their story.

First, be sure to read up on the specs of the Tempest:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

Concept behind the Tempest

Roger: I think the things that have carried over [from the original collaborative design] are the real-time performance instrument aspects. I always saw the need for something that was not just an off-line editing machine, but in which the idea of composition was tightly integrated with performance. So that’s what the operating system is about on this one – to try to do that with as few controls and as a tight a package as possible, and to have those controls work in multiple modes.

Dave: There are two purposes of this instrument. I think one purpose is what Roger covered, which is usability, and what a drum machine should be doing these days. But the other half is sound. If you’re happy with samples, we can’t compete with a free piece of software that gives you a billion samples and a full-screen interface that lets you program it however you want. That’s not what this is about. This is a musical instrument, and the sound is tightly coupled with the operation, and it gives you a much wider palette of sounds because of the analog side. But you can use samples when you want to, and you can combine the two to come up with all kinds of new sounds.

From my point of view, if it didn’t sound new and different and better, then there’d be no reason to do it. I certainly wouldn’t have done an all-sample drum machine, because my interest is always in the sound area. If the sound is like everything else, it kind of bores me, and there’d be no reason to do it.

The collaboration:

Roger: Basically the entire user interface, data structures, file types … as far as the interface and the way that the machine works as a drum machine, that’s entirely me.

Dave’s really a hardware guy much more than I am. I’m not a real hardware engineer; I’ve put products together, but under duress. I can’t really design a circuit very well – I did circuit design on my earlier machines, but it’s always harder for me. And it’s just not fun for me.

I live in Plato’s world of ideals. Dave loves to live in that world of imperfect copies on the surface of the Earth. It’s just a matter of what makes you happy, what’s fun for you. The truth is I’ve never really liked hardware, it’s just that when I made products earlier on, you needed hardware. I prefer to live in the computer, the efficiencies of the computer, the connectivity, the screen, the ease of writing software. The only reason to have hardware is for the human interface.

I like design, and I like to be close to the musician’s experience. [Dave] likes to be close to the circuit. On this, the first thing he did was design the voice board. He didn’t really care about my 3D models or drawings; he had to touch and feel it. He has the physical gene turned on and I have the virtual gene turned on.

It’s actually very nice, because we cover opposite ends of the spectrum, and I think it’s what made this product work is that we’re covering both those sides. I agonize over the user interface and the data structures and the files and the interactions of the controls. I like solving multi-dimensional problems where you’ve got time involved, as you do with the sequencer, and imagining myself playing the device before it exists. He likes the circuit boards, and he likes writing the low-level firmware.

The synthesis engine

Dave: Large parts of [the Dave Smith Tetra] are in that there are the same two analog oscillators and low-pass filter and one sub oscillator, and we have feedback like we did on the Tetra and the Mophos. The additions are that each voice has four oscillators — two of them are analog and the other two are digital. The digital oscillators are really samples as opposed to oscillators, but they can go either way. We’ll probably be putting the Prophet VS waveshapes in there also. So you basically have four different sound sources per voice. We also added the high-pass filters which none of our other synthesizers have.

[The high-pass filter] gives you a lot more control when you’re mixing analog sounds with samples. Sometimes the analog stuff gets a little bit too bottom-heavy. If you’re not careful, it’ll get a little muddy after a while. But the high-pass does a great job of letting you tweak that when you need to.

Sequencing and real-time control

Roger: The sequencer is event-oriented. In each note event, you’ve got four bytes that you can feel with four different pieces of information. For example, for all notes of the snare drum, byte one could be pitch, byte two could be the filter, byte three could be decay, and byte four could be pan. People who are not very technical can just touch it.

The touch strip lets you override parameters as it plays, or record parameters. This is something that I first made on the MPC60, the variation slider. So it’s not really new, but it’s turned out to be an effective thing. Instead of one, we have two, and each of them as two different sets of assignments, so you can toggle between them.

The idea is that all the changes you make in real-time are recorded into the sequencer if you’re in record mode, or changing them live if you’re playing live.

The way we designed these, they’re both position and pressure-sensitive FSRs (forse sensing resistors). It’s a two-dimensional sensor.

An instrument you can play

Roger: What is cool about this is, with these sixteen beats, you can go in and out of record on them, do any editing that you want, use any sort of pad mode for your recording or play live with the tunings or adjusting the voices or adding and recording note effects – and note effects you can also save beat-wide parameter changes – and do all that, and you never have to stop. The only time you have to save is when you’re saving to flash [memory], but I think that’s the only thing. I think even the edits can be done as a background task. And of course you’ve got real-time erase and all that stuff and single-level undo.

