Still in New Orleans, in spirit if not in body, Paul Colbert completes his look at the Namm Music Fair, and the gear it launched. This month, home recording, effects, guitars and software.

Home recording and effects

Perhaps the two most popular areas for 'pull down' technology ie, finding ways of production that can pull down expensive gear to the price of home (semi-pro) enthusiasts. SMPTE and digital reverb are the next areas to be assaulted.

Fostex get there first with the 4050 Autolocator aimed at their B-16, 80 and 20 tape decks which they claim is 'the first Auto-Locator designed for the artist/composer'. The strength of this boast is based on the 4050's ability to cue in bars and notes, not just minutes and seconds. It incorporates an SMPTE generator/reader and a MIDI synchroniser. Tempo and rhythm changes can be programmed with reference to real time, and cue points and tempo sequences can be stored in memory or dumped to tape. There's also a serial communication buss for computer connection.

In a similar field they're offering a $2000 synchronising package that can lock video to audio or audio to audio with a 1/100th frame resolution.

Dod enter the digital reverb battle with $699 rack unit and a 700ms footpedal, though at the moment it seems to be the Yamaha Rev-7 which is taking all trophies, offering room creation facilities rivalling those of machines two or three times the price.

Even Hohner have a pair of units, the MIDI compatible RDM 1000 with a max reverb time of 3 seconds, and 8 memories, or the preset, non-MIDI, RD500, both 16 bit with a frequency response of 20Hz to 10kHz for the effects signal.

And finally an example of tables turned. So many players are using their Rockman headphone amps as effects units in the studio — see last month's interview with Dave Stewart — Rockman have decided to put the devices in a rack and miss out the headphone bit.

There's the Rockman Stereo Chorus/Delay (with a wide setting, just like your Ghetto Blaster), and the Rockman Sustainor Preamp. The latter is the fascinatingly complex one. Two footswitchable channels and on each you have the option of lead, rhythm, clean and semi-clean sounds (the latter offers a long sustain but only a slight distortion and can be 'semi-clipped' for a touch of compression at the beginning). But most attractive and damned useful, is the Auto-Clean which lets you go from distortion to clean sounds by turning down the volume on the guitar, yet compensates for the natural decrease at the clean level by automatically lifting the volume and treble.

A noise-gate with adjustable threshold shuts out the noise efficiently and subtley, and a high level effects loop takes off the signal for additional treatment after the compressor but before the distortion. Somehow it seemed to sum up America — an incredible amount of effort, detail and consideration gone into making something distort.

GUITARS

You can point to new guitar trends until your plectrum goes wobbly, but if there's one philosophy that binds 1985's new models together it's this. Put everything on the outside.

Remember when guitars were sleek, streamlined items, with every pickup, tremolo unit and knob hidden below or at least recessed into the surface? Well, you probably don't and you're unlikely to be reminded by the spawnings at NAMM.

Almost every stand displayed guitars with vast, bulky tremolos riveted to the timber, pickups standing to attention and string-locked nuts forming an overhang at the far end which would Faze Chris Bonnington in his ascent on the headstock. If you want it to be butch, you have to bolt it down.

Take Washburn's new RR Series - semi Flying V types with three pickups (two single coil, one humbucking) and a fine tune trem tailpiece. Each of the pickups has its own on/off toggle switch (plus a coil tap for the humbucker) so you can line up any combination. Stripey white and red or red and black graphics complete the deal.

Even they can't compete with MAG 'The Magnesium Guitar' — a glass blasted magnesium body, about a quarter of an inch thick, on to which everything is attached and proud, including a small 'garage' at the back that houses the sliding pickup and stops it digging into your waist.

Apart from going for world domination in the amp stakes, as mentioned last month, Peavey have been preserving, doggedly, with electric guitars. They seem torn between traditional styles (early models were Fenderish in tone, if chubbier in appearance) and futuristic angles.

This year there were the Vortex 1 and 2 — the former presenting a body leaping off in four directions, and the latter closely matching the semi-V style of the Washburn that went before. Both are, as the shape would lead you to suspect, fairly hot instruments with twin humbuckers and locking Kahler trems. Somewhat cooler in its lines is the Impact, Kahlered and bolted yet again, bearing two single coils and a humbucker in the tail slot.

