NAMM 2013 Day Two...

Okay, NAMM, we need to talk. It’s time you put on your big boy pants and moved to a real convention center. Anaheim was fun and all (okay, well, not really), but you’ve grown too large. It’s time to consider moving to a larger convention center like L.A. or, if I might be so bold, Vegas. Anaheim can’t feed all the people. Anaheim doesn’t have room for all the vendors. Anaheim doesn’t have a place to put all the cars. And wouldn’t Anaheim really be happier just getting people to Disneyland, which is all they truly want to do anyhow?

In any event, between the two and a half hours (!!!) I spent parking and screaming at shuttle bus drivers, the hour (!!!) I spent in line trying to get lunch, and the hour (!!!) I spent un-parking, I didn’t actually see very much yesterday. It was a banner day for the Anaheim Convention Center service industries. Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

So, with that:

1. Eventide H9: This is a pretty crafty product. It’s actually sort of a meta-pedal, and you get an iOS app to program it. Not great for synth-tweakers like the other pedals, which have banks of knobs for performance (you have to use the iPad app to program it) but the shear amount of DSP power in this tiny little pedal is somewhat overwhelming. It is more-or-less identical to the other pedals inasmuch as you, say, load up the Black Hole preset, and it’s exactly like the the Black Hole algo on the Space pedal. Feels solid as hell, and looks great. If it had a “Like” button, I’d press it.

2. Eowave: Nori Ubukata was in the Eowave booth, and he was playing one of the stranger things I’ve seen at NAMM. Eowave makes a stand-alone ribbon controller, and he had it driving an oscillator/VCA combo. This was sent to a gong/speaker thing. In this way, he was able to “play” the resonant frequencies of the gong/speaker thing with the ribbon controller. Very odd and cool sounds. Throw that shit through the H9 pedal and we have ourselves a drone party! They had the Magma, of course, which is their current marquee product, and they were also showing a 6U all-in-one modular. It is labelled in French, so I wasn’t able to parse out its full complement, but it looks pretty nice and capable.

Other than that, I had a couple meetings, and I wasn’t actually at the convention very long, so I didn’t see anything else worth noting. Today I have no meetings and I’m going pretty early, so it should be more productive.