You can actually do real-time creation, and I think that’s the nature of working today, is that a DAW as an editor is kind of an old-fashioned statement. Editing and performance are ideally the same thing.

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this is to try to say, what’s the virtuosic music instrument that we could create if we’re trying to make a drum machine?

What differentiates the sound

Dave: lot of it is a matter of how you program it. A lot of people have already found that on a Tetra, because it’s multi-timbral, you can get some pretty interesting drum kits going. And on this one, we went just a little bit further with the high pass and the samples and a few other little things here and there. We have five envelopes per voice, because envelopes are pretty important when you want to tweak a percussion sound. The LFOs go up a lot higher in frequency, so you can actually use them to do some FM-type effects with the oscillators. And then just the programming, people approach it more like a percussion instrument, so it takes more of that flavor.

Groove and voodoo

Much has been made by MPC users of that instrument’s groove, but Roger – the guy who actually made the groove – routinely discounts it as being anything special. I raised an eyebrow when Roger mentioned in his copy for the Tempest that he used his “bag of tricks.” He explains here precisely what he means – a must-read, incidentally, for MPC fans.

Roger: There’s a lot more voodoo in the press than actually exists. Even on my earliest drum machines, all I did was make sure my samples were trimmed tightly and wrote my software so that the software responds tightly. Swing is just a matter of accurate percentages.

My bag of tricks is basically taking away all the stuff the software sequencers give you — options for that no one knows how to set. Back then, in the earlier days, sequencers just weren’t very good for timing because the OS would always get in the way. These days, you can get great swing if you know what yuo’re doing. The problem is the software interfaces make it so hard to get what you’re trying to get.

For swing, what I do is I use my percentages. You can do fifty percent up to seventy-five percent. And what that means is, for every eighth note, it’s the percentage between the first sixteenth note and the second. 50% means straight time, 66% means falling on triplets, 75% … is going very slow for a jazz groove. It actually falls on 32nd notes. Most of the time it’s 50%, 66%.

There’s no other trick than that. The thing I think made a lot of my early drum machines sound good, at least starting with the 9000, was that you had the pressure-sensitive pads coupled with the note repeat feature. I called it note repeat, people called it rolls. It was mostly not for doing rolls, but just doing good … sixteenth-note grooves. If you just play it by varying pressure, it’s pretty easy to get it right. You couple that with nice swing percentages – something around 58-60% is really pretty cool. I think it’s pretty easy for most people to get a good groove.

The Tempest and its place in drum machine history

Ask a marketing person about a product, and you’ll get a fairly dull answer. Ask someone who’s been around the industry as long as Dave has, and you definitely get an answer with some personality.

Dave: When you say analog drum machine to people, it can mean almost anything. A lot of people instantly think of the old Roland stuff, and already a lot of the people who have been playing with this machine have programmed a lot of the classic 808-type sounds. So we can cover that kind of analog.

And then we can also cover the poly-synth kind of analog, because it is a real programmable analog voice. It’s not the stripped-down Roland version from way back. And then you get the samples, so between all of that, you get a pretty wide palette to work with. It sounds a lot different than if you did the same thing on a Tetra or a Prophet.

The old style analog drum machines – there’s the Roland style, which nobody bought when they first came out because they didn’t sound very good compared to the drum machines at the time, and it only became fashionable much later. But the earlier drum machines, like the ones we made at Sequential, we were basically just taking samples and running them through analog filters. They weren’t really configured like this as a fully-programmable analog voice.

We’re trying to cover all of the bases. Operation-wise, you can program it Roland-style, you can program it MPC-style. From a sound point of view, if you want to stack oscillators to make a big sound, which is what people tend to do a lot on the MPCs, to make it sound thick because you stack a lot of voices, we’ve got four oscillators per voice, and two of them can be samples, and if you want to throw in some low-frequency triangle waves or something you can do that, too. So we don’t need the huge voice counts of the MPCs to do the same thing. The idea was kind of a one-size fits all instrument that can cover all types of musical styles, so it’s not shoehorned into one or the other — I guess what you’d call the two different camps.

It’s been so long since there has been a new drum machine out there of any kind. Even the monomachines have been out for a while, so it was time for something new — and a different take on it.

Price and value

I mentioned to Dave that, given the ability to use a Tempest as a synth module as well as a drum machine and take advantage of genuine analog signal path, the price would make sense to at least some prospective buyers.

