Gadgetory

hey this is Danny with the birch and we're here in Anaheim California at NAB which is the National Association of music merchants show now a lot of this show does center around traditional instrumentation so we're talking pianos drums guitars things like that but there is a portion of it that is devoted to technology and there's a lot of it so we're gonna wander inside and see what we find and play around with a lot of cool stuff and hopefully we will uncover some cool technology that we can share with you so there's really been two overarching themes have been really interesting at NAMM this year and that's the educational side where people are really trying to simplify the music making process and make it so that total beginners can enter and not feel scared and can can learn to play any sort of instrument with relative ease we saw teenage engineering they came out with some new pocket operators and they're very cool little calculator size kind of mousetrap looking things that are sequencers with a very minimal set of buttons and they're new ones let you actually record vocal samples into them so you can take your own voice and create a completely synthesized version of it and play around with it it's it's really wild they're cheap they're fun to use those were great and then we also saw this little thing called the blip phlox which is a synth that cement for three to eight year olds they which is insane and it's got these little arrows on the top that show you the signal how it goes throughout the instrument from button to button to the eventual output so the idea is for little kids to get comfortable with the origins of synthesis before they actually graduate to some that requires a little more precision and attention then we also saw the one highlight piano strip so it's an 88 key strip that you place on top of your keyboard and guitar trio style it teaches you how to play the notes light up as they're supposed to drop down on-screen and you just follow along I tried playing it I screwed up quite a few times but after about five minutes I got the hang of the melody and nailed a hundred percent I felt really good about it - it's great we're also seeing this whole category sort of third-party add-ons of do all things that you can use in conjunction with equipment that you already have to add functionality or to make them even better than they already were another thing that we saw was a little rectangle called sustain and the phase is something that you put on top of a record on a turntable and it communicates with a hub and your computer to eliminate the need for a tone arm so you can scratch a record you can scrub through songs and you don't need to have a needle you don't need to have a tone arm at all it's wild also solving the tonearm problem we had a company called 'rain which had actually created a brand new turntable from scratch that did not have a tone arm built into it whatsoever and that had a little pad on the side where the tone arm would traditionally be but it was a smart strip instead and you could just take your finger and run it on the side and use that to find your position within the song where ever you wanted the song to land just in a weird part of the music spectrum there's been a couple of VR experiences as well there's a company called arrow drums which lets you play drums in VR so you have the sticks and then you have metallic reflectors on your feet and then there's camera and using oculus you can play an entire drum kit without making any noise without actually buying a drum kit at all and you can swap out the drums to make a custom drum kit to whatever specifications you would want so there's definitely a couple of companies that are trying to figure out how music can be accessible in a VR space how successful they are I'm not really sure but it really was fun to try them out at the very least so those are really the two main categories that we're seeing here at NAMM and it's a really interesting time because over the past few years there has been this intersection of music and tech that has really tried to simplify the music making process and it's cool to be here and to see all of it in person to watch that revolution happening for more information and to follow more news about music and technology follow us at the verge calm