For every manufacturer at this year's Frankfurt Music Fair that had their ears to the ground, there were hundreds that had their heads up their bums.

If you were looking for new or innovative products you had a lot of walking to do. If you were looking for things that were either irrelevant or duplicated what other people had done two years earlier, two thousand pounds cheaper, and two hundred times better, you were onto a real winner.

Journalistically, you have two halls (one two floors high) chock full of gear and gear-related bits and pieces. Everybody is trying to convince you that their particular bit of kit is the world's best whatever. So what do you do?

You invest in a stout pair of shoes, a good pair of earplugs, a 'Press' badge and about five pints of good Russian vodka a day. Then you set out to find out what is actually worth looking at and what is merely worth a fast raspberry and an even faster exit.

Therefore, don't look here for a comprehensive guide to everything that was exhibited. These are just the things that were worth a look or two. In some cases, just the one, actually.

But before the serious stuff, here's some of the bits that made us giggle ever so slightly.

What about a glass harmonica for a start? Yes, just over from the One Two stand was a device that harnesses the principle of rubbing your finger round the rim of a wine glass to produce a note. It's lots of glass bowls on a stick, rotating via a motor, and which you play by rubbing your finger on the appropriate one. At a cost of thousands and thousands of pounds, the opinion was that it's not going to sell in the zillions.

There was also a singing blackboard. Yes, a blackboard with a musical stave printed upon it which played the appropriate notes when you touched the spot. Hmmm.

Just down the way was one company whose sense of showmanship veered towards the bizarre; their display consisted mainly of a small booth containing a small amp, a small array of effects, a small drum machine, a small speaker system, and a small person playing a small guitar. The Heavy Metal dwarf was definitely one of the pulling points of the show for the tiny-orientated amongst us and a good subject for small talk amongst everybody else.

If you like playing the maracas in the dark, why not invest in the produce of one French firm whose stock appeared to consist mainly of glow-in-the-dark maracas, bongoes, and castanets. Fluorescent percussion — next year's thing? Maybe not.

The big colour this year is... Ribena. Well, perilously close anyway. A sort of cerise tinged with magenta, to use interior decorator's jargon, but in actual fact a real pain in the eye. There were guitars by the (ver) million of that hue, drums, and even a piano which made some of the more delicate classical souls turn a very matching shade.



The Bugari people were there once more with their 'Stonehenge' range of guitars and basses. These Italian anachronists axes are vaguely triangular, and if you were foolish enough to ask them they'll tell you that the pickup placement, bridge adjustment and so on are all based on the leylines and cosmic forces at the big stone circle itself. Most people avoided it as though they'd grow a headband merely by walking past, but we did spot our 'reformed' hippy editorial director sneaking off in that direction more than once...

One thing that was unavoidable was the five-string bass. Every manufacturer who could count further than four slapped an extra string on their product, and the resultant din as hundreds of slap bass players struggled to get to grips with the tighter string spacing and looser low string was painful in the extreme.

As for the rest of the show, you'd be lucky to get out of earshot of an electronic drumkit. There were hundreds of the bleeding things, all going 'boink', 'cabafff' or 'dink' to widely varying degrees of acceptability. Some were good, some were bad, and quite a few were ridiculously ugly. Singled out particularly for the 'uurrrgghhhhh' award was a set of pads called 'MIDIDRUM' which, when you sat in the middle of the kit, made you feel as though you were being attacked by a horde of vampire bats. Not for the paranoid drummer.

Special congrats to French firm ADM Europa who scooped the award for the most Blue Peter-ish "take two yards of sticky-backed plastic, a roll of Sellotape, three toilet-roll holders and an egg carton... and here's one we made earlier" device on show.

Their MIDI guitar was controlled by a circuit board and ten pressbuttons taped to the top horn, and the rest of the machinery involved also had that Heath Robinson chic off to a tee. It was a little difficult to gauge the efficiency of the device — we were laughing too hard. But nice try, mesamis.

Continuing their strategy for world domination, AKAI unveiled a whole load of rackmounting things including expanders, MIDI-effects (programmable), samplers, a MIDI recording system and a fully automated mixing desk.