Dave: You can already plug in a keyboard and play it as a six-voice analog poly synth. It is definitely dual-purpose in that sense.

The street price on a Prophet is a little more than this, and this has a more complex voice than this does. If we took the pads off and sold it as a six-voice synth, it’d probably cost about as much as it does. I think it’s a good price for what it does.

Roger: The thing can actually double as a six-voice keyboard synth. It has all the same voices that the Tetra has. I guess it’s like a Hextra.

The pads and their layout

Roger: I really like the two by eight layout; I find it really cool to work with. All the pads are right on the front between your fingers. It’s the ideal compromise between the 4 x 4 and the 1 x 16 layout. And since this does both step time and real-time programming, it makes it very nice. The other thing is, when you’re using the pads for tunings, you can select a number of scales – it can be two octaves of major, two octaves of minor, chromatics, two bass strings, two octaves of pentatonic minor, pentatonic major – it actually works out very nicely for doing pitch parts.

Who’s it for?

Dave: I think anybody should like this. The old synth guys from the 80s should like this, because it’s a good, old-fashioned poly-synth drum machine. The electronic guys should like it – a lot of people already use our stuff, because if you want an analog poly-synth these days, there aren’t many choices. The hip-hop guys will always appreciate a new sound, and they always love anything Roger did, for that matter. It’s funny, I’ve been through this cycle so many times. And it’s really hard to predict ahead of time, because so much of this is just a fashion thing, where if the right people decide this is the thing that everybody has to have right now, then it will go crazy. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll still sell a lot, but it can make a pretty big difference. And those are the kinds of things you can never predict

So far, the handful of people who have played with it have liked it a lot, which is a good start. We won’t know until after we start shipping.

Philosophy of design

Dave: Concise instruments to me are very important. A Prophet doesn’t do everything a synth can possibly do, but it has just the right number of knobs for direct control, and the right number of features that make it easy to get your head around it. At the same time, it’s incredibly versatile. People who go too far down the software path where every year there’s a new version and new submenus — it’s more features, you can’t argue, but it just gets silly after a while. So I try to avoid that. Ed.: Since this line was misunderstood in comments, part of this came out of Dave not particularly liking software – which I found especially amusing, as Roger describes not particularly liking hardware. I think these two are yin and yang, Bert and Ernie, in a good way. -PK

For me, an instrument should be concise, it should have a lot of personality. Software never has personality, if you ask me. And it should be fun to play. Software often isn’t fun to play.

Photo courtesy Dave Smith and Roger Linn, circa five years ago.

Genuinely new drum machines don’t come along very often, but that’s precisely what the Tempest is. It has the analog soul of a classic Dave Smith synthesizer, with the user design of a modern drum machine conceived by Roger Linn, the man who many believe fathered the genre. After fits and starts in this collaboration, most importantly, it’s real – not an early, non-working prototype . A finished version will ship mid-year, with an expected list price of US$2000. (That’s steep, perhaps, for a drum machine in a recession, but it’s a very fair price indeed for one with six analog voices.)

The Tempest will actually be the first of two new drum machines this year, the fruits of the Linn-Smith collaboration. That collaboration started four years ago, as the Dave Smith booth at NAMM teased a concept they called the BoomChik. A non-functional prototype followed a year later, but the project stalled.

Dave Smith called for a reboot, and the result will be not one but two drum machines. One will be released by Dave Smith Instruments, and another by Roger Linn Design. The designers each called the shots on the instrument that will bear their name, but they also worked on the other’s creation – a bit like musicians trading remixes.

Dave and Roger walked CDM through their creation and provided details of the design. The specs, in short:

• Six analog voices, each with two analog oscillators and two digital oscillators provide deep, rich sound capabilities.
• Dave’s lowpass filter, a new highpass filter, analog VCA (voltage-controlled amplifier) with feedback, five envelopes, two LFOs, various analog modulation routings.
• In addition to percussion, you can tune sounds and play scales from the pads, or connect a MIDI keyboard and use it as a 6-voice analog keyboard synth.
• There’s a small display – 256×64 OLED – but onboard controls are designed for real-time music making (a topic Roger covered with me in more detail, along with his philosophy for how to make drum machines instruments).
• 2×8 pads, each pressure- and velocity-sensing. Roll function, which doubles as “stutter” when a beat is assigned to a pad.
• Two touch sliders, each with pressure sensitivity, for more real-time control.
• Pure analog signal path, but without skimping on effects – stereo analog compressor and distortion, beat-synced delay that actually uses note effects, and beat-synced stutter.
• Real-time swing controls.

