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 The largest International musical instrument show in the world is held at the Frankfurt Messe every year in March. There were many exciting new products shown this year, some that were introduced at NAMM, and quite a few brand new ones as well. In depth reviews will be posted throughout the year on our Great Gizmos page, but here are some of our initial impressions of the big show and some of the most interesting new products we found: 
First of all, it was great for us to hear so many manufacturers featuring
Spectrasonics samples in their product demos. Our sounds were used in several
of the Roland product demos for the XV-5080, the VP-9000 and the Guitar
products. Every station at Emagic had Spectrasonics samples loaded into the
EXS24s for demoing. Metamorphosis is clearly already a favorite amongst the
demonstrators at Emagic and Roland!  Our favorite product demo both musically and in its clever application of our samples was the Virus Indigo demo by Marc Schlaile from Access. Killer music and really cool use of Burning Grooves, Metamorphosis and processing the Brazilian vocals from Vocal Planet through the filters of the Virus. It's really worth checking out as a creative way to use our samples with synthesis. Download the MP3 to check it out! Software, Virtual Instruments and Plug-Ins were the talk of the show floor, and there was much wonder to behold....things are moving at a very rapid pace in the software world. As at NAMM, Celemony's Melodyne "elastic audio" Mac software was stunning people at regular intervals with its amazingly intuitive interface and incredible sound quality. It's one of those programs that changes your perceptions about what is possible with digital audio manipulations. They've definitely raised the bar quite a few notches! Lots of jaws dropping at that booth. Expect to hear about this program a lot. What a perfect program to use with Vocal Planet too!  Emagic was certainly the software juggernaught this year with 10 (!) new products introduced. Logic 5.0 looks really sharp with more new plug-ins and a more pro automation system that integrates with the new Logic Control moving fader controller designed by Mackie....(which looked incredible, BTW and only $799......unbelievable!). We played with the new ES2 virtual synth a little bit and were knocked out! It was extremely powerful sounding, ultra-flexible and could very well end-up the king of the native virtual analog plug-ins. (Watch out Pro-52!) The EVP-88 virtual electric piano is cool too (especially the Wurlitzer sound, dynamic range and built-in FX). Emagic had a very nice new vocoder/formant filter plug-in that we'll have much fun processing things with. Virtual Sampler competition is heating up dramatically with Steinberg's gorgeous looking HALion VST sampler to be shipping soon. Its interface is both beautiful and innovative. Emagic's wildly popular EXS24 has now broken out of Logic and there are new versions for TDM and for VST hosts. It now reads SampleCell and Soundfont libraries as well as Akai. The new EXSP24 VST has all the features of the full EXS, but without the mapping and waveform editors....rumored to be not much more than $100. Not to be outdone, Creamware entered the fray with a native VST version of their Powersampler, but called "Volksampler" ......ready for the price??? FREE! What's next....companies paying people to use their sampler?  Lot's of cool stuff for vocal processing at this show. Steinberg's Voice Processor plug-in can do formant shifting, replaying the melody from a MIDI keyboard (ala Roland's VP-9000), Auto-Tuning and a very clever real-time harmony mode. The sound quality we heard at the demo was extremely good. One very interesting plug-in that many people seemed to miss was the Prosoniq Magenta real-time resynthesizer plug-in. It was generating awesome pad sounds based on the harmonics of an audio track or real-time mic input. You can play it live polyphonically through MIDI. Sounded something like a vocoder's cousin...but different and quite unique. On our short list of things to check into once they are available.  