It’s NAMM time, which means we’ve got a deluge of new gear to sort through. And while here at CDM we believe you can make music without pricey tools, we enjoy drooling and lusting as much as anyone else. Next week, we can go back to being practical and budget-minded.
CDM Team Coverage begins now. In New York City, yours truly — I couldn’t make Anaheim this year, so I’ll be reporting from the CDM Studios / Worldwide HQ. In Anaheim, Josh Jancourtz, new to CDM, will be out photographing the show and getting close to the gear first-hand.
In Anaheim? Share your snaps! If you’re in Anaheim and want to contribute, feel free to upload images to the CDM flickr group. Tag them NAMM. (Yep, empty now — won’t stay that way for long.) And yes, this goes for manufacturers. Expense your AA batteries to your employer.
Why do we cover things last? When new products are announced, manufacturers often release press releases “under embargo”, which means you’re not supposed to publish information about them until a certain date. A number of websites (not mentioning any names) routinely violate the embargoes, or willfully ignore international time zones (embargoes are dated Anaheim time), or pull incomplete information from sales sites. Sometimes this appears to be intentional; sometimes foreign PR seems not to be in sync with North American embargoes. Then that gets out to other blogs (who can rightfully say they’re just sourcing the other sites.) We don’t do that at CDM, because we want to communicate with the manufacturers directly, and if we start breaking embargoes, they’ll stop talking to us. Now, I have nothing against the way the other sites work — I sneak peaks at them, too — but since I know you’re often reading stuff at CDM last, I’ll try to make it worth your while, by getting information that’s not in the PR and adding our spin instead of theirs.
Stay tuned today, as we’ve got a torrent of incoming information we’ll be able to post through the day, from the likes of M-Audio, Native Instruments, Apple, Korg, and others. Now, excuse me, I’m putting on another pot of coffee.