Travel Report for
Michael Bierylo
NAMM 2003
For many in attendance at this year's Winter NAMM show, the 20th anniversary of MIDI was a reminder of how quickly time flies, and how much the electronic instrument industry has changed. It must have been a radically different mindset that gave birth to an industry-wide standard, MIDI, that was in place before manufacturers began shipping products. With every new technology since then, there have been competing standards and protocols developed by individual manufactures, all vying for the coveted position of owning the best solution. With each ensuing NAMM show, it seems that a big part of the game has become figuring out what works with what. Perhaps a manufacturer's biggest selling point these days is that their product works with everything.
With this as a backdrop, this year's show introduced products that offered more in the way of refinement than innovation. Clearly, software synthesis and DSP plug-ins have become mature products, and the pioneering companies are beginning to grow as industry leaders. Hardware developments continue to focus on control surfaces and high definition audio interfaces as computers continue to develop as the hub for electronic music production.
As in the past, this year's report makes no claim to be an exhaustive analysis, rather it is a collection of impressions from the show. For a more complete round-up of new products, I highly suggest the following:
The Year of Keeping Promises - Mac OSX
For many companies, products and updates announced last year were actually shipping or were close to it at this show. For many, the hold-up was with Mac OSX, which was not ready for prime-time MIDI or audio services until last year's release of Jaguar. Developers such as MOTU claimed they couldn't really start working on OSX versions of their products till this release. This year, nearly every manufacturer was either shipping or promising a spring delivery of OSX versions. The only company that made no public display of an OSX version was Coda, makers of Finale. However, OSX support is slated for the summer release of Finale 2004, hopefully by the time Berklee makes the switch to OSX campus-wide in the fall.
The real news at this show was Audio Units. Apple's native plug-in architecture might seem like an unnecessary addition to a crowded field, but every plug-in manufacturer announced support for the new standard. Apparently, it's very easy to write an audio unit version of an existing plug-in with several developers noting that the actual work involved was, in some cases, only a few hours. On the host side, sequencer manufacturers will find it difficult to scrap their existing audio engines to support audio units. Since audio units support native DSP on the Mac, hardware-based DSP such as found in TDM versions of Pro Tools will continue to be addressed with proprietary drivers. For most manufacturers, there is no compelling reason for them to abandon their existing architectures. Digidesign will eventually support audio units, but it's not high on their list of priorities. Steinberg has no interest in abandoning VST and although MOTU said they will support audio units, the initial release of DPX will still rely on MAS as an audio engine. Not surprisingly, Emagic is the sole manufacturer to offer exclusive support of AUs. Needless to say, the market will be confused for the next year while all this gets sorted out. As it stands, a plug-in manufacturer will still need to support all formats to service the major production platforms.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Waves announced the Waves Update Plan (WUP) for version 4 of their complete line of plug-ins. The V4 plug-ins will support both OS9 and OSX on the Mac as well as offer refinements of automation capabilities and a revised copy protection scheme. WUP offers a year of free updates for any of their V4 bundles. For anyone interested, Waves offers educational pricing of 50% off the list price on any of their products. The offer is for both faculty and students and is available either through Waves or an authorized dealer, such as Parsons Audio.
Overall, the Mac is the most highly visible platform for music at NAMM. While there is still quite a bit of innovative development on the PC side, especially from smaller, start-up manufacturers, most major products are cross platform. Steinberg used LINUX to develop their latest generation of products which makes compiling for Windows and Mac OSX (a UNIX cousin of LINUX) a much easier task than was the case with cross platform versions that supported Mac OS9. Hopefully if this marks an industry trend, cross platform compatibility will move closer to being an industry standard.
With this year's OSX buzz however, the developments we're seeing are still just in getting music production to work at all on what's now the default Mac OS. The benefits for producing music on a modern OS still remains to be seen. Additionally, as Apple has concentrated it's efforts on the consumer-oriented "digital hub" strategy, they have been slow in rolling out a new generation of pro hardware that will meet the needs of these DSP hungry applications.
The 20th anniversary – Is MIDI dead or does it just smell funny?