The design could be, for many, the best of all possible drum machines. The 2×8 drum pads are eminently practical. The workflow is really Linn-conceived, but with Smith-style control of analog synthesis that will please synth enthusiasts. The layout is clean and Linn-like, but with fit and finish that makes it look at home with other Dave Smith instruments. You get a rich range of analog voices, but coupled with digital oscillators. (Details are forthcoming, but those digital oscillators should provide a range of wavetables for even more sounds.)

In short, it looks like the sound and fun-to-play aspects have been merged into something that I think will have immediate appeal. My prediction is, a lot of folks will be working on how they can set aside two grand.

I’ve spoken extensively to Dave and Roger, and will post that separately, because even if you won’t get one of these, seeing into their minds is a great treat.

Dave’s got a new keyboard, and the headline gives it all away: it’s a Mopho, but adding keys and more control, all for $800.

There’s a myth out there that the computer music user and hardware synth lover are two different people. Au contraire, mon ami. Thanks, indeed, to Dave Smith himself, the computer and the synth get along just fine. But if you’ve got scant few dollars, which synth is really unique enough, elegant enough in use to justify those dollars?

Dave Smith Instruments is on the top of the list. They’ve got personality, accessibility, and terrific sound. And the DSI instruments are even starting to look like they themselves recognize the invention of the computer, with the addition of USB MIDI and software editors. Oh, yeah, and Dave Smith’s creations are also uncommonly good values: analog synths the everyman can afford. The new Mopho keyboard is in late prototype phase, and it already looks to fill that mold.

The Mopho keyboard has all the analog sonic goodness of the mopho synth module, an overwhelming CDM reader favorite in 2008. Like the Mopho module, you get a rich monophonic analog synth on a budget. That voice is roughly the equivalent of a single voice from the Prophet ’08, but with the addition of sub-octave generators and audio input and feedback options. Because you can input audio signal, that makes the Mopho a doubly-interesting possibility alongside a computer, as basically a big modulation source. (The Moog Little Phatty has earned some fans for the same reason.)

The one thing I didn’t much like on the Mopho module was its minimalist controller section. The keyboard is different, as you can see in our rough video walk-through. There’s a clever set of controls that let you manipulate either oscillator 1, oscillator 2, or both simultaneously. The knobs themselves feel lovely, too, and you have a lot more onboard programmability. There’s MIDI-controlled feedback. And there are pots everywhere, without any menu diving – nearly everything is accessible via shift keys.

What I also love about the Mopho is its compact size; it’s easy to carry and lift.

As always, some of the biggest competition to Dave Smith’s synths are other Dave Smith synths. So you do have to weight the Mopho keyboard against the Mono and Poly Evolver keyboards. Those have deeper sound architectures (even on the Mono Evolver), and while they don’t have 100% analog signal path, you don’t (cough) really need that, necessarily.

There aren’t any specs up on the Dave Smith site, and even the final appearance may differ slightly. (I liked the little bit of yellow peeking out from beneath the more refined wood and front panel; I hope that makes it onto the finished model.) But you can expect the Mopho keyboard very soon, some time this spring, at MAP US$799. Stay tuned.

Dave Smith Instruments

(PS, I’m blanking on the name of the gentleman in the video and I neglected to photo your name badge as I should, so since my memory is worse than a preset-less early analog synth, please drop me a line.)

As always, we won’t cover every last bit of news, just the stuff we really find important. And in a twist, we’re also looking to volunteer participants to help us cover the community around music technology, not just the big industry-driven stuff.

Where and when to get your tech news

At 10:00 or 11:00 am tomorrow, January 14, Pacific Time (GMT-8), embargoes begin lifting on most NAMM news.

You can follow CDM’s coverage in two places: here on CDM, of course, but also at:

namm.noisepages.com

On CDM, we’ll have our own editorial look at the show. For the latest, round-the-clock news, videos, and clips, dispatches from our contributors, as well as unedited press clippings, watch namm.noisepages.com. We’ll take the best bits of the noisepages site and round them up on CDM.

We’ll be covering official and unofficial news this week. So, yes, we expect to cover big names like Roland. We’ll also be picking up on tech in hotel rooms, open-source oddities at the party Friday, and hardware that can’t afford NAMM booths – you know, just like we always do. Every day is a news day around here.

