You can tell this guy’s in software when he walks in the booth. He’s got the wiry frame, the glasses and that smile that tells you he knows something you don’t. So we asked Colin McDowell, the McD in McDSP. And if you’ve been going to live shows lately, you just might have heard some guitar or vocals coming through their plug-ins. Colin, what’s the buzz here at NAMM?

Howdy Tom. Boy my voice is shot, so I can’t say much. Whoops, hey I am typing, ok never mind.

How’s NAMM - dang it is loud. But it is great to be here. The folks brave enough to make music for a living need a place to get together, bond and buy more gear!!! But with all this technology advancement, we still get back to some of the same old dang problems that drive us nuts. Noisy cables, vocal/dialog editing, or making tracks even louder because that is what the listener really wants anyway. Or what the heck, let us make some pristine recording sound like it went through an old tube radio.

And then all this gets corrected in the studio, we get to do it all over again in the live environment. Couple that with the extreme pressure the touring crews work under and you have a recipe for serious hair loss.

So what the heck would a complete geek like me do about it? Well, since most modest equipment racks outweigh me by 100 lbs, I’d have to say the movement to use plug-ins in a live sound environment is a good thing. Just like in the studio, the advantages of instant recall, complete automation, and multiple channels of as many EQs, compressors, etc. is great. Sure you can drop your hard drive and be forced to install some stuff over, but last time I checked that vintage guitar amp, when dropped 6 ft from the lift gate, sounds craptastic too.

So for those who are in the know, McDSP has started to support this Venue live sound system from Digidesign. We are seeing our stuff used in a lot of high profile acts for both monitoring and FOH, and the response is great. All the same design goals we had for the studio folks (zero latency, great flexibility, and ok it sounds pretty darn good in my completely biased opinion) work well for live too. And I am glad to always have customers that actually care about product quality. If you make a great text editor, so what? But if you program a sonically satisfying audio plug-in, you’re like family.

So what have we been up to at McDSP? Three new plugins for Pro Tools / Venue. The FutzBox - inject noise, distortion, and other kinds of stuff to ‘futz things up’ (including that dang old tube radio sound). The NF575 noise filter (think little dipper with 5 notches, harmonically linked with even tigher Q). And the DE555 de-esser - great de-esser capable of de-essing a consistent amount at any signal level. If you are in live and have the quite to loud vocalist, you’re riding a threshold control to de-ess that person - but no more. And if that did not make sense to you, then you must not be in pro audio, or are as hung over as about 30% of the attendees here.

And once your digital / software based system is setup (Digi, etc.), you are golden. Setting up for the gig is much more simplified. And the ’same sound challenge’ is now a little more managable. But you’ll still get 10 other things to do because with these new fangled systems you surely are just sitting around on your butt.

Well, like I said my voice is shot, and the folks at the booth must think I am out buying more gear. Gotta go. See you at NAMM, or on the web. Rock on with your bad selves, or whatever it is hip people do these days.

Colin