Groove Tubes was showing off their new tube ribbon mic today. It has a great feature in that it comes with a spare engine that the user can easily swap out should the ribbon get damaged. Check out my podcast and listen at the end for a ribbon-esque recording tip from GT’s Steve Good.

At NAMM today the most exciting thing I saw and heard was a synthesizer called the Solaris. It’s a work-in-progress by veteran synth and sound designer John Bowen. What began as a soft-synth project outgrew the confines of John’s computer, so he brought it to life as a living, breathing (okay, not really) keyboard instrument with lots of knobs and big, bright displays. It uses a variety of synthesis algorithms, from sample playback to FM to wavetable and more, and it gives you eight envelopes, five LFOs, and more types of filters than you ever imagined you might need. And the sound! It’s a beautiful thing, and it will be April (or so) when John hopes to begin shipping the Solaris. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait! But don’t take my word for it; head on over to http://www.johnbowen.com/solaris.html and hear what I mean.

Hot news! There’s an all-new Gibson Guitar Corp. following today’s announcement of a merger with TC Group out of Denmark. Lots of details yet to be worked out, but right now we know that Anders Fauerskov of TC will be the COO and Henry Juszkiewicz remains CEO. The deal is expected to be finalized by the end of February.

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

Greg, you’re off the Electric Gnat Ranch acreage in Illinois and running around Anaheim…What have you seen, what do you know?

Conflicted news runs rampant in the aisles–is attendance really down, are we feeling the impact of the credit crunch? My response: Aisles are reasonably jammed today (Saturday 1-18), with people who count. My own casual, non-scientific research (based upon listening to the wisdom uttered by 27 years worth of contacts in this business while doing PR, and the insight of this, my 25th NAMM Show) shows things may not be growing as much as we’d like, but it’s not getting worse. Sail on, everything has its correction. Next year will post the numbers everyone is looking for now.

Look around in the pro audio ghetto (Hall A) and despite any misgivings about the health of the economy, you’ll find your fair share of new product intros and lively booth activity. On a closing note, happy anniversary wishes need to go out to QSC for surviving and thriving over the course of 40 years in this business, and special thanks to Shure Inc. for lending the legislative, moral, and technical support needed to guide us all through the current “White Spaces” maze in D.C.

So long for now–gd

We’re here with Dan Snyder of Intel, and if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to the pro audio industry the past couple of years, you must be aware of the reach that Intel has. We certainly all recognize the speed and power of the quad-core Intel Macs, but their work with Cakewalk has proven the mantra that cooperation is key. Dan, can you tell us about the latest developments, what we have going on at the show?

Hey guys, things are going great here at NAMM — my favorite tradeshow of the year! Being a guitarist I love to check out the show floor and drool all over the new gear! We at Intel just launched sixteen new processors last week at CES and we are thrilled to see how the developers and computer makers use and abuse our stuff. Cakewalk for example has completely optimized Sonar to use all the CPU cores (or “brains”) it sees, so our quad core processors will be kept very busy. No rest for any of you cores, haaha! Check out Cakewalk’s booth here at the show to see them in action.

The computer manufacturers also blow me away, Apple’s ultra sleek notebook announcement this week shows how closely we work with our customers, and most people who want it surely won’t wait for Christmas to ask Santa to treat them to it! In the specialty audio PC space, our friends at PC Audio Labs for example are on display at several booths here at NAMM. These systems are MONSTERS with balanced XLR ins and outs, terabyte+ storage and tested and tuned audio applications out of the box.

It’s never been a better time to be a computer musician than here at NAMM 2008!

We’re here with mobile man, Studio Without Walls, writer par excellence and the new face on the back page of EM. Mr. Nathaniel Kunkel!

well it sure is nice to be back here at NAMM. So nice to see all my friends again. seems like this is the only place I get to see them.

In addition to a bunch of fun mix projects that I’ve been working on, we, at Studio Without Walls, have been putting a lot of effort into creating some disk images for distribution made from our working-testing Intel Pro Tools systems. So many of my peers and I have been putting significant effort into getting our new Intel architecture Pro Tools rig stable that we figured it was about time we made all that effort available to everybody else. We’re hoping that concurrent with announcing Leopard compatibilty, we’ll be capable of publishing links to these images. I’m sure that Intel will be interested in disseminating this information, but in lieu of their effort, you can always check out studiowithoutwalls.com and we’ll be sure to have that information available for all of you out there in the production world.

This should be available with the announced Leopard compatibility…so stay tuned!

Carmen stepped away and we’re here with producer/composer/musician Michael Boddicker, who tells us he’s about to break ground on a new studio (hooray for studios!) in Encino. Michael, what type of space are you building?

We’re building a mix theater, with an SSL AWS 900 and the Euphonix MC5 controller. I work in Pro Tools and I use Logic and Final Cut Pro too. I’m also putting in a Pro Tools edit bay, a composition room and a great espresso machine. Carl Yanchar did the acoustics. Jaime Pavez is the architect. Of course we’re just starting the build, but we have hopes to do good-sized film projects.

So what brings you here wtih the Intel folks?

Awesome processing, incredible stability, more power than I can grow out of in a decade, available to me now. Plus, they’re really nice people.

Thank you, Michael!

Okay, last night we had a smokin’ hot party at the House of Blues to relaunch the new EM, and the grooves all night, the pulse behind the rockin’ party, was Carmen Rizzo. And he’s here with us now…

Carmen, what are you working on these days?

I just finished up a track with k.d. lang. i added aome of my sound, some strings, and we had a good time. Ijust finished an HBO show, called The Song Story, a documentary-style show with a record producer, me, finding three young people through You Tube and MySpace, and I produced the tracks. They’re looking to franchise it.

What have you seen at the show?

I was really impressed with the Gator cases. I have a luggage fetish and nobody pays attention to bags. M Audio (I’m on the cover of their new catalog) have some cool new products out.

You’re standing here with Intel. Last year on the producer’s panel, you said the most important piece of gear in your studio was your Intel Mac?

Now that I’ve been on my Intel Mac for a year, I can’t imagine working without it. I’m spoiled by the speed. I work both sides of the fence, and it’s pulled my studio together.

Anything else?

My new solo album is about to come out. Two other projects, Niyaz and Lal Meri, both on Six Degrees Records. Check ‘em out.

This mic from JZ, a new company formed by mic designer Juris Zarins, takes a cue from the doughnut. It has a hole in the center that acts as a port for a springloaded shock mount. This model offers cardioid, figure 8 and omni patterns and sells for $1850