Pics from the Namm show

Playing the sweetest note of my life on a Keytar

I went to the Winter NAMM show a few weeks back and snapped some pics with my blackberry. Thought I'd share. First up I got a little hands on time with the Ion Audio iCade. This thing is basically a little "arcade cab" that you slip your iPad into. Currently they have a licensing deal with Atari so they only had Asteroids playing, but the controls felt like genuine HAPP. It wasn't clear if you'd be able to load up your own Roms or if the software was closed. The guy at the booth was more of an audio guy so he didn't really know. All in all it seemed like a great purchase if you have an iPad:




Seems like the "things you plug into your iPad" is going to be a big niche industry for the music industry. Since the next thing I drooled over was the Korg MS20 Legacy Midi Controller. This thing is so sweet. It's all knobs and patch chords. I've used it to interface with Korg's MS20 soft synth on a computer, but at the show they had the MS20 software running on an iPad. IT was a totally portable set up and it sounded great:



Next up we have an official Tron themed iphone / ipad doc. Not much to say here, it is an ipad doc shaped like a Tron Data disc. As UK Mike would say, it does what it says on the tin:



Here is my buddy and band mate DJ Bractune playing a Moog Theremin. If you're not familiar with this device you should really Read up on it, it's totally crackers:



Down stairs in the basement was a wonderland of "home baked" synths and music gizmos. There were all sorts of Chinese outfits selling all manner of boards and chips and such. I'm not much of "chip bender" but some of the things these guys came up with was pretty impressive:





Next up we had a booth of guys who were showing of a vintage Fairlight CMI 2 synthesizer. This thing was a real treat. These babies were used by all sorts of musicians in the 80s but what I found most intriguing was the sweet "Light Pen" interface. This thing was pre-midi and pre-mouse controller. Totally ahead of it's time. The line was too long for me to get to try it, but I snapped a few pics over people's heads:




And I'll end up for something a little more "Rock and Roll" since I know not everyone on this forum is a big synth geek like myself. The classic UK outfit Orange Amplificationwas on hand with a wall of some of the finest amplifiers a man could wish for:



And all being drivin by a head unit with quite possible the greatest name ever bestowed on a piece of hardware the "Terror Bass":



It was a great show, didn't get to snap a picture of it but the Electron guys were there with their SIDstation, a device that I WILL own one day, mark my words.