Musikmesse 2008 in review

Musikmesse 2008 in review

19 March, 2008 | 10.00AM

• Section: Music News Topics: Technology
• Written by: francispreve

Every March, Musikmesse — the European version of the NAMM show — takes place in Germany.

In terms of new electronica production tools, many of the offerings at this year’s event tended to be extremely practical, but not quite revolutionary.

With the exception of two amazing innovations, which we’ll discuss here.

First up, there were several new keyboards and interfaces from Clavia, Steinberg, M-Audio, and Yamaha.

VirSyn also announced their TDesign plug-in, which is sort of like a highly specialized compressor that allows you to change the attack and sustain characteristics of drums and such, which is fantastic for adding punch and presence to your tracks.

One of the show-stoppers came from Korg, demonstrating again that they truly understand the club scene.

The product?

Their amazing little DS-10 Nintendo DS mini-studio, which we covered on Beatportal.

But the earth-shattering news came from Celemony, makers of Melodyne.

For those who may not have heard of Melodyne [screenshot right], it’s an audio workstation — and also a separate plug-in — that allows you to completely rewrite the pitch and timing of any audio signal.

With Melodyne, you can take a vocal performance and fix bad notes or even create new melodies.

Until now, this could only be done with single notes, not chords or polyphonic material.

In fact, the ability to change a single note in a chord was considered a technical impossibility, due to the nature of sound itself.

Well, apparently the designers at Celemony are able to transcend certain laws of physics, because their extraordinary Direct Note Access technology can deconstruct recorded chords (like those within a funky guitar part) and provide detailed control over them.

We could go on and on about the specifics, but the video at the Celemony website does a much better job.

So there you have it.

Now it’s time to start bracing yourselves for WMC.

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