Native Instruments is definitely on a worldwide sonic-domination mission. We were happy to see that they've picked up the development of one of our secret weapons -Absynth- that we used extensively on Metamorphosis. Native will be porting it to the VST, MAS and Pro Tools Direct I/O plug-in standards. Most showgoers were hearing it for the first time, and were blown away at the unique sounds it's capable of. Absynth really is something brand new in the world of synthesis. In the "virtual hardware emulation" camp, Native introduced the FM7, which is designed to be the ultimate FM synth replacer. Coolest features are that it reads the patch data from every generation of Yamaha FM synth, and it has integrated FX and some brand new extensions to the original Yamaha designs. Looks good on paper, but our initial impression checking it out in the phones was that it was pretty sterile sounding....even much more so than a DX7....but we'll reserve final judgment on it until we can check out the final version. Native's Spectral Delay was also turning a lot of heads. It's very powerful, surprising sounding and it is a bit like what you can do with Metasynth sonically, but all in real-time and with an outstanding interface. Native's Battery looks like a much nicer version of the LM-4, with a much more powerful interface. Steinberg also introduced the brand new Attack virtual percussion synthesizer VST instrument, created by Waldorf. Sounded like a dead-on "virtual Kraftwerk" blippy drum box, with an outstanding sound that rivaled real analog percussion synths. Techno-kids do not miss this one! Ableton's LIVE software has been getting some buzz, since it is the first loop software ever created with the attention of live performance and improvisation of loop creation. Unfortunately, it was very hard to tell in the demo how good the quality of the time-stretching was, since the demonstration used such ridiculously bad sounding electronica loops. The interface looked a bit cheesy, but you can tell that there is definitely some great potential there. Keep tuning in to www.spectrasonics.net for a full report on LIVE in the coming months. Bridging the gap between hardware and software was the concept of Novation's new Reason Remote keyboard. It has generic knobs with a Reason template overlay, as well as battery power and built-in speakers. Definitely a smart idea....although it remains to be seen if the implementation is any good, or it's just a good marketing idea.....here's hoping for the former. Roland introduced a funny looking new groovebox called the D-2, which looked like a piece of orange candy (apparently to please those nutty dance folks!). It had some interesting features, and a unique spin pad, where you twirl your index finger to trigger RPS patterns and FX changes including a realistic scratching effect. Toylike...but fun.  The new Roland RD-700 88 note performance keyboard was introduced at Frankfurt, and it was a knockout in style, sound (OK, we're biased since we worked on the sounds) and especially ease of use. This may be the most perfect live oriented keyboard yet, with easy layering and sounds arranged in categories under dedicated buttons. It reads two of the SRX expansion boards in addition to it's internal sound set, which is based on the 3080, the RD-500 and brand new samples. The new main piano is really excellent. It also featured a brand new weighted keyboard action, which was on the heavier side, but very much like an acoustic piano. The good part is that you wouldn't lose your acoustic chops as much, if you were gigging with the RD-700....it's a vigorous workout! This is a recommended keyboard for guys that just want to play, but still have the possibility of fat layered sounds at their disposal. We predict a big hit, and a long sales life for the RD-700. Speaking of expansion boards, the new Roland SRX-03 Studio and SRX-04 Strings boards will be out soon, and they came out very well, with a great complement of sounds to the internal set of the XV series. We didn't get a chance to check it in person, but Yamaha's new Motif keyboard sounds like a powerful workstation that might be worth closer inspection. Last but not least, our favorite hardware at the show was a little box that wasn't even designed for musicians at all. The Red Sound Cycloops was designed as a real-time remixing sampler for DJs. The outstanding thing about it was that it constantly kept its sync and adjusted the time streching length of its loops in real-time, even while it was sampling! The product only has about eight buttons, and the interface is ridiculously simple. Basically, its what everyone wishes you could do with a looping sampler, but all the manufacturers and software designers always make too complex. The demo was jamming! Cycloops looks totally FUN, sounded excellent and has a myriad of applications. It wouldn't surprise us if this becomes a new secret weapon of dance and hip-hop producers. It's less than $400 bucks....so get it before everyone else discovers how cool it is! There was much more at Frankfurt (about 10 NAMM show's worth in fact!), but that's a few of the things that caught our eyes and ears! Hey.. have you heard about 
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