Friday night in Los Angeles, I’ll be part of the big, unofficial Wham Bam Thank You NAMM party. We’ll have video, sound, and feature coverage both of the artists and of the discussion we hope to kick off about the future of music tech. So watch for bits of that over the coming days.

What to expect

Our most anticipated news:

Ableton and Serato have already teased ableton-serato.com. So, obviously, if you were to tune into CDM at 11am California time tomorrow, I’m sure there won’t be any news whatsoever. Got that? Do not, by any means, expect any news Thursday around 11am.

I’ve been looking forward to talking to Teenage Engineering about their gorgeous-looking, Casio-inspired, FM radio and FM synthesis-equipped OP-1 synthesizer for months now; NAMM had always been the timeframe. Whatever isn’t ready, I should be able to catch when I’m in Stockholm in February. I’m imagining their studio looks something like the Wonka Chocolate Factory. If you’re there, you can find them on the floor.

I expect lots more controller hardware from lots more makers, and, whether it’s at NAMM or Messe or (for many manufacturers) completely independent of any trade show, I think 2010 will see more integrated hardware-software products.

No LinnDrum. There won’t be a LinnDrum announcement this year. That’s actually not a rumor. I think it’s best to diffuse any potential disappointment early. Dave Smith Instruments, though, have promised an announcement, so we’ll see what Dave’s been up to and I hope to catch up with Roger (Linn) later this year.

I could make more predictions, except I already know a lot about what’s coming out, so the predicting is somewhat less fun. Let’s see, let’s see, something I don’t know — I predict that the panelists I assembled on Friday will propose something so ludicrous and absurd for futuristic music tech that we’ll all be forced to make it.

And protests of major guitar manufacturers. On a more sobering note, the Korean workers who make major US brands like Fender, Ibanez, and Gibson are assembling a protest of the whole show, as reported by MusicRadar. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello is even involved. It’s guitars, which strictly speaking isn’t NAMM news – but nearly everything we make (even the inner circuits of a US-assembled monome) is built with Asian labor. If anyone can get the scoop on this protest, I’m happy to hear it.

Big 2010 NAMM news that’s… not at the NAMM show

A lot of the big news in 2010 may happen outside NAMM:

• Big makers skipping trade shows: Native Instruments, for instance, is skipping pricey trade shows to talk directly to would-be customers on the Web. So if there’s an announcement from NI – among ranks of manufacturers I expect will gradually grow – it’ll be elsewhere. I hear this Web thing is going to be huge.
• Renoise 2.5, 2.6: The underground tracker is adding some unique features. The 2.5 upgrades, like its unique matrix view, look cool enough, but it’s the 2.6 version, with full-blown scripting and OSC support, that gets even more interesting. We should know more about each as the year goes on. (There’s no NAMM announcement, but you can catch Renoise at the Indamixx booth on the show floor.)



• Ruin & Wesen’s magic box: The techno geniuses of Ruin & Wesen have been hard at work on their MiniCommand, plus the open Miduino library – built on Arduino – that powers it. This deserves a lot more attention for things like algorithmic musical programming, but the short version: expect magical music-programming capabilities that bridge hardware and software.
• OpenSoundControl/OSC: Yeah, I know: OSC has been waiting for its big breakout year for some time. But don’t forget, OSC already has new traction, from becoming a standard in live visual/VJ apps almost overnight to inclusion on new hardware. There’s some big news as far as better hardware and software implementation in the pipeline. Oh, and because it’s open, we’ll get to just talk about this, and actually make it happen. OSC won’t be at NAMM because that’s not where it belongs: it’s a way of implementing Internet standards as much as it is a way of creating music-specific protocols, and a lot of its future lies directly in your hands.
• Open hardware: It won’t be on the NAMM floor, but there is a convergence of monome users, alternative developers, and even (at the party Friday night) open-hardware Arduinomes. DIY tech is something we’ll be watching in Anaheim and all year long.
• …and the suitcase brigade: Technically, NAMM doesn’t allow “suitcase” behavior – that is, people showing stuff who don’t have a booth. But I have at least one product demo booked offsite at a hotel room I think you’ll like. (Whoa, that sounds way more illicit than it is.)