The S900 MIDI sampler stole the biscuit which gives 8 note polythings or 8 individual noises with separate outputs giving 12 seconds of sampling at pro quality and 48 seconds at British Telecom quality with full multi-sampling as well as control over ADSR types. The even better news is that the system will have software available on disk (not expensive EPROMS which need fitting) which allows it to a. function as a sinewave-generating sound-source and b. as a short-term recording unit with full looping and overdub facilities. Brilliant sounding PPG on the cheap anybody? £1599 ish incidentally.

Akai's German distributors had other ideas when we tried to evaluate the new recording system; however, we can tell you it's based on a 'Qwerty' keyboard, sequencing unit and a monitor, which holds massive chunks of song data with auto correct and all the other things you would expect Akai to have covered, sounded impressive when sequencing rackfuls of their samples so when we get it, you'll hear what we think. Obviously they didn't want the One Two micro filming expert anywhere near it.

Connected, or intending to be, with their sample, Akai showed the AX73 synth, which is velocity sensitive, sells for £695.00, has a big, fat sound and enables you to filter sounds from the Akai sampling brothers and give it stereo chorusing as well as control over the envelope of the samples. Should be big. The AX73 with the keyboard sawn off is called the VX90 and is identical i.e., 6 bi-timbral, 2 envelope generators and all the bits.



Tucked away up their collective sleeves was the MPX820, a fully programmable mixer that had us dropping our tobacco rushing to the bar. This out SSL's the SSL in that everything apart from the gain input is fully programmable over MIDI. That's right, programmable panning, level changes, EQ changes, effects loops and all the rest. Mix information is saved as part of your songs and sequences on any MIDI sequencer, preferably the new MIDI Akai one which holds 50,000 notes, each track having up to 999 bars, with 3 MIDI ins and outs. Yes.

Other worthy notables were the 19" rack mounting effects. The ME25S MIDI keyboards splitter allows you to split previously non-splittable keyboards when used with other MIDI sound sources, fully programmable of course. The ME30P is again, a fully programmable MIDI patch bay allowing 15 programmes to be stored on different patches and patching. Both sell for £99.00 and will deservedly clean up. Not forgetting the studio side of the market, Akai also have mini studio monitors available which are brill and a rackmountable 14 channel recorder using their ½ inch cassette system with a SMPTE based autolocater as well. Where will it all end?

To view the new goodies at the Aria stand we had to look as inconspicuous as possible and wander, humming inanely, past the horde of small yellow gentlemen into the back room where the gear was hidden.

Once there, however, we could have been forgiven for thinking that we'd somehow arrived in a British trade delegation by mistake. Wasn't that a Simmons kit? And aren't they Status basses over there...?

The Aria drum kit had enough differences to its shape (including a neat-looking rackmounted brain) so that the St. Albans padbashers don't come round mob-handed and readjust the competition's incrementors — but only just. Its likeness to the market leader was a touch Tokaiesque, but with the price of Simmons stuff being so competitive already, only drastic cheapness will make it viable in this country. They're still fixing UK prices, so wait and see.

As for the basses, they were wooden-bodied, headless items with carbon-graphite through-neck design... sounds familiar? One was a six-string which took full advantage of the carbon neck's rigidity but whether it'll be a great success depends on how many people there are who want a full-scale six-string bass. I'm sure all sixteen will love it.

Oh, and they also had a five-string bass.

Sampling, MIDI, digital delay, disk storage; all the new-tech buzzwords were applicable to the new Bel units. These studio rack-mounted devices had sampling of up to 32 seconds available at superb quality, remote control, reversing of samples, sequencing, pitch shift, and in fact could probably book you a table at the local curry house if it only had hands to pick up the phone book.

Very nice, very smart in the new grey livery, and not unduly expensive at roughly £3,500.

Little combos were the big news from Carlsbro; their Sidewinder 60 valve type was a try at the British Boogie market and a creditable one too; and the Rebel 8 and 12 were minute but loud and impressively cheap at less than a couple of hundred nicker. With plenty of guitarists drooling over the almost microscopic Gallien Kreugers (but due to their extreme priciness drooling was the limit of their involvement) Carlsbro's weeny Rebels could be a big winner for the Mansfield men.



Casio's music on the masses philosophy is certainly well under way, with the release of a 4 note sampling keyboard selling for £89.00, the SK1 and their first stand alone rhythm computer which just happens to have 4 user sampling locations for £395.00, the RZ1.

