New Music Gear Monday: Yamaha Raijin Drum Cube

This may be just a prototype, but it's so different that I had to include it in New Music Gear Monday. It's the Yamaha Raiijin Drum Cube, a whole new way to play drums.

Raiijin is Japanese for thunder, which is an appropriate name for this ball of drums. And what's interesting about this is that it was designed by the Motor division of Yamaha and not the music instrument division for one of it's inter-company competitions (called AH A May or Yamaha spelled backwards).

While the Drum Cube might look cool, I'm not so sure it's practical. First of all the drums radiate in a circle, which might be a problem if they're not all miked. The fact that there's a lot of places to hang mics from would be a positive though. And the one thing you don't see happening on the following demo is the drummer just laying down a beat.

It looks pretty uncomfortable too, but that would mean that you'd never have a drummer slacking off during a gig.

Thanks to my buddy Jesse Siemanis for the heads up.

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Yamaha To Acquire Line 6

In a move that surprised many in the industry, the MI market was shaken up on Friday when it was announced that Yamaha has agreed to acquire guitar and amp company Line 6. Few details of the agreement have been revealed except that Line 6 will be operated as a wholly owned subsidiary, and that management team will remain in place and the brand will continue.

While acquisitions like this sometimes mean that the company being bought was in trouble financially, that's not the case here, as both sides are quite pleased with the strategic nature of the situation. Line 6's investors were able to cash out and the company will be able to gain some much needed marketing clout and expertise from Yamaha, while Yamaha gains some great proprietary technology and expertise that they need as well.

My take is that while it's tough to see another large MI company absorbed by an even larger one, this is the nature of the business and something to be expected. In all industries you have the mega, the medium and the boutique. The mega's tend to acquire the medium companies, which opens up room for the boutiques to grow. If you're a small company in the MI business, you have Ghandi's words to follow:

"First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win."

In business, winning can mean a lot of things, from growing to becoming a mega corporation, to going public, to growing just big enough to keep the founder happy, or to selling out to a larger company. In the case of Line 6, it's the latter, so congrats to the executive team at the company, and here's to keeping the brand alive.

Just another reason why NAMM should be all the more interesting this year.

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New Music Gear Monday: The Yamaha/Steinberg Nuage

People that work on Nuendo absolutely love it, as well they should. It has a slick user interface and it sounds great. One of the things that the platform has sorely needed was a worksurface as good as the software, something that Steinberg, then Yamaha has struggled with. That now may be over with the introduction of Nuage (which is French for cloud).

Nuage is an integrated system comprised of worksurfaces, a Master Control unit, analog and digital IO, and a PCI network card. It's designed to work at up to 128 channels of 192k/24 bit source audio, which while impressive, is overkill since Yamaha says the unit is directed at post, which is a 48k/24 bit world.

Take a look at the video. Nuage is slick and you get the feeling that you can just jump right in and work. The price is said to be $18,000 to $30,000, depending upon the configuration, which might be a little too pricey for the American market. I'm sure we'll learn more at NAMM in January. Visit the Nuage page for more info.

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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.