Waldorf’s Zarenbourg electric piano was on display at their NAMM booth. Beholding its grand, future-retro design, you’ll immediately wonder: are there tines and pickups under the Zarenbourg’s hood, or a digital sound engine? The answer, alas, is the latter, which will be appreciated by keyboardists who value the ability to use multiple built-in sounds and […]

Why should you get excited about Nexsyn, the hybrid soft synth/sample player available starting today from KeyToSound that was developed by Max Groenlund, creator of the Studio 9000 for Koblo? While I could ramble on about Nexsyn’s true stereo signal path, its 4 Gig Big Fish Audio sample library, its ability to load a 400MB […]

In this case it was “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” as the folks at Moog backed up their promise of ANOTHER DIMENSION with an intimate solo theremin performance. A sizable crowd enjoyed this breath of fresh air in a convention jam packed with high energy live gigs. Ed.: Moog Music has an incredible group […]

It’s been pretty quiet at winter NAMM as far as the major DAWs; Mackie released Tracktion 3 but the larger players either just released major updates (Cubase SX 4, DP 5, SONAR 6, Live 6, and the Pro Tools 7.x updates) or have yet to upgrade (ahem, Logic 8, anyone?). That didn’t stop Cakewalk from […]

If you really like the idea of creating your own Logic EXS24 sample patches but end up not because it’s really, really a pain in the ass, you will love Keymap from Redmatica. The demo I saw took a single audio file of half a dozen instrument samples at different pitches, then automatically sliced them […]

Audio Impressions had a working demo of their flagship orchestral library, DVZ. Well, ok—just the strings were demoed, but the full package with over 600 instruments is scheduled to de-vaporize and ship in March. Audio Impressions > Products > Realtime Instruments (DVZ) DVZ (pronounced “di-vi-zee”) promises a unique experience for those yearning to achieve new […]

Wallace is CDM’s resident turntablist, and he’s also immune to blind gear lust. I’m waiting to pass judgment until I get first-hand contact with Xponent, but I’m equally confused from a product perspective. Now, let’s see — we could copy and paste a press release here. Or we could try Wally. I just hope we’re […]

Was 2006 the year that manufacturers really started paying attention to visualists? Sure, the DVJ-X1 has been out for 3 years now, but prices of video mixers and custom video hardware like the DVJ mean it’s not really a tool for aspiring VJs to dip their toes into the form. So purpose-built VJ hardware has […]