The SK1 will surely be the worthy successor to their phenomenally successful VL tone, giving usable sampling to the man on the street. OK, so its not Synclavier quality, but that's not the point. What it does do is give you looping of your sample, a choice of 13 envelopes to use on it, along with 10 sounds available for use. Throw in a 400 note 4 voice poly sequencer, a harmonics synthesizing section and you have the SK1.

The RZ1 has 12 preset sounds of the PCM type of surprisingly good quality along with 4 user sampling locations which retain the sounds whilst power is off, just like the 3 grand plus SP12 from Emulator. OK, so it's not quite the ultimate, but you get step and real time recording of 100 patterns and 20 songs, 10 separate outputs, accents, with all the usual (read higher priced) features like song chaining, inserting and deleting functions and frankly quite astonishing.

Casio demonstrators Richard Young and Hans Dreyer gave impressive demonstrations on the CZ3000 and the CZ230S respectively. Impressive on the CZ3000 because if it stands the Keith Richards type attack that Richard Young was giving it, no problems on the durability front. Impressive in the sounds department from Hans, as he gave a shockingly realistic impersonation of a screaming guitar sound complete with feedback and vibrato; just one of the 100 preset sounds available wth the CZ230S though it undoubtedly helps if you can make your fingers go all over the shop like Hans baby can.

Unfortunately Casio have not finished their R and D on the range of samplers being developed for mass consumption nor on their drum kit. The electronic drum kit did make an appearance in the Casio demonstrations, but problems with late triggering are holding up production. Rumoured to be in the pipeline are a CZ3000 type synth but with velocity sensitivity and of course, Casio's range of samplers which will possibly clean up like their CZ101's have done in the multi-timbral expander department; witness Vince Clarke with literally rackfuls of them. Gone are the days when 'Serious/Professional' musicians sneer at Casio. See who has the last laugh.

Dynacord had loads and loads of das German technologischengebangen devices. Their electronic drumkit has been the recipient of a massive update in both style and sounds. The style is a really excellent combination of high-tech smartness (lots of black steel mesh and hunky tubing) and solidity. The bass pad, too, has been upped in style points and now looks a little like the drastically minimalist D-drums one; wedge-shaped and solid.

The new brain is called the ADD-one (advanced digital drums) and looks to be in the same league of programmability and minimal front-panel control as the DX7. In other words, there's little on the front but a big display and a few little knobs. However, the spec and the sounds are rather good so it's worth getting inside and fiddling about.

So far, so sensible, but on the silly side they had (and were enthusiastically and, more amazing still, straightfacedly, demonstrating) the Rhythm Stick, a machine invented by a small team of barmy English types and now being churned out by the might of the Dynacord industrial machine. It looks a little like a guitar that's had all its frontage sanded off by a Black-and-Decker-wielding maniac but in fact it's a controller for MIDI rhythm machines. You strap it round your neck, hit two pads on the body and simultaneously press one of eight buttons on the neck and there you go — somewhere between Simmons and Gibson.

Unfortunately, I couldn't play it without feeling what the locals call "ein berk". Nevermind, there are plenty of them about (just watch Top Of The Pops) so it may have a ready market.

More seriously, other Dynacord goodies included much MIDI machinery; a Digital Multi Effect Processor which flanges, doubles, delays and chorusses, all in stereo; and the impressively big and red MIDI amps (see recent review, fact fans).



Emu systems were showing off with their recently released Emulator SP12 sampling-percussion-programmable-drum-machine-thing and also had their new 20 megabyte hard disk unit for the Emulator II up and happening. It holds 23 Complete Sound libraries on its disc and offers a loading time of 2 seconds, compared with the 25 seconds loading time of the Standard Emulator disc drives. But, the most interesting thing on the EMU stand was a 'read-only' Compact Disc unit that loads the EII in superfast time, but stores an incredible 536 complete sound libraries on one disc. This is produced for the EII by Optical Media International. When we started salivating we forgot to ask the price, but, the most interesting titbit was that Optical Media are in the process of producing their CD sound libraries for more budget (ironic term that) samplers like the Prophet 2000 and the Mirage.

Also on show for the EII was the Digidesign Software which uses the Mackintosh giving you some very pretty pictures to look at complete with the obligatory 3D display of samples. All very impressive, but who can afford it?