This year's 20th anniversary celebration of MIDI was a low-key affair. The MIDI Manufacturers Association held a silent auction offering autographed instruments and magazine collections, but there were no signature events marking the occasion. Perhaps the most exciting announcement from the MMA is a new printing of the MIDI spec. Manufacturers who have built their careers on this, showed no public sign of enthusiasm for this milestone. With a recent ad slogan from Ableton announcing "The end of sequencing as you know it," an obvious question is "what's up with MIDI?" How relevant is MIDI production in an increasingly democratic audio production environment? Also, is the MMA relevant as a forum for ongoing standards for music production tools? Some recent product trends may shed some light on this.
In the early 90s, Opcode's StudioVision opened Pandora's box for music production tools. Since then MIDI sequencers started becoming more like hard-disk recording tools and vise-versa. Both Steinberg with Nuendo 2 and Digidesign with ProTools 6 are upgrading the MIDI capabilities of these two flagship production platforms. Steinberg is adding all the MIDI functionality of Cubase in Nuendo 2, while ProTools will add expanded quantize and selection capabilities, as well as support for MIDI time-stamping using interfaces from Digi, Emagic or Roland. While these professional platforms embrace expanded MIDI capabilities, a new generation of self contained production tools such as Reason has less use for system-wide MIDI capabilities. Since these products use only host-based soft instruments, patch change commands and SYSEX are not supported. Perhaps the growth of software-based instruments has slowed development of patch name management services in OSX? Although both Emagic and MOTU have announced OSX versions of the editor/librarian programs, neither company is in any hurry to get an update to market. MIDI appears to be most useful for connecting a generation of hardware devices.
As software instruments play more of a role in production, the role MIDI plays will change. Using virtual instruments, inter-application communication becomes increasingly important. Both OMS and FreeMIDI supported this, however it's not clear how this will work in OSX. With their latest releases, Emagic and MOTU are joining Steinberg in supporting Propellerheads' Rewire2 protocol with Digidesign announcing support coming later this year. Originally developed to facilitate inter-application audio and transport control,.Rewire2 adds support of MIDI, allowing seamless connection of soft instruments between applications. For example, ProTools would be able to access any of the instruments found in Reason. Although VST2 allows MIDI control of plug-ins, Rewire's client/.host architecture, as well as its independence from any particular plug-in format, makes a stronger case for broad acceptance. Interestingly enough, the MMA didn't seem to recognize this need and hasn't addressed this in the ongoing development of the MIDI spec. In this case, Rewire2 seems to be emerging as a standard the entire industry will support, regardless of any action from the MMA.
Other trends do not point t the demise of MIDI, but rather to a realignment. With the explosion of groove and DJ products in the last few years, the ability to generate and recognize MIDI clock has become increasingly important. Electronic performance is being redefined in such a way that traditional keyboard skills are no longer the only means of producing music. Real-time control using a variety of interfaces is now, more than ever, the key to a compelling performance. With the computer as the hub, live or in the studio, MIDI controls mix and synthesizer parameters. Virtually every digital mixer and a number of dedicated production surfaces use some form of MIDI to communicate.
In addition, as the art of sampling evolves, musicians increasingly rely on technology to produce authentic orchestral music on the desktop. The best of the current crop of high quality orchestral libraries use a variety of MIDI techniques for selecting and controlling samples using the GigaStudio platform, demanding an increasing awareness of MIDI's real-time control possibilities.
Software samplers are huge. High quality sample libraries are huge. Perhaps riding on the success of the GigaStudio platform, samplers are everywhere, and Giga is certainly the benchmark for performance. This year, all major players in this field have updated their products to include hard disk streaming. The big hit in the past year looks like Kontakt. Building on this, Native Instruments announced an expanded product line that includes an entry level version called Kompakt and a sample loop tool called Intakt. Intakt looks like Propellerhead's ReCycle on steroids. Although it reads REX files, it's not clear that it will save as REX files. Now that REX file impost is a feature of all major sequencers, another program that generates these files would be most welcome.
If there ever was a reason for Logic-envy, its tight integration with the EXS24 sampler would probably top the list. This year, MOTU makes its first foray into virtual instruments with the Mach Five UVI (Universal Virtual Instrument) sampler. MOTU has licensed this technology to build a sample instrument that will integrate with any DAW and provide a broad range of format comparability, with drag and drop import of Giga and Sample Cell instruments. The included UVI-Xtract utility facilitates importing legacy sample file formats such as Roland and Kurzweil.