How to Send Us News Tips

Are you a manufacturer with a product? An attendee with photos, video, sound, or words on anything cool — even that late-night jam back in the hotel room with friends? We’d love to have you get it to us. Directions on the namm.noisepages blog:

Community-driven coverage: Help Us Cover The Stuff Everyone Misses

Quadruple quadruple your refreshment, quadruple quadruple your enjoyment… sorry, I started quoting old Doublemint Gum jingles. As expected, Dave Smith has released his Tetra (“Tetr4″ in the l33t speak on the case). The name says it all: the Tetra takes the popular Mopho synth and packs four of them into a single, compact case. The Mopho was featured in the CDM Winter Guide and was one of the favorite reader products of 2008. Its strength is that it’s a great-sounding synth in a small box with all the basic analog goodness. The Tetra simply takes that design and squeezes four of them into a box. That’s four voices, each with two oscillators (which in turn come with sub-octave generators), one Curtis low-pass filter, and feedback loop per voice. You also get the step sequencer and arpeggiator features.

The Tetra also shares a name with the badass pirate version of the Princess Zelda from recent Nintendo games.

Now, the Tetra, like the Mopho, still remains a terrific choice for people wanting some simple analog goodness. But as noted in the Winter Guide, Dave Smith still has some tough competition …from Dave Smith. The Evolver’s digital oscillators may not appeal to analog purists, but they allow Frequency Modulation and Ring Modulation effects. And the Evolver has a digital highpass filter. Of course, the Evolver now has to stand up to the Tetra’s additional voices, which enable routings that weren’t possible before. But I’m hoping increased Mopho and Tetra demand may lead to some cheap used Evolvers on the market; I badly want one. Even from Dave Smith direct, at US$599 on sale I think the Evolver is still worth a look, even if it loses on voice count and doesn’t have those cool, accessible front-panel controls.

The Tetra is priced at US$799 direct from Dave Smith, or at your local reseller. And Evolver comments aside, it’ll clearly be the synth to beat – it’s a pretty amazing investment in an analog synth for $800, and it’s small enough to toss in a backpack – no flight case needed. You can route audio input into it with feedback. And the design eschews the psychedelic looks of the Mopho for a more grown-up, handsome look. Correction: The Tetra seems to lose the audio in present on the Mopho – one reason the Evolver and Mopho are still strong alternatives. You do keep the feedback routing, but there’s no audio in. (Thanks, mcpepe in comments – so it’s not quite like having four Mopho’s in one case; they had to cut something!)

I think Dave Smith’s work has a reputation for being favored by analog snobs – you know who you are. But it’s clear that these make nice hardware synths for computer fans, too, especially thanks to its compact size. If you pick one up, readers, let us know how it goes and how you use it.

Dave Smith Tetra

…and the oldie but goodie: Dave Smith Evolver (now, could we have a Quadvolver, perhaps?)

Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine and creator of some of its greatest models (including the MPC60 and MPC3000), really is working on a new generation. I’ve seen some of that design work, and I’m confident it’ll ship in some form. But announced yesterday, that shipment won’t happen third quarter this year. Also, it seems that, while this was always a LinnDrum and not a SmithDrum, the product is tending even further toward the Roger Linn side and not so much the Dave Smith side – especially with Dave Smith’s own synth business going great guns.

I will say, I prefer a few months’ delay with fewer compromises (or in this case, maybe a lower price). The big names in the industry have such firm release dates that often some significant functionality slips instead of the ship target. Part of the reason a lot of people don’t talk about projects before they’re done really isn’t competitive secrecy – it’s because the evolution of a hardware design can be unpredictable.

But so you can decide for yourself, here’s the published note from Roger:

Update – July 9, 2009:

We’re still hard at work but regrettably won’t be able to meet our earlier estimate of a 3rd-quarter 2009 ship date. The recent changes in the economy have caused us to rethink our design, which had become too expensive. One problem is that Dave’s customers and my customers had different views of what the product should be, so we had been working on a more elaborate design that we thought would please them both. Then the economy tanked. Oops. The other issue is that Dave and his team have been having such success with their analog synths that they’ve been spreading themselves pretty thin trying to work on both projects.

So given these circumstances, we’d prefer not to state another release date estimate at this time, but when we do we promise to post it here along with any other information we’re able to release. Also, given that Dave and his team have their hands pretty full and that a beat-oriented product is more of a Roger product anyway, we’ll probably be selling it through Roger Linn Design instead of from both companies as we had previously considered.

I’d personally love to tell everybody all the details of the product design, features and price as we did with our initial designs of the product, but there’s that pesky problem of keeping the information from our competitors. So we need to keep tight-lipped for now and regrettably can’t answer any questions. Thanks also to those who have kindly asked to place advance orders. However, we don’t feel it’s right to accept orders until we are able to release the price or more information about the product.

