2015 Winter NAMM Show Trends

NAMM Attendee

The latest Winter NAMM show, the semi-annual exhibition of musical instrument manufacturers occurring each January in Anaheim, has ended, and more so than most, this one reflects what’s happening in the music creation business and even the world we live in. 

NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) is unlike any convention anywhere, from the hustle and bustle of a Black Friday at the local mall, to the cacophony of simultaneous sounds from every kind of musical instrument imaginable, to a bevy of both legit and wanna be rockers bumping into you at every turn. The show is grueling, tedious and fun all at the same time.

Every year I post several editions of cool new gear that I spied at NAMM on my music production blog, but this post is particularly about the trends seen at the convention that show the latest from this side of the music industry and how it meshes with the more publicized production and business side. Here’s what I saw:

Avid Pro Tools First, Pro Tools 12 and Cakewalk Sonar - Avid’s Pro Tools is the king of the digital audio workstation (DAW) app in that it’s used by the majority of audio professionals in music and post. Avid is transitioning to the cloud with Pro Tools 12 and the free entry-level Pro Tools First, where you have the choice of buying the app outright, or paying a monthly fee. Of course, being in the cloud has it’s advantages for Avid, in that it can now charge users to store their projects there, and also to rent any plugins needed for the project. Also, being in the cloud also allows for online collaboration, which many see as the future of music creation.

While Pro Tools is primarily a Mac app, Cakewalk’s Sonar is one of the kings of the PC DAW world, and it too has introduced a monthly and yearly membership model to go along with a straight purchase of the software. Of course, this has been a viable business model for the tech world for some time, so it’s surprising that it took so long to be implemented on this end of the music business.

That said, it may not add up to the profits that these companies anticipate. Most professionals won’t indulge in the membership model because cloud recording just isn’t practical in terms of the number of simultaneous tracks that need to be recorded at any one time because of the upload bandwidth required. And while cloud storage of a project might have it’s advantages, most engineers, producers, artists, managers and record labels feel more comfortable with the data on a local hard drive that can be locked up or taken home for safety, at least at the moment. 

As far as cloud collaboration, there are a host of companies betting that this will be the next big thing, but it almost seems like a solution a problem that isn’t there. At least on the pro level, musicians and producers prefer working together in the same room to allow for the best interaction. That’s not always the case when it comes to guest players or vocalists, so I can see the need in that situation, but there still doesn’t seem to be a huge number of users clamoring for the feature, at least as far as I can see. Let’s see how this shakes out in a year. Read more on Forbes.

Top 10 DAWs For Songwriting

Songwriting is such a personal affair. Everyone does it differently and everyone has an idea on the best way to do it. These days, most people write with their favorite DAW to help them either flesh out the rhythm of the tune or simply remember any ideas. For some, that's a heartache in itself as sometimes there's more time spent on the technical aspect of the DAW than on the actual writing.

That said, here are the top 10 DAWs for songwriting as stated by songwriting.net.

1. PreSonus Studio One

2. Propellerhead Reason

3. FL Studio

4. Acoustica Mixcraft

5. Apple Logic

6. Sony Acid Pro

7. Steinberg CuBase

8. Avid Pro Tools

9. Cakewalk Sonar

10. Ableton Live

I'm not sure that I agree with everything on this list, especially the order, but then again, to each his own when it comes to DAW choices. I sometimes think that the easiest thing is a simple handheld recorder by Zoom, Tascam or even a recording app on an iPhone to capture the ideas. You can always flesh them out later on the DAW. Then again, if you're writing around beats and loops, then the songs starts in the DAW in the first place.

What's your choice?

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The New King Of Music Production Software?

There's an interesting new chart (seen on the left) making its way around the Internet from Digital Music Doctor that shows the popularity of both Sonar and Cubase exceeding Pro Tools for the first time during the first quarter of 2011. Both Sonar and Cubase are great pieces of software and have quite a large installed base that I'm sure is growing, but there's a flaw in this DAW hysteria.

Digital Music Doctor doesn't measure the installed base of users or even sales of software packages, they measure Internet search results. This is like saying that Rebecca Black should be on the top of the sales charts based on her Internet popularity, when we know that those numbers have nothing to do with actual sales (which are dismal despite nearly 200 million YouTube views).

I'm no shill for Pro Tools but I can tell you that if you really want to work professionally in just about any area of the entertainment business, knowing how to use it is a necessity because that's what the majority of pros use. From music production to film and television post to voice-over work to anything else you can think of, it's a Pro Tools world for the most part. That's not to say that any of the other fine DAWs don't have their place. They're great learning and production tools, every one of them. But if you're looking for a job that has to do with audio, you'll need some Pro Tools operational skill no matter which way you cut it.

This comes from a person who started with Digital Performer version 1.0, then switched to Nuendo 1.0 (which I loved), only to go kicking and screaming into the Pro Tools world after it became just too painful transferring projects back and forth to those other platforms. I've never looked back and my projects never suffered from the change. So just a word of warning when looking at software popularity charts; they don't always tell the whole story.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Music Software Popularity

The second Music Software Popularity Index for the second quarter of 2009 has arrived from the Digital Doctor website. The ten most popular music software products, based on recent search engine activity, are:

PRODUCT (INDEX)
1. DigiDesign Pro Tools (13.3)
2. Steinberg Cubase (10.2)
3. FL Studio (8.3)
4. Cakewalk Sonar (7.1)
5. Apple Logic (4.5)
6. Adobe Audition (3.8)
7. Ableton Live (3.5)
8. Apple GarageBand (3.3)
9. Sony Sound Forge (2.9)
10. Sony Acid (2.8)
11. Band-In-A-Box

12. MOTU Digital Prformer

13. Propellerhead Reason

14. Steinberg Wavelab

15. Steinberg Nuendo

This index is based on quarterly Internet search activity on Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Collectively these 4 search engines represent more than 95% of the searches on the Internet. Over 100 search terms are used to construct this index, and 15 music software products are tracked. An annual average of the past four quarters is also included for comparison.

I've used a lot of these software packages myself. I was a Digital Performer user from version 1.0 until I switched to version 1.0 of Nuendo. Played around with Cubase, Logic and Reason for a while, and actually did a few television cues in GarageBand. Recently got into using Ableton Live a bit too.

But after many years of trying to avoid Pro Tools, I finally gave in 3 or 4 years ago and never looked back. Pro Tools is the de facto standard in just about every major studio, every professional audio production, and every post house. It's cheap and easy to get into, and with version 8, it's assimilated the best parts of virtually every other DAW out there, not to mention rock solid in function (I never had a crash yet).

Although it's great to have competition in the marketplace, if you want to work in pro situations, you have to be well-versed in Pro Tools.

Additional details are available at the Digital Music Doctor website.