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:

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

A major highlight of the party CDM held last weekend with our friends at TRASH_AUDIO and VJKungFu.tv: a live remix of The Karate Kid. Momo the Monster mangled the video while Shane Hazelton and Stephan Vankov did music. The whole event was powered by some clever MIDI sync that managed to wrangle the gear — enough hardware that it seemed like the crew had just raided a Guitar Center — and sync up the video.

Sure, the remix may sound silly — and it was. (Deliciously so.) But the interplay between the three, punctuated by ridiculous live vocals by Shane, really put it over the top. Adding some MIDI intelligence to your digital trio could help all kinds of performances, not just this one We’ll have to get Momo to share what he did.

Momo has more over on Create Digital Motion, complete with technical details:

Karate Kid AV Remix

But this clip should give you an idea of just how live the vocals were — in a moment that captures, shall we say, the brutish masculine power of the film:

Karate Kid live remixing music performance from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

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.

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?

Fruity Loops, while a long-time underground favorite of PC music makers, seems to be on a roll at the moment. We were lucky enough to get an FL Studio 8 sneak peak with Didier Dambrin, Image-Line’s lead programmer — one of the great music software artists. Since our French was nonexistent and his English was limited, the scene was something like this: Didier silently tweaks his way around his software, we squint at the screen, and magical sound awesomeness happens.

FL Studio 8’s feature set will evidently be set free gradually, starting with a beta build called “7.4″ you’ll be able to download from the forums. The new features are FL’s combination of sublimely powerful tools and oddly superfluous toys. In the toys category: a live audio visualization you can float around your screen. (I’m guessing they’ll be fun to look at when you’re completely stuck creatively in the middle of a project.) In the sublime category: a new beat slicer that takes Edison several leaps further. Beat slices are MIDI assignable, filters and such are already available, and … well, it’s rather hard to describe, but it’s all put together in a Fruity way that makes it compelling.

The other revelation was that the cult-hit SynthMaker VST creation tool is now being licensed by Image-Line for inclusion with FL Studio. It’s not clear yet what if anything will be unique to this version, but the combination of FL’s tools with custom SynthMaker instruments you’ve built yourself sounds lovely. It should give you something to muse on while we wait on Ableton and Cycling ‘74, who are still mum on any product of the partnership they announced last year. No other details yet on FL 8 or FL SynthMaker, but this one’s dead center on our radar.

NAMM supposedly stands for the “National Association of Music Manufacturers.” It’s purportedly a trade show for music instruments and technology. But, for brief but glorious moments, “NAMM show” translates in English to “ridiculous musical stuff.” Just how ridiculous? We’re talking guitars made out of football helmets.

Just in case you think you might extract any respectability from this $299 novelty guitar, there’s more: interchangeable face masks. Multiple colors for matching your favorite team (you’ll have to provide the logos — guess they didn’t pony up for a license). A built-in speaker, just in case an amp looks too, you know, professional. And the pièce de résistance, football-shaped guitar picks.

Helmet Guitars

Any pride left? Well, how about filming a demo video playing this,(inexplicably) shirtless. Hint: do not tell, say, potential dates or job interviews “Last night, I took off my shirt and started totally wailing on my helmet guitar!” That could be interpreted in way too many ways, none of them not wrong.

Hey, at least Miesel Stringed Instruments doesn’t have any illusions. They promise the guitar “will have you rockin’ all the way from your rec room at home, college dorm, tailgate party, to the Super Bowl after party!”

Will you see anything this fun at CES? I don’t think so.

But if I sound in any way critical, it’s only because I think the Helmet Guitar can’t begin to compare with the same builder’s aquarium acoustic guitar (among others).

Tune in January 17-20 for live coverage from the NAMM show in Los Angeles, from the awesome to the awesomely strange. And stock up on donuts, because you may start craving them.