And now I must get back to work.

- Roger

Advance Product Information: LinnDrum II

Ever wished you could pack the sonic goodness and programming power of a soft synth into a hardware box? Dreamed of software that lived in a road case and had the stability and power-on capability of your outboard gear? You’re certainly not alone. That meant many of us were intrigued when soft synth emulator house Arturia showed off the Origin, a DSP-based hardware box that put their emulations in a box that wasn’t a PC.

Dave Dri knows touring with gear, as the founder of Seque and a live electronic festival vet. We got his impressions from across the Pacific in Australia. He’s upfront with everything he loves and everything that annoys. To bring a different perspective to Planet CDM here, I’m pleased to welcome Dave as a guest.

An Origin Of Sorts

Founded in France in 1999, Arturia has gained a solid reputation for the quality of its emulations of classic analogue synthesizers. If the soft synth emulations of the classic Moog Minimoog and Yamaha CS-80 have made Arturia a name in the industry, the news of its development of a hardware DSP system made for enjoyable speculation and furious Google searches for videos, news and reviews. While units in Australia are somewhat scarce at present, an Origin was supplied for review by Musiclab in Brisbane, Australia. Where the initial review was for music press print media, there is so much more to this module that we can take a deeper look and share with the CDM community some of the issues and notable features of the Arturia Origin.

Man, Meet Machine

The initial impression of the unit is typical of any large synth module with a host of knobs and blinking lights. The Origin can be rack-mounted or run as a table-top unit, with supplied wooden ends screwing in for the all-important retro aesthetic. There have been comments about the time it takes the unit to boot up, which takes a while. Once you have booted, though, it’s a treat to use, and the LCD screen is both large and bright. As ever, first impressions gained by scrolling through the individual and multi presets give a feel for the possibilities and examples of programming inside the box. A range of usable bass and synth sounds nestle amongst the abstract sweeps and blips, showing plenty of sonic diversity. The Origin is, after all, billed as being “the most powerful synthesiser on the market”.

Origin is essentially a modular environment for programming custom synth modules with a collection of oscillators and filters. It draws upon Arturia’s stable of analog gear models, adding new, original content from the Arturia team. With those synth sounds now in a physical case, boasting external signal inputs and a three-layered step sequencer, the Origin is impressive on paper. Its sound is equally impressive, but one would expect no less from Arturia based on the quality of their software. The presets might attract the same “heard it all before” criticisms from anyone who has been around analog synths for a while, but that can be perhaps considered a complement to the analog modeling. One needs only to play up and down the range of notes of a Minimoog patch to realise that the coherency of the lower and higher notes is superior to lesser Virtual Analogue products. This is especially pronounced in the lower note ranges, though the manual goes into details about avoiding upper frequency aliasing and a “no names” criticism of some other “leading softsynth”. If you’re a soft synth developer, it might be you! Uh oh!

Get With The Program

The first issue that one is likely to run into is delving into the much-talked-about modular programming environment. Whereas the similarly modular Nord G2 includes robust programming environments in computer software for their hardware synth, Arturia have chosen to limit the Origin’s programming to be an entirely inside-the-box affair. Indeed, the USB port and supplied software are merely for archiving and transferring patches. Quite why this process takes such an excruciatingly long time is a mystery, but the lack of any ability to edit file names of archived patches is simply lazy programming. At the time of writing, Arturia haven’t replied to confirm if there is an editor on the way, but one would consider it likely that such a revision will be released with an OS update shortly.

Not that programming on the Origin is anything near impossible. Merely annoying. There are two modes to view the programming process, which amounts to dropping modules into slots and opening each module to connect to another. Frustratingly, there appears to be no way to intelligently “insert” modules into the signal path. This, in addition to no method of “swapping” modules in and out, slows down the rate of programming and limits the kind of creative and random experiments that make actual modular synthesis interesting. Similarly, deleting a module inline will break the signal path, and require re-patching. Despite these quirks, the process is relatively fun and the availability of up to 9 oscillator instances and 4 filter instances will surely yield some interesting results.

Ed.: This is one I’m definitely interested in following – I’d be willing to make some sacrifices for in-box programming, which is an impressive feature, especially with this modular structure. But these do sound like significant obstacles. Other folks want to chime in? -PK

These modules are sourced from the modeling of the Moog Minimoog, Yamaha CS-80, ARP 2600 and Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, as well as additional Arturia originals. Each has its distinctive quirks and allows for some interesting combinations, with features like self-oscillation on the Moog and the smooth response of the Jupiter filters. The manual becomes useful here, with examples and reference points for understanding the characteristics of each.

