California dreaming
This year’s NAMM show brought an intriguing array of product launches to the table…
NAMM 2024 had a lot riding on it, being the first fully-fledged January show since the pre-pandemic era. The industry collectively pondered whether the NAMM show would still remain the draw it’s always been for music tech manufacturers, or whether the rise in online and influencer-aligned marketing strategies might dilute the need for many to attend.
While we’re writing this, the show is currently underway in its typical spot in Anaheim, California, and all indications are that it has proven itself to still be a vital networking and exhibiting hub. But what you really want to know is, what did the show tell us about what’s to come in 2024, right?
From a software point of view, there wasn’t a great deal to write home about, with most of the big stories being in the hardware domain. Korg unveiled a salvo of new keyboards and synths: particularly tantalising is the announcement of the microKORG 2, the follow-up to one of our favourite synths of all time. Like its hailed predecessor, the microKORG 2 is built around a virtual analogue synth engine. The synth’s polyphonic architecture can handle up to eight voices, and sounds can be layered in Dual mode to create multi-timbral patches. The synth comes with 512 presets categorised into eight banks labelled by genre, and custom sounds can be saved in its 64-slot patch memory.
Other impressive hardware that dazzled us included Yamaha’s all-in-one Seqtrack, and Supercritical Synthesizers’ ‘Demon Core Oscillator’-driven Redshift 6. For us in-the-boxbased folks, there was the sublime-looking Space Rider spatial effects suite from Waves, the gorgeously UI’d Voice Enhancement Assistant (VEA) from iZotope, and CM favourites u-he demonstrated its upcoming free version of the latest iteration of Zebra, with Zebralette 3. We can’t wait to take a hands-on look at this modern upgrade to what has become a real Plugin Suite favourite.
There’s likely to be more releases we haven’t mentioned, which we’ll fill you in on next issue. In the meantime head to MusicRadar.com for the complete coverage and show reporting.