Speaking of legacy formats, Chicken Systems continues to update their Translator file format conversion utility to include Giga, Kontakt and EXS24 compatibility. They seem to be doing their best to keep up with the multitude of soft sampler formats. In addition, as Reason becomes an increasingly popular platform, Propellerheads is developing Reload, an AKAI sample format conversion utility. A call for beta testers is now posted on their web site. It would be a good idea for the Music Synth department to get at least one copy of each of these tools to make existing and future sample libraries compatible with a wide variety of formats.
Now that we've been flooded with software samplers, if anyone is still interested in hardware, AKAI's updated Z series samplers look like superb instruments. However, in a move that maybe too little, too late, AKAI was showing the VZ8 software sampler for VSTi and Audio Units. The VZ8 has the advantage of being completely compatible with their hardware line, and has a nearly identical architecture, including the same filter design.
Several years ago, Roland pioneered time and pitch processing with their VariPhrase sampler. Although these functions are now found in Kontakt, Roland has revisited this technology in their new production tool, Varios. Varios is really a hardware/software system that includes a single rack space unit with editing software that allows the user to control various (no pun intended) time and pitch shift functions on screen. It's interesting to see that a large company like Roland is beginning to design products to be used specifically with a computer-based studio after placing a tremendous amount of resources into providing a their own self-contained studio solution.
Samplers themselves are only half the story, and truth be told, the" samplers" we're really talking about are for the most part, tools for delivering sound libraries .A number of years ago, when the Miroslav Vituous library first became available, it looked like there would only be a small market for such a high priced library. ($3000) With disk streaming systems a la Giga all the rage, the potential for convincing emulations of orchestral instruments has considerably advanced, and the demand for these types of high quality libraries is on the rise. Two standouts this year were the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) distributed by Ilio and the Quantum Leap Orchestral Library distributed by East West. Both offer superb recordings of major orchestras and are designed to take advantage of the MIDI programming available in Giga. The VSL ships on DVD or hard drive and is also available for EXS24 version 2. The Quantum Leap library ships with each volume of the library in a dedicated Kontakt instrument. Both of these companies offered demos in sound-treated booths that gave their audience a welcome respite from the sonic onslaught of the show floor.
For the last several years, surround audio has been a pretty big buzz at NAMM. Many manufacturers have developed products and marketed them for this purpose. Although the norm for major release film sound, at what point does surround production become a reality for the project studio? When do composers and synthesists start writing and designing in surround? This year's show introduced products that indicate some trends in this area. For surround to become a reality to the average project producer, the following components need to be readily available and affordable.
Workstations - As of last year, all major players in the workstation arena had integrated surround capability in their products. Although high-end processors from Lexicon and TC Electronics have been available for the pro market, plug-in and effects manufacturers are beginning to release products that address the project studio market. Notable among these is the Waves Surround Toolkit, available for ProTools TDM. Recognizing that surround production needs a dedicated, multi channel toolset, this bundle includes standard tools such as dynamics and reverb as well as new tools for imaging and calibration.
Monitoring - Perhaps the biggest commitment involved in getting into surround is accurate monitoring. All speaker manufacturers are showing high-end solutions, but this year, Alesis was showing their ProActive THX-approved monitor system for a list price of 399.00. This system is designed for small project studios that need accurate monitoring. At this price, surround may now be a reality for many project producers.
M-Audio was showing its Revolution 7.1 surround PCI card that provides an affordable solution to recording at 24 bit, 96K and getting multi-channel audio out of a computer. Although primarily geared toward the consumer market with an eye toward game applications, this $100 card brings surround and high definition audio to the consumer desktop and would certainly be a good starting point for musicians interested in exploring surround. Although the card supports Mac and PC, it's not clear how it would be used with a DAW. Mike Sokol will be using the card in his upcoming series of Fits and Starts surround demos.
Instruments - Access has marketed its six-output Virus as "surround ready" since it came out, and in truth, any multitimbral synthesizer with six outputs can make this claim. But a couple of recent electronic instruments are designed to be used with surround. The Hartmann Neuron, that was announced last year, is now shipping. This synth has been designed from the ground up to output to surround. With many of its parameters controlled via joysticks, this makes for some interesting sound design possibilities. Hans Zimmer recently signed on as a partner in the company, and that in itself should signal the direction film and media composers are headed.