Peavey's R&D department have dipped deeply into guitar technology and have decided that one of the reasons today's players may have problems with their truss rods is down to the general trend towards lighter strings. "The old method of inserting the truss rod into the neck slack and snugging (?) it up if the neck bowed forward was fine when everyone used relatively heavy strings" they purport. "But now with players choosing anything from 8's on up, you can't count on necks pulling forward and allowing the truss rod to contribute to the rigidity which is so necessary..."

Their solution (apparently protected by patent 4,237,944) is to fit the truss rod after the two halves of the neck blank are joined around it, but before the final profile is cut. "This results in finished necks that always have the added rigidity of a truss rod exerting torsion against the natural pull of the strings." What would we do without R&D departments?

However, not all research is carried out by the big buck establishments. In Australia, a graduate of New South Wales' University's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, W. Harvey Holmes, got to thinking about the amplification of acoustic guitars, and the inherent problems of the transducer bug. One of the flaws, he decided, was that bugs cannot preserve the elements of tone introduced by the soundhole. They concentrate on the radiation coming from the surface to which they are attached. 'Soundhole radiation' is responsible for a sizeable proportion of the low and low-mid frequencies, he claims.

At NAMM, what approached a scientific paper by Holmes and Joseph F. Hayes, explained about air pistons, top plate masses, and equations along the line of:

H(s) = S² + sw_h/Q_h / S² + sw_h/Qh + w_h²

This, as far as I can make out, means that you can analyse the frequencies missing and replace them with the appropriate filter network, which is their PASSAC system — in short, a tone control, but a smart one. Suppose they could be having us on.

Holes appear to be making a comeback, even in electrics. Schecter had been taking the fretsaw to their Saturn and Genesis models. The first only met with a triangular slice extracted from the headstock. The second (sort of Explorer shaped) found itself giving up the sawdust around the upper and lower bouts, and at the rear. Remember, these are the same people who are doing a right-handed Jimi Hendrix Signature series guitar with a reversed headstock.

Even there they are not the first. Robin Guitars (they who made the mini-octave six string for Dave Stewart as pictured on last month's cover) string many of their instruments this way. But their most attractive six string, as far as these eyes were concerned, was a chunky version of a Gibson SG Les Paul (heavily influential on the first Yamaha SGs) with a lovely, faded sunburst finish, PAF type pickups and wide cream binding — maybe a shade too rich for some customers.

It would be warming to say that the guitar business was alive, well and flushed with enthusiasm. Sadly the main American reaction to Japan's accomplished productions seems to be a hysterical use of the spray booth and the brass accessory: ever more violent colours and extended shapes weighed down with extravagant trems. Is this the future of the electric guitar? At the moment there are only a few notable exceptions writing other scenarios.

SOFTWARE

Octave Plateau's Sequencer Plus has a large appetite, if nothing else. It can hold up to 60,000 notes in a 640K IBM system, divides it in 64 separate MIDI tracks, full visual editing of all notes "including independent, per-note control of pitch, start time, duration, attack velocity and release velocity. Timing can be adjusted with absolute precision down to 1/96th of a quarter note." Cut and paste, as you'd expect.

Cherry Lane have developed their Texture package more along the lines of a drum machine. Rather than thinking in terms of tracks it splits your song into 64 patterns (each of up to eight polyphonic individual phrases or tracks) then links them in any order to form completed songs. IBM or Apple II for this creature which refers to itself as 'Modular Recording'.

Also in the Cherry Lane supply is the interesting looking CZ-Rider (say it in American and it makes more sense) which can display parameters for the Casio CZ synths on screen to facilitate editing, and then store extra patches. Use it with the Apple II and you can also employ the joystick to draw envelopes. Apple's Macintosh is proving popular for music software and interface producers who presume (perhaps wisely) that musicians are better with things that slide than buttons that push. You can get the MIDIMAC Interface (standard IN/OUT connectors) and MIDIMAC Sequencer, which, apart from the usual sequencing activities offers 'Computer Improvisation'. This is where the Apple takes your song sections and plays them in a randomly generated order.

MusicData ((Contact Details)) were offering a crafty deal to do with DX7s. Having contacted four of the country's popular session keyboardists (they say), and acquired their personal DX7 programmes, MusicData are prepared to sell them to you, or dump them onto a blank RAM cartridge of your own to keep down the costs. $75 for each set. Same deal for Commodore and Apple disks. They do say to 'go through your local dealer' so check it out before you send your cartridge off.