NAMM 2021 – What’s new?

Fender just launched their brand new Noventa series – and if you look closely you can understand what’s going on: all guitars are equipped with Fender MP-90s P90 pickups. All guitars feature 21 medium jumbo frets, a 9.5″ radius and a maple neck with maple (Daphne Blue, Surf Green, Fiesta Red, Vintage Blonde finishes) or Pau Ferro (Crimson Red, Walnut and Two-Color sunburst finishes) fretboard.

The stratocaster comes with two P90 pickups and is available in Daphne Blue, Surf Green and Crimson Red Transparent. The telecaster comes with a single bridge pick-up, a classic tele bridge with compensated saddles and is available in Vintage Blonde, Fiesta Red and Two-Color sunburst.

Finally, the Jazzmaster features three P90 pickups with a simple control layout and is available in Surf Green, Fiesta Red and Walnut.

The Korg Modwave is a tribute to the wavetable sounds of the classic 1985 DW-8000 synthesizer, updated with Korg’s futuristic Motion Sequencing and the tried-and-tested Kaoss Physics engine for creating amazing tones. Featuring 37 standard sized velocity-sensitive keys, two wavetable oscillators per program as well as a sub-oscillator / noise generator with one of 12 filter types (including MS-20, Polysix multi-filter) and a rather modern OLED display to work on your sounds, this is a great addition to the arsenal of synth enthusiasts.

The ARP 2600 M is a blast from the past: this semi-modular analog synthesizer features a polyphony of 2-voices, 3 VCO, VCF, VCA, noise generator, ring modulator, two original ARP 2600 Filter (Type 4012 and Type 4072), built-in speaker and a plethora of connections for your MIDI keyboards, inputs, outputs, headphones and much, much more.

And on the same page we have a Behringer take on the above mentioned ARP 2600: a semi-modular analog monophonic synthesizer, equipped with 3 VCOs, low pass filter, noise generator, ring modulator, 1 oscillator with sawtooth and pulse and another two with switchable oscillator synchronisation and outputs for triangle, sawtooth, sine and pulse, ADSR envelope, voltage processor and everything else you would expect from a 2600. The price is really, really attractive!

Snarky Puppy’s Mark Lettieri is an extraordinarily talented guitarist – and it made perfect sense to design and build a guitar to his specifications: welcome the PRS Fiore. A “nitro-over-cellulose” finished swamp ash body with an HSS configuration, 25.5″ scale, 22 frets on a maple neck with maple fretboard make this guitar versatile yet elegant. 2-point style tremolo with vintage saddles, 3 stunning finishes (Amaryllis, Black Iris and Sugar Moon) and an intelligent switching style.

Black Lion just introduced its first USB-powered audio interface on the market, and it’s quite interesting: Black Lion has been building interfaces for brands such as Focusrite, M-Audio, MOTU and Presonus for quite some years now. Their first product takes every experience learned to build a competitive product: high end components, quality capacitors, power conditioning system included in the build, audio resolution up to 192 kHz / 24 bit, 2 high headroom microphone input, 2 decoupled main outs, s/pdif and much much more.

Directly inspired by its 5-watt ancestor, the Fender 68 Custom Vibro Champ is an extraordinary amplifier packed with Fender tones: 1x 10″ Celestion Ten30 speaker (for reinforced bass response), a modified circuitry, custom-made Schumacher transformers, Fender hall reverb and tremolo are only the tip of the iceberg. The controls include volume, treble, bass, reverb, speed and intensity as well as a bright switch, encased in a beautiful and 1968-inspired aluminium chassis and silver-turquoise grill.

The 68 Custom Pro Reverb is a great and loud amp, equipped with a 12″ Celestion Neo Creamback speaker, a lightweight neodymium magnet which allows for a reduced weight of 15.9kg, 3x 12AX7 + 2x12AT7 pre-amp tubes and 2x 6L6 power tubes. Controls include Volume, Treble, Middle, Bass, Reverb, Speed, Intensity and bright switch. Reverb and Vibrato are included, and you have 2 instrument inputs.

The VocALign Ultra is an alignment plugin: it takes two (or more) signals and matches the timing and pitch for both. This is really useful to have dead-on vocal recordings matched with instruments or backing tracks, but also much more. Tightness Control allows to apply the alignment carefully; Match Pitch Section applies the tuning of a guide track to any other track; protected signal blocks allows to exclude parts of the replacement signal from alignment; user definable Sync Points; simple and intuitive operation with basic and advanced editing panels.