Among the features in MOTU's Mach Five sampler is support for surround format audio files and direct outputs to workstation surround busses. The company used a stunning surround church organ patch for its demonstration to great effect, making a strong case for designing surround specific sampled instruments.
Synthesizers - Despite the absolute deluge of software products, hardware is still alive and well. The big manufacturers still have their flagship workstation synths, but all are looking to "classic" analog synthesizers to inspire their newer models.
Alesis is ready to release the ION synth, a very nice analog modeling synth with a promised entry-level price point. It features the requisite sync to tempo function for many of its parameters as well as a 40- band vocoder.
In a break from this, Roland's new V-Synth combines many of the technologies found in their groove products such as the D-beam controller in a new keyboard synthesizer. It features sampling, coupled with their VariPhrase technology, and their COSM physical modeling technology. The demo highlighted its usefulness in producing dance styles as a self-contained workstation.
A couple of industry pioneers had new products. Ironically, they are both monophonic, analog synthesizers. Bob Moog's MiniMoog Voyager is now shipping. The synth looks and sounds great and is a worthy successor to the fabled MiniMoog.
Dave Smith was on hand demonstrating his new Evolver 1 voice, 4-oscillator synthesizer module. Taking a different approach from the Moog, this is a small, almost handheld device that features an arpeggiator and a front panel modulation matrix. Throughout his career Dave has been ahead of the curve in terms of product innovation, starting with Sequential Circuits, then years later developing Seer Systems Reality, one of the first commercially available software synthesis packages. Dave says he's done with software and is very successful working for himself producing this boutique synthesizer. Although Smith was one of the authors of the original MIDI spec, he had little to say about the 20th anniversary. His eyes are on the future.
That brings us to another interesting boutique company. Leaving synth-land, we find Zachary Vex Effects a company that produces a line of handmade stomp boxes offering some unique kinds of effects to guitarists. This year they were showing what was billed as the "world's smallest tube amp." All their products are hand wired and come in durable, custom painted enclosures. Very cool.
Back to synthesizers, Creameware was showing a hardware device called Noah- a software configurable sound module. This appears to be their Pulsar or Scope system outfitted in a standalone unit. With this unit, users can boot different soft synthesizers and use front panel controls for editing. The models currently available include a Sequential Circuits Pro One. This product demonstrates an interesting idea, however the synthesizers themselves didn't break any new ground.
Along similar lines, an Austin Texas startup Open Labs showed EKO, a hardware shell that looks like a workstation synthesizer on steroids. The unit houses a PC loaded with the user's choice of software synthesis/DAW packages. EKO comes with a MIDI keyboard controller, an ASCII keyboard as well as a variety of synthesizer/mix controllers. Is this the future of hardware synthesizers?
AKAI showed a VST player in the early stages of development. This was essentially a box with DSP and a basic user interface that would load and play VST effect plug-ins. The target price was somewhere around $1000. Perhaps as the price of these types of units drops, they'll become common in a variety of studio settings. It would be nice if these types of units offered a DSP upgrade path as it would certainly be cheaper than replacing a computer, and would provide some clear advantage. AKAI mentioned no plans for this, however.
Controllers - Although the cat was out of the bag long ago, what we all thought was Logic Control is now Mackie Control as well. Mackie was demonstrating how this surface integrated with every DAW available, with varying degrees of compatibility. Still, the integration between Logic and Logic Control looks to be the best of the bunch.
JL Cooper was showing their CS-32 mini mix controller. This provides basic volume and pan control for 32 assignable channels. The main advantage of this is that it's small and looks to be quite durable, ideal for live mixing situations.
AKAI is now offering the pads in their MPC line of sampling sequencers as standalone controllers. The MPD16 connects to a computer using either MIDI or USB and looks like it would make a good hand percussion controller.
FireWire - MLan is still alive, but FireWire audio interfaces continue to be the most visible use of the technology, specific to production. M-Audio showed a very attractive new offering, the FireWire 410, a bus-powered interface that combines two microphone pre amps, zero latency monitoring and eight analog outputs. This portable solution is designed with surround applications in mind, and offers what M-Audio claims is true IEEE-1394 compatibility.
As stated earlier, the amount of software on display this year was simply staggering, worthy of a dedicated report. However, a couple of trends became apparent:
Vintage Emulations continue to be the rage with manufacturers bent on supplying users with a virtual garage full of classic gear. Our esteemed senior synth faculty will be gratified to know that the gear their youth has popped up on the desktop. GMEDIA Music, known for its mellotron emulation, demonstrated their Oddity, a software version of the ARP Odyssey. Under discussion is a software version of the ARP 2600. Their programmers seem to think this would require a great deal of DSP power to accurately model this, but development is under consideration.
Last year, Arturia demonstrated Storm, their hobbyist version of Reason. This year's surprise was a Moog Modular emulation. The company claims that their TAE - true analog technology - enables them to accurately reproduce the sonic characteristics of this. (I wonder if they nailed the oscillator drift?)
Polish developer PSP demonstrated their PCM42 plug-in that garnered critical acclaim from Gary Hall, the unit's original developer at Lexicon. All of their software sounds great and they offer a couple of nice freebies on their web site: http://www.pspaudioware.com/. Here, you'll find a vintage styled VU meter and PSP PianoVerb, a plug-in that simulates the reverberant quality of piano strings.
One thing to note is that many of these smaller software startups are desperate to get exposure for their products. Several mentioned hope that NAMM meetings with M-Audio might land them a stronger distribution network. Apparently the success of Propellerheads and Ableton has become a model for this industry.
GMEDIA actually represents a consortium of British software developers, as well as themselves. Included in this are: Ohm Force, Efex Expansion and Code Audio, makers of Beatburner looping software. It seems that there's a good deal of innovative development going on, and hopefully the best of these companies will survive.
Another trend apparent this year is a greatly renewed interest in vocoders. Even AKAI has a 50-band vocoder in their catalog. The best I've seen has to be the new Native Instruments Vokator Vocoder. With up to 1024 bands and additional synthesis functions such as NI's granular sampling and multi-segment modulation, it goes far beyond what one would expect from a traditional vocoder.
Berklee Media - The College's presence at NAMM is usually most visible through Berklee Media's booth. This year however, Berkleemusic.com and associated strategic alliances with Guitar Center and Digidesign was announced at a press conference. The turnout was quite respectable and the response appeared to be positive.
Education - I managed to look at some current music technology offerings from various publishers. Although this is a hot topic, there's very little available in the way of a good overview. The best title I saw was Making Music With Your Computer by Brent Edstrom from Hal Leonard. Perhaps we should get a few review copies of this.
M-Audio has started a series of publications dealing with fundamental topics in music technology called "Record Now." The first of these, Choosing & Using Microphones is available as a free 2.5 Meg download from their web site. (http://www.m-audio.net/record_now_pdf/Record_Now_Mic.pdf) In addition, they've developed a set of CD ROM tutorials for Reason.
Student Internships - Most manufacturers I spoke with about this were very receptive to the idea of using Berklee tech majors as interns. Students would be well advised to seek out manufacturers while on their summer break. Locally, BitHeadz expressed great interest in using students to develop soundware. Bob Mirabelle from soundware company, Sonic Reality located in Florida, would also appreciate student help in preparing sample libraries.
Fun - Since all this is about music, it's nice to be able to see some performances while at NAMM. This year, for their 40th anniversary, Korg hosted a concert featuring Herbie Hancock's Future-to-Future group as well as the Zawinal Syndicate. This was a fine, but long evening of great keyboard playing.
This year's Berklee Alumni Brunch honored Emagic founder Dr. Gerhard Lengling and arena pop uber drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. Abe Jr., who is MP&E major Mateo Laboriel's brother, was a Music Synth major. So now, when parents inquire on the employment opportunities for our graduates, we can add playing drums for Paul McCartney to the list.
Gary Chang - Thanks to Dean Stephen Croes, several of us had the opportunity to visit film composer Gary Chang at his home studio before leaving sunny Southern California. Gary was extremely generous with his time, playing us some of his music on a superb surround monitoring system, and expounding on a variety of music tech topics, showing off not only an amazing collection of synthesizers, but also a serious microphone case. At very least, we should have Gary for a visit, Beyond that, we might want to consider inviting him as a Music Tech division artist in residence.
Thanks for reading, and as always, I look forward to your comments.
eMBee
February 2003