Those warm passionate people from Ensoniq didn't like us too much when we tried to get more specific details about their new products in case we disturbed their demonstrator from making his Radio 3 type Muzak noises using far too many keyboards, rackfuls of expanders and most of Sarm West's outboard gear. Still, we did manage to nick some of their brochures.

Coming soon, as they say, is the Ensoniq Piano the SDP1 which contains voice samples of a stonking Grand Piano, electric piano, marimba, vibes and bass sounds to boot, as well as the ESQ1. This is a digital synthesiser and sequencer featuring 8 voices with 3 oscillators per voice, 32 multisampled and synthetic wave forms and 4 envelope generators per voice. One Two can also reveal (after we accosted a beautiful Fraulein to translate the dodgy Germany literature) that there is indeed an inbuilt sequencer offering a paltry 2400 notes, although expandable to 10,000 if you have the cash.

It was a shame we couldn't find out any more as we would have been able to tell you about the rack mounted Mirage sampler. Again, a standard Mirage with the keyboard sawn off. Rumour has it that the Expander has a quieter output than the original Mirage, obviously designed to stop people taking the thing back to the shop and demanding to be shown how to take a decent sample. Still, in the shops at £995,00, we shall see how it does — Does what?

Now that Fairlight have slashed their prices for the new series III monster, there's certainly no excuse for everybody and their uncle not to have one, a steal at £57,000.00 plus VAT. For all of you who do have that sort of loot lying around in jam jars, you'll be pleased to know that it's a 'state of the art sound and music production system' available with either 16 voice and 8 megabytes of memory or as a poxy 8 voice version with a piddling 4 megabytes of memory. It's good to see that the company who promised that they will 'never produce a Mark II version of the Fairlight which makes the Mark I system obsolete' have just gone and done it.

Still we mustn't let false promises and an asking price of a decent semi in the country put us off, oh no, even if you had to bribe 4 officials, 2 clerks and the receptionist before you could actually hear the bloody thing working, sweaty fingers and awkward questions being kept strictly at bay.

On a slightly more affordable (cough, cough) note, Fairlight had their Computer Video instrument, that draws pretty pictures, and the Voicetracker, which doesn't, up and happening Bruce. After initial bitchiness and laughter about their voice tracker not working (heaven forbid) all seemed hunky dory in that department. Just wait until they stumble across the technology needed to produce a VL tone (at £5,000.00 no doubt).

A wedge-shaped thing was attracting a lot of attention on the Fostex stand; and we don't mean cheese. The new 260 Multitracker is their new entrant into the Portastudio market, coming in at about the £700 mark and including on its sleek black fascia Dolby C, parametric equalisation, posh LED metering, lots of patching and monitoring and much else. It looks excellent (if a little large to be truly portable, as is the trend these days) and should be in the shops here mighty soon. If not now.

Showing the Rolls Royce of Synchronizers, the SRC and SRC2, Friendchip also had some new stuff like midi-patching bays and delays. The SRC2 which is cheaper than the 'industry standard' RC seems to do exactly the same as the SRC, but for less money. It synchronizes all those expensive products we dream about owning, you know, Fairlights, PPG's, etc. together, to produce a cohesive whole head of compatibility when in an ongoing non-happening compatibility problem scenario.

Friendchip's midi-patching unit called the 'Midi Max' only costs 3500DM (£1125) so I won't bother to tell you that in its basic configuration it allows 16 inputs and 16 outputs with source and destination patching being a piece of pee. Another bargain at 3600 DM was their CMS, which allows you to delay all time codes and midi messages to theoretically solve all timing problems in synchronicity (no not the Album), another must. I mean, who wants to buy another touch-sensitive Polysynth or Expander when you can spend the same and delay what midi gear you already have beyond any musical recognition.

Greengate were exhibiting their DS:4-8, an upgrade for the existing DS:3 Computer System. The DS:4-8 is a 16 bit Sampler/Sequencer with 8 voices and 8 channel outputs with MIDI and 12 seconds of sampling at Compact Disc quality. The system is nearing completion and we were unable to fully assess its capabilities as the software hasn't been completed yet. However, the company seem to be able to update the systems software incredibly quickly and so at the show, they were busy listening to interested parties comments and so when the system arrives (March-ish) it should have all the features a professional system should have (like fine-tuning of samples for instance).