Better Living Through Synthesis

Beyond creating your own patches, the unit comes packed full of preset programs. Each program contains one synth structure as well as up to three effects settings and one sequence. Up to four Programs can be combined as a Multi, allowing for multi-timbral sound module use with MIDI note, channel and split functionality. The synth structure can be either a user-built modular environment or a template synth. At time of writing, the Origin is shipped with only the Minimoog supplied, with no clear date from Arturia when they will supply the rest. This does seem a curious omission given not only the cost of the unit, but the idea that all these units are already modeled in other Arturia software, requiring only a programmer to port the modules to the Origin. Add another thing to wait for in “the future”.

Room For Improvement

There are quickly a list of issues and concerns a programmer will have with the unit. Where the Arturia software emulation of the Minimoog shows numeric values for tuning settings, the Origin does not. Indeed, all parameters are merely displayed as a graphic representation of a knob, leaving only a visual cue as to the settings. This becomes an issue when tuning the semitones of a number of oscillators for instance, which coupled with the lack of editing software or a touch screen, makes programming the same patches on the Origin a slower affair then Arturia’s own Minimoog V.

Other issues include the use of only a single instance of the Delay, Chorus, and Reverb effects, out of a maximum of three effects able to be run at any one time. The limited palette of effects including Distortion and a Phaser are similar to those found on a Novation X-Station at five times less the expense, and pale in comparison. The Delay and Reverb lack depth of character, and one might find themselves checking that the Distortion is, in fact, actually turned on. The restriction to singular use of the more CPU intensive Delay and Reverb is an indication of conserving processing power for the actual synth patches, but these issues quickly creep into the potential capacity of a Multi patch. In an era where the cheapest entry level laptop has processing power to spare, it is relatively disappointing that a module advertised as “the most powerful synthesizer on the market” would have any processing restrictions whatsoever. If you intended to run the world’s most ultimate 9-Oscillator Trance super saw Multi with full effects and blazing filters, think again. Outside of CPU and “I can’t believe it doesn’t have a touch screen” interface issues however, much of what currently detracts from the overall desirability of the Origin could well be fixed with a timely OS update.

Things Are Looking Up

Those niggles out of the way, it’s time to reaffirm that the unit does in fact sound fantastic. As said before, so it should. It’s Arturia doing what Arturia do. Coupled with the rather interesting, if quirky, step sequencer, the unit has the potential to become a boutique brain for a relatively well-funded live act. Where programming may feel like a festival of clicks, the Origin is perfectly suited for performance and allows for an incredibly well-planned customization and mapping of knobs to this end. External inputs offer the chance to create inspired filter programs and the unit hasn’t neglected a healthy array of midi ports. The unit is heavy at around the 8kg mark, but the build is impressively solid and all the knobs have the same smooth feel that makes units like the Waldorf Blofeld such a joy to tweak, grab and perform on.

It is, however, the quality of the sound that will emerge as a common point of conversation regarding the Origin. It is very expensive and will perhaps emerge as a limited and desirable boutique unit for some. For others, the comparison to the Arturia software will be a pressing factor, with all the synths on the Origin available as part of Arturia’s acclaimed “V Collection” at a price over four times cheaper than the Origin. Of course, these are not available in modular form, which invariably brings up again the question why the Origin is shipped without a software editor. Sure, the Origin sounds amazing, but the question is whether it sounds that much more amazing than the same software, and whether the potential for programming is currently worth the restricted workflow of doing it all inside the box.

To Origin, Or Not To Origin

Some of the best music technology in history has been quirky and difficult, and there is little argument against calling the Arturia Origin exactly that. For all its difficulty, however, it sounds incredible. For all the niggling feature complaints, it suggests a well-timed OS update in response. For its price though, there are no easy answers. Comparing the recommended retail prices in Australia at present, the Arturia Origin costs only a few hundred less than one would spend purchasing both a Moog Little Phatty Stage II and a Dave Smith Prophet 08. Both being genuine analogue synths in their own right. Whether the market is ready to pay this price until Arturia address the features left wanting is entirely up to the producers and acts with the money and passion for incredibly sounding and very specific modular emulations. For everyone else, the software awaits.

For another – similarly skeptical – take on the Arturia, here’s Music Thing from last year:

Review: Arturia Origin. It’s bit, it’s expensive, it’s sexy. Why don’t I want one?