Ahhhhh, NAMM. It’s a glorious time. For any musician, regardless of style, genre, race, religious views, THIS is 100% AWESOME. Think every holiday ever rolled into one and dumped in the Anaheim convention center. We’re here to tell you about some of the exceptional new products that are on display. From black-light sensitive drum sticks (HitSticks.com) to Blue Microphone’s Mikey: a microphone with three gain settings that sticks right into your iPod. See what I’m talking about? I’ve mention TWO things, and I know you’re excited.
Racket Patrick and I fanned out, scoping out everything from Sennheiser’s always-intense array of microphones, DJ Mike Relm video remixing “Charlie Bit Me” for Rane and the pro studio equipment with touch screen mixing boards that I admit, I drooled about.
As we know that a majority of you fine readers could care less about a 32 track mixing board with on-board effects, we’ll keep it to the stuff that’s ACTUALLY useful for home recording and young bands.
Let’s say you’re an aspiring podcaster, you may ask yourself what you need to get you comedy skits onto the Web. Well, we got you. You’ll need a mic, a laptop/desktop and some mixing software. If you happen to have invested in a Mac, you’re already set with Garageband, though I will tell you that the built in mic may work for late night video chats with the gf, but not so much for people actually understanding what you’re saying.
Though Samson’s USB mic made a valiant effort, I’d say the Blue Microphone Snowball is your best bet. Multiple settings (cardiod, supercardioid and omni) allows you to minimize the background noise of mom and Aunt Vickie discussing Days of Our Lives in the living room. It’s USB connection is seriously easy to plug and play and you can get it for around $100.
Now, if you did not invest in a mac, no problem, there’s still hope. You cooould go with the all-encompassing ProTools (which has free downloads online,) but it generally works better with an M-Box, and honestly, has too many bells and whistles for the average user. You could get Cakewalk’s Sonar software, which is $120-$150, meaning it’ll pop up for around $99 every now and then. You could also download Audacity, an open source sound editor for free! So, Audacity, Mic and (previously existing compy) now has you at $100 to get going. Learning is fun, no!?
Bands, you, too, should pay attention to NAMM announcements, as you can find the latest models of guitars, basses, drums and more. For the songwriter, I have heard that you wish you could have a portable, albeit good, recorder for song ideas. Well, check out our Olympus LS-10 review HERE. Anyone who knows anything knows that any aspiring band needs a 4-track recorder. While Tascam and Roland make some good ones, the Zoom H4N not only has XLR, but it already has a pair of condenser mics set up in XY. If you have no idea what that means, it means “two free microphones already installed for good stereo sound.
Now, NAMM is not simply a dreamland of music tech, they ACTUALLY do good in the world, too. The do music education workshops and even run the NAMM Foundation, which you can peep here.
Until next year’s goodies, we’re out
Patrick Mason and Jonathan Yost