Also on show was the new ADSR software and 1 megabyte expansion board for the DS3. The ADSR software allows you to merge and mix samples as well as the obvious features like controlling attack and decay times of existing samples. At £50.00 you can't argue with the control it gives you. The 1 megabyte expansion board for the host computer (the Apple II E) works well giving massively long samples of about 30 seconds, the only problem is that with the present disc-drives, you can't actually save anything you sample with the megabyte board so this restricts you to mainly structure usage, spinning in total sections and choruses. Greengate are currently researching new high storage disc drives which will be available when the DS:4 software is finalised.

Some traditional ideas and some great new ones on the Hofner stand; the traditional were their classic semi-acoustic guitars, both in a full-bodied F-holed jazz stylee and in a rather gorgeous black-and-gold thin-bodied 335-ish beast called the Nightingale. Ideal for yer discerning Velvet Underground fan, the Nightingale is also available with a Floyd Rose whammy-bar and stereo output for high-tech B.B. King acolytes.

The high-tech was most interesting as well; the odd-shaped Alpha-E guitar is the recipient of one of the most sensible ideas a mass-production guitar company has ever had. It goes like this. When you order your guitar, you fill in a form specifying what sort of bits and pieces you want it to be built from. Woods, normal or reverse headstock (a la Jimi H.), pickup configuration, whammy bar or not, mono or stereo, colour, fingerboard wood, type of frets, you name it. And all for the same price. The form goes to the factory, and shortly your ideal guitar comes winging back complete to your own personal specifications.

At last the solution to the nitpicking "it'd be great if only..." syndrome. You pay your money and you take your choice. Literally.

And possibly the best news for Hofner owners and would-be ones is that they have apparently fixed up UK distributorship once more, after some years being handled by the somewhat disinterested Barratts of Manchester and then a period without an agent here at all. No firm details as yet, but watch this F-hole...



In what must have been the best demonstrations of the show, Hybrid Arts amused and alarmed us with their software packages for the Atari Computer family.

Amusing us with the price, was the revelation that they will sell you a 16 track, fully polyphonic sequencing package for only £699.80 complete. This buys you their software, entitled MIDI Track III, the Atari 130XE computer plus disc drive. Attaching this lot to a monitor (or ordinary TV) and a couple of MIDI synths/expanders gives 10,500 notes, auto correct that you put on after recording that we can verify that works, programmable drop-in and drop-out points and everything else the new Linn sequencer does, at less than ⅓ of the price. If I told you Ashly of Imagination fame bought one on the spot or that the Pointer Sisters production team or the 'weird' one from The Cars uses one, would that make the picture clearer? No?

Alarming us then, Hybrid Arts president delighted at the look on our faces as he gaily pulled out the disc drive connector whilst a sequence was running and watched as the program kept on running doing its own funky thing. We called it the most Rock'n'roll sequencer of the show after he invited us to try and crash the system and try as we might, we couldn't.

The even better news is that the same package is to be made available for the new ultra-fast 16-bit Atari, the 520ST, which just happens to have a built-in MIDI interface. Hybrid Arts will do a trade in with you, for the 520ST version for extremely reasonable prices, this version has up to 100 tracks of sequencing available and Oh! nearly forgot, it accepts step-time input of notes as well.

As an indication of what crazy Californians get up to in all that sun, the very same people produce the "DXDROID" programme, that just happens to be an Artificial Intelligence program for the DX7 and Atari 520ST, that knows the DX and TX range of keyboards and lets you define the sort it should make. When we see it, we will try it, PS. Brilliant graphics!!



Another "it'll be nice when it's finished" project was the Ibanez MIDI guitar. They've gone the complete-guitar-plus-floor-unit route, and while not quite as cosmic as Roland's G707, if I were in Sigure Sigue Sputnik I wouldn't be ashamed to be seen with one.

One unit was being demonstrated in a very hands-off-you-pleb way but the one that was out for the grimy hordes to finger looked decidedly unfinished. Not to mention unplugged-in.

Its headless configuration and V-shaped body replete with umpteen knobs (dodgy-looking knobs, too) also came with a wang bar attached. Strangely enough, this worked not on the strings at all, but just on the electronics, apparently being assignable to various functions from pitch-bend and modulation on up. Felt a bit odd to yank on the bar and have the strings stay stock still, though. Price? Well let you know when they start arriving here, and judging by the state of completeness so far, don't hold your breath.

