NAMM08: Volt Per Octave Play the Moog Music Booth from cdm tv on Vimeo.

Husband-and-wife synth duo — and Moog superfans — Nick and Anna Montoya were helping out at the Moog Music booth this year and NAMM. Their greatest responsibility: making sure synthy good vibrations emanated from all that hardware through the day. We picked up a bit of their performance, which was able to rise above the din of the trade show floor.

Okay, that’s my hand. But my feet are eager to stomp on this, too.

People looked at me funny when I told them the most promising gear I saw at the NAMM show was a foot controller.

Well, not just any foot controller. First off, the design and build quality are really exceptional, even in the pre-production model, as you’d hope from a premium-priced Moog box. But it’s brains, not beauty, that set it apart. The MP- 201 is a controller that finally gives your feet some intelligence.

Here’s Amos from Moog Music taking us through the MP-201 — including a peek at what’s coming between now and when the unit ships in the spring. And Amos is worth listening to, as he’s one of the folks working on presets for the unit.

NAMM08: Moog Multi Pedal Preview from cdm tv on Vimeo.

My first impressions of why it’s cool:

You’ve seen the “top picks” lists elsewhere online for the NAMM show, that massive Californian convergence of musical instruments and music-making gear. Add together the knobs and faders from such lists, and you could probably build a synthesizer Death Star and destroy Daft Punk’s hidden Rebel base. Of course, you’d only have a marginally larger Death Star than the identical one you could have built from last year’s gear.

We’re doing things a little differently: picking out entirely random stuff that managed to reach for the sublime — including the sublimely absurd. Bad is better than boring. We’ve seen strange things that simply failed, or at least substantially creeped us out.

Now, those moments of victory, of supreme revelation, of –

Yeah, that’s Roger Linn, the LM-1 and former MPC designer without whom drum machines as we know them today wouldn’t exist, holding the “Drum Machines Have No Soul” bumper sticker he acquired. That’s why we were in Anaheim.

We’re still waiting on Barry Wood’s legendary NAMM Oddities, so we’ll focus on our own sense of the exceptional.

Other standout moments and products for reflection:

NAMM had plenty of new goodies, but what do we actually want to buy? Here’s Liz’s top pick (high on my list, as well). -PK

No, it’s not an advertising campaign for Ableton Live if that’s what you’re wondering. The Live-like logos that pop up onto your screen when you start using the Novation Nocturn controller actually represent the Nocturn’s various knobs, automatically mapped to whatever software you’re using at the time. It’s a heads-up, intuitive display that extends both the mouse and the controller itself. You can see the knob settings on screen, then use the mouse to navigate between the controller’s touch-sensitive knobs. If the Automap feature isn’t doing it for you, you can reassign any parameter or create a new MIDI map from scratch. Ed.: Novation says this functionality will soon be available on other Novation Automap gear, too, like my beloved ReMOTE SL keyboard. -PK

In terms of blinky appeal, each of the knobs are surrounded by LEDs that make it easier to see the knob’s position in a dark club.

What will it cost? A mere $100. On my wishlist, for sure.

Nocturn - The world’s first compact intelligent plug-in controller [Novation Music News -- and by "first", I think they mean the first of theirs, of course, or "intelligent" defined as their particular Automap feature]

Stay tuned for hands-on video with the Nocturn. And yes, the crossfader feels fantastic, especially for the price.

Don’t believe what you see in the press releases, in the glossy write-ups of shiny, new technology from the NAMM show. Wandering the NAMM show is a truly surreal experience, like falling into a giant music store that acquired its own zipcode crossed with a swap meet crossed with a convention of badly-dressed rocker cosplayers. With apologies to Barry Wood’s superior NAMM Oddities, we couldn’t resist telling you what we really thought of some of the things we found. NAMM find: win or fail?

Part one, the items that registered fail (with one very sweet win that managed to undo one of those failures.)

(Warning: one mind-bogglingly not-safe-for-work close-up photo toward the end. If some things offend you, try not to scroll very far.)

Liz McLean Knight also contributed photos and editorial to this report.

Will Richard Devine unleash his blazing fury once again at NAMM this year as he did with the Neko keyboard, or will he physically keep his cool but unveil his own brand of auditory destruction instead?

Come to the CDM Unofficial Afterparty in Los Angeles and find out! Show up at 8pm to Bassworks and witness a DIY, technological show and tell and then stick around to check out live musicians and visualists along with our pal Rich. Fire may or may not make an appearance, but we in CDM HQ personally hope for the metaphorical sort.

And you are all on the guestlist (meaning it’s a free party). You’d be ragingly insane to miss it if you’re local on Friday.

Yeah, this isn’t just marketing: the newest Moog Voyager is really old school — and it just makes us want it more. Moog Music has taken out twenty years of recent technology and kept the classic tech — all in a new case that’s fully wooden and entirely devoid of glowing mod wheels. In fact, the actual marketing side steps just how old school the Old School is:

“Priced between the Voyager and Little Phatty, this modern classic makes the coveted Voyager sound and design easier to own than ever!”

All of that is technically true (and we are coveting), but — reality check. The Moog Voyager Old School as a left-brained compromise? A value buy? I don’t think so. You’re shelling out US$2600 on the most beautifully anachronistic synth keyboard from Moog yet. You’re going to use nothing but control voltage because you think digital makes people’s souls weak.

We’d like to suggest an alternative slogan / t-shirt design: “Presets are for posers; MIDI is for pussies.”

I’m only half joking. Coming to an annual trade show could easily lull you into the idea that music technology is a simple, linear progression from one idea to another. (Now with 10% more this year of exactly what we had last year!) How boring would that be? Mercifully, Moog Music — and quite a bit of other stuff we’ve seen, great and awful — reminds us that design is about choice and personality. It’s not rocket science — it’s cooking.

We’ll have more of the latest Moog (among other things) as we finish off our NAMM videos.

Oh, and one last tip to Moog: we’re awaiting the Really Old School model. What’s with the keyboard being attached? And why is everything patched for you in advance?