I got back from MusikMesse yesterday night, while the other guys are still attending. It was my first show ever, and I have to say I totally enjoyed my time with the other guys – we’re quite spread across Europe, so it was a very good chance to meet and to have good long conversations and diners after knocking off the Messe days. But also, I personally find the event a bit too exhausting for my tender nervous system. It is really nice and important to meet people at the booth and anywhere, but the overall impression overload just totally overwhelmed me. One must get used to it, I assume.

Whatever, I’m not complaining here, also I was there only 3 days including the preparation day. But also, my confusion pretty much put a spoke in my wheel: there were quite some things I wanted to check out, actually. The Percussa AudioCubes for example, which I knew from the net before, but touching a tactile product is really more effective. I loved their booth – all dark, you could only see the cubes and some screens. I also ran into a demo and asked some questions, but I’m now rather more confused about how I could use them for my own personal performances than before (which rather has something to do with my above described hypersensivity, not with the presentation itself).

And then, after having coped with the incredible no photos sign I suddenly found in our booth, I read about something called DS-10 (a MS-10 emulation for the Nintendo DS by Korg) in the comments on Create Digital Music. I went to the Korg stand and tried to find it, but believe me … this stand was the most overtaxing one for me. So many different products (a lot of them quite exciting, but I think I had already seen most of them before) – all the Kaoss-whatever devices, from big to small. And an actual battle of presenters! Something like almost 10 different guys, all presenting completely different stuff and most of them quite into what they were doing. Respect, but let me get outta here, please! And the guy I asked about the DS-10 couldn’t help me, although he was wearing a Korg shirt; maybe I shouldn’t have asked him only 1.5 meters away from the speaker, but then again: where is that holy place on Musikmesse where there is no speaker within spitting distance?

Lucky enough, I just found out there’s some coverage about it over at CDM and MusicThing. Hopefully there will be somebody clearing the situation about distribution outside Japan, I am certainly not the right ambassador for that kinda stuff, sorry guys. But as I already tried and liked some homebrew music software approaches on my DS, I would be seriously interested in checking it out. Forgive me Pierre (who’s a quite avid MS-10 owner: “… how could you squeeze an MS-10 into a Nintendo DS??”).

The bottom line is: my Musikmesse experience was not about knowingly checking things out, but rather about accidental discovery.

For me personally, the highlight of MusikMesse 2008 was the announcement of Direct Note Access in Melodyne 2 by celemony (watch the demo movies on their website). Unfortunately, I missed all presentations at the booth – done by Peter Neubäcker, the founder of celemony and originator of Melodyne himself.

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.

I think this is where technology can be truly inspiring. This is such a simple (or simplifying) thing – in terms of the result, or the benefit for musicians, not in terms of the process/algorithms involved in the process. I can already see a lot of creative possibilities I could gain from that concept (for sure, this is an assumption based on not having actually used the software, but if you’ll ever be in a 3 meter radius of this congenial bearded man, all you could do is trust him! ;-)

Coming across that is mainly exciting for me, since as a musician/producer, I have never thought of using Melodyne in some way. I’m not working with a lot of vocals anyway, why should I use a software to correct wacky singing? You wish! Once again, much more and not less euphoric about it on CDM and MusicThing – and Peter talking to the press on Sonic State.

Another lovely surprise was the drum replacer plugin Drumagog. Their product is around since 9 years now, as the guy on the stand told me. Never heard of it before. Well, but also the original intention of the plugin could not really arouse my interest: you can replace drum sounds of single drum tracks with whatever samples without the need of re-recording anything. That’s something for the professional studio/recording guys.

But at MusikMesse, they had setup a more creative example: they built a standard type of drum kit with kitchen utensils, each with a microphone. Every microphone goes into a single track of Ableton Live, each containing an instance of Drumagog as an insert. Like that, playing the kitchen kit triggers real drum sounds coming out of the speakers. A really funny effect, although the technology behind it seems so impressively simple. Imagine building a drumkit with cardboard boxes and spilling out really nasty electronic sounds. I’m sure somebody has done that before, and I think the technical part could also be done with a self-made Max/Mxp patch (at least on a quality level that is enough for a more experimental approach).

As a long time fanatic of the MPC (or drum pads in general) I also had to check out the new Akai MPD32 software control surface. Unfortunately, the Akai stand was close to the DJ/”Remix” area, which was the most edgy and loudest part I saw at the show, so I was not really a patient man. My review in short: the pads were totally inspiring (as expected), I quite liked the faders and knobs but for some reason, the overall product did not fully convince me yet.

So, I missed all the serious new stuff, right? ;-)