Little amp people ILP made lots of noise with their (cheap at £750-ish) 2,000 watt amp and their 350 watt bass speaker; Simmons used a custom ILP number for their new drum combo so they must be OK. They are certainly noisy.

The less ear-bursting stuff included a bass version of their small guitar combo, and flightcased versions of both which looked smart and well droppable. At £245 for the guitar amp and £349 for the 120 watt bass one (including five-band EQ and a compressor) yet another contender for the small/cheap/decent/British amp prize.

JMS or Jellinghaus Music Systems for short had some jolly good products on show, no, some absolutely spiffing stuff; how about a MIDI update for the Linndrum for starters! One reason that Syco systems gracefully slashed the price of the Linn recently was, in the One Two opinion, due to them suddenly realising that the "worlds best drum computer" wasn't as up to date as it was claimed. JMS stop all of this with their interface which allows the Linn to be controlled via MIDI with touch sensitivity and MIDI song pointers and most certainly not forgetting boring old MIDI synchronization via MIDI via MIDI. Selling for 790 DM (about £250.00) they could be onto a winner.



Speaking of which, the DPU or Digital Percussion Unit for short, is a spiffing rackmounted drum unit with up to 16 samples inside. Eight samples are available at any one time, with the ability to trigger different samples with increasing velocity over MIDI. Yes with this unit, you too can have your "Owner of a lonely heart" sample transmogrificate into your "Power Station" mega sounding ambient snare. Only drawback is that you can't sample sounds yourself, not yet. The sounds we did hear were most impressive with the cymbals and gongs in particular sounding much brighter than yer average sampler. The DPU sells for 3998 DM (about £1250.00). Also for use with DPU was a PDM which allows drum pads from all manufacturers to be plugged into the unit and output MIDI information to drive JMS's DPU or other MIDI thangs.

Various software packages were on display including an automated mixer package for the new Atari 520ST+. This requires the installation of VCA's into your mixer, but only allows muting and not much else. Better though, was the editing package for the Apple II which allows those people who are that way inclined, to edit sampled sounds from the Akai S612 sampler. This allows you to mix, merge and fade sounds digitally and gives you multisampling.

Quite how you multisample with the AKAI (which only allows you to hold one sound in memory at a time) is not clear, but it did have the obligatory 3D display of varoforms, so they should be onto a winner, Walter. About 650DM (with the JMS Apple midi interface) which is extremely roughly about £200.00.

One more for the Rodney Chameleon Imitative Design Award; Kawai's K3 synth is a digital keyboard that could well be the DX7's long-lost cousin in terms of facilities, looks, and marketing. It's programmed by an incrementor wheel à la Roland Alpha Juno series, offers velocity sensitivity and aftertouch but lacks a modulation wheel for the performance-minded. The sounds? How can one find a suitable word to describe the fluttering of a gull's wing or the breeze on a hilltop! How can one sum up in mere words the beauty of rays spearing through the cosmic void? How can one even attempt to express the ineffable majesty of being? How...

Oh alright. The sounds were naff.

It's a case of back to the future for new British company KMD. Their valve amps have all the traditional noises available from gritty M*****ll raunch to all-out B***ie metak, and cheerfully enough, sell at well under the competition's prices. If they can make enough of the things — which range from a big, meaty bass head and matching cabs down to tiny combos — they should make the same kind of impact that Session did with their Sessionette a while ago. The graphics are a little bit Scalextric but the look is macho enonugh and the sound stonking enough to make a lot of players look twice.



Like so many other manufacturers' latest and fabbiest gear, the new and utterly wonderful gadgets on the Korg stand were most definitely not to be touched by the rank and file plebs; their sampling keyboards looked on paper to be pretty hot but their hands-off policy meant that the nearest you could get was watching a snooty demonstrator make smarmy noises or pressing your nose against the glass case surrounding a (more than probably non-working) prototype.

However, assuming it ever gets into production and more than one of the things ends up in a state to make noises with, the spec includes more or less everything that the big boys (Emulator, Wave and so on) can do including eight-voice polyphony and after-the-event waveform juggling. Two built-in digital delays and an equaliser sort out the sounds yet further once you've finished with the complicated bits and it can all be stored on a floppy disk, just like the Mirage and Prophet 2000.

Price in the UK is only a very rough estimate, as the object almost certainly won't appear until Summer — when they've got it into full production, hopefully. However, the experts reckon about two-and-a-half thousand quid is a fair guess, so start saving now.

