I had an interesting day today, starting off with a visit to the NYC office of Ableton for a demo of Live 6. I hadn‘t yet seen the new version, and I was duly impressed. Live continues to get better, and more fully featured, yet never loses its cutting-edge vibe. I was glad to see that Ableton has added video support. Now, it will be usable as a standalone app on a scoring project. The Instrument and Effects Rack features are way cool, allowing you to chain together combinations of either. Live 6 also debuts a new soft sampler, and the Deep Freeze feature that lets you freeze a track but still edit it. Overall, lots of good stuff.

After the Live demo, it was off to a Barnes and Noble location just a little north of Columbus Circle, where I was moderating a panel discussion for the CMJ Music Marathon, a music festival and conference for independent musicians held every year in New York (kind of like the New York equivalent of South-by-Southwest ).

Sitting outside the Barnes and Noble on Broadway was one of Gibson Guitar‘s tour busses, which was being used as a “green room” for the panelists. The bus was filled with guitar-shaped tables, photos of guitar stars, guitars, lamps made from Slingerland toms (Gibson owns Slingerland), and lots of cool stuff.

Anyway, the panel was titled, “Gearheads Unite,” and was focused on new gear for musicians. Panelists included Yamaha product specialist Phil Clendennin, Ableton general manager Dave Hill, Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, M-Audio Northeast Sales Manager Gary Karlsrud, and Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) VP Michael Petricone. The CMJ schedule gave us only 45 minutes for the discussion, which is really brief, as these things go. So after I gave a quick intro, each of the panelists took the floor for a short presentation.

Clendennin talked about Yamaha‘s digital mixer line, and their Motif keyboards. Hill discussed the new version of Live. Juszkiewicz brought up Gibson‘s new digital guitar, which outputs to an Ethernet cable and offers individual outputs for each string (it currently comes with a breakout box that converts the signal to ¼-inch outputs for each string because there are no input devices designed for the guitar as of yet).

Karlsrud brought in some of the new M-Audio devices including the new NRV10, an analog/digital mixer hybrid that features a 10×10 FireWire interface. He says the mixer should be shipping within a few weeks. I look forward to checking it out.

Petricone was the only member of the panel (other than myself), who didn‘t represent a specific musical instrument manufacturer. The Consumer Electronics Association is an industry group that represents 2,000 companies related to the consumer electronics business–including the major manufacturers. The group is fighting against such trade groups as the RIAA, which the CEA says is inhibiting the business growth of its membership with lawsuits over piracy and copyright infringement. I wish there had been more time to really get into the whole issue, because it‘s a fascinating one.

After the presentations, we took questions from the audience–many of whom said they had home studios–and then the discussion wrapped up. All in all an interesting and productive day.