NAMM Day 1!

 NAMM Day 1:

    What a day to start! Today was my first day attending the National Association of Music Merchants, and this years conference began with a plenary with the other award recipients. Much of the talk was standard welcome speak, but a bit in we got to hear from Victor Wooten. He spend a bit speaking of his start with music, and what we should do to make the most of the conference, which is about what we had been hearing for while: talk to people.  

    Quickly afterwards I had to work a shift with MusicMax, most of which was spent talking with the manufacturers and learning the gear they were showing off. Most interestingly though was Flock Audio. I spent a lot of my shift speaking with Ben of MusicMax about Flock audios hybrid digital-analog gear, analog gear with digital interfaces. Most interestingly for me was a budget model of a 16 channel digital patchbay releasing later this year for $1000, a patchbay with a digital interface aimed towards budget and home studios. It was nice to get a slow introduction to the showroom floor, because it was massive! Heres a short burst of things that caught my eye today:

• Dreamtronics Vocaflex AI formant shifter, which uses imaging of voices to match your voice live via formant shifting. There is embedded in each export an invisible audio watermark attached to your account, allowing for safety in knowing when the tool was used and by who. 

• New voice banks for SynthV Studio 2

• Eclipsed sounds, a voicebank manufacturer also showed off new voice banks

• Soundtoys has a new spectral reverb update

• New budget condenser mic from Telefunken with a flat EQ curve, which is nice for my voice.

Today had some interesting sessions to go to, a couple of the more notable being a vocal processing session, and a session to go over generational gaps in music teams. While the vocal processing session was pleasant, to be honest much of the session was spent talking about the panelists experiences with vocals. While interesting, I did not come away with too much. The generational panel was much more interesting, with one of the speakers being sound designer Rick Allen. Here, I was able to learn a lot about the mindset differences between older and younger musicians, an important thing since I eventually want to be leading team of many different artists. Overall, a busy but good first day at NAMM, I still need to make time to check out the entire arena exhibit.