Its sister synth (try saying that without getting saliva on your toecaps) is the SG-1 Sampling Grand which produces a truly marvellous piano sound thanks to its sampled ROM-stored presets. Four only, however, for an estimated price of around two grand? What price a second-hand piano and a team of roadies? Mind you, it would make an excellent MIDI master keyboard as it is reputed to have a very smooth keyboard indeed.

For the rest of the Korg stuff, the interesting bits were a new dual digital delay (a two-jammed-into-one-box number enabling true stereoechoes and chorus), a smart little rack-mounted thing with five graphic equalisers, four mono and one stereo. Obviously aimed at the four-track recording market, it would be all the Eq that any self-respecting Portastudio owner could need. And the Voice Processor, their all-in-one chorus, harmoniser, pitch shifter, and Mormon Tabernacle Choir kit, which has been out a little while over here, was also attracting a few fiddlers. It's impressive-sounding, but at £800 may be a little over-specialised for the smaller studios.

When we wandered along to the Laney stand the relief at hearing at West Midlands accent was indescribable after days of "Layfwerksfern — bedienungen" and "selbstprogrammierten rhythmuspatterns". The jovial Brummies, however, were setting their sights a lot further away than Cradley Heath — their amps are apparently selling in the US as well as Mikhail Gorbachev dartboards so all their production efforts have been directed towards fulfilling that demand.

Their brand new line of amps is hence called the Linebacker series, which we believe is some sort of American Football expression. Though what's wrong with the 'Aston Vila 50' isn't quite clear.



Nonetheless, the amps look to be excellent value, with their overdriven sound truly impressive for a transistor amp. This is apparently due to a new circuit which in some way makes the speaker contribute to the sound as well as merely overdriving the circuitry. Technical details aside, it seems to work, at least on dirty sounds (the 'clean' channel did have a tendency to clip if pushed too hard on the model we tried, but that's on transistor amps) and the range of facilities and tonal variation also impressed. The bad news? They won't be available in this country for a good few months yet, till early Summer in fact so you'll have to wait till our Yank mates have been given their fill to see some here.

Whilst sitting down having an apple juice (honestly) we were accosted by a Dutchman showing a software system for the Atari 520 ST computer. His recommendation was that we shoved the disc he gave us into the nearest 5205T and see what happens.

According to the literature he gave us, we should get an 8 track midi sequencer that seems to have most things covered with autocorrect to the Nth degree, programmable drop in and drop out points, brilliant graphics utilising the wonderful 'mouse' system on the Atari, which means that you hardly ever have to touch the computer keyboard leaving you to concentrate on the music, hopefully.

Here's hoping they get British distribution as this amazing piece of software retails for only 250 DM (about £80.00)!!

PPG had their Hard-disk unit on show and the controlling unit, called the Commander (no sense of humour these Germans), which in fact turned out to beta only working prototype, the hard-disk unit gives you 12 Mutes, yes 12 minutes, of sampling MIDI, giving the lucky recipient (together with the 2.3 synthesizers and Waveterm) a computer system that is "completely independent of studios and tape machines" to quote. As you would expect it does all the boring echo, flanging and harmonizing effects but most interestingly also doubles as a fuzz box. Yes, a fuzz box. In a hilarious example of sledgehammer and nut overkill, it seems that the HDU can function as a valve simulator of sorts. PPG's example was using the HUD to simulate a valve amps curve and characteristics, allowing you to plug your guitar into the unit and use it as a rather expensive fuzz box. On a more serious note it seems (and they weren't giving much away) that the simulation put to the HDU's program allows you to specify the type of sound you are after, analogue or digital/FM and the HDU simply simulates said sound. Quite a cheeky idea if you must ask, imagine Yamaha when they realise that people will rush out and sell their DX7's to buy the PPG HDU simulator, in order to simulate a DX7 sound. They seem to be quite serious these PPG people about the equipment you must, repeat must, need in order to write a 3½ minute pop song.

There was a very nice kit on Premier's stand. It was a shiny new 'piano white' finished conventional acoustic drumset.

There was also a not-so-nice drumkit; their brand new electronic affair. Squarish in shape and supported on a very Mothercare-looking stand, the kit was lauded by the Premier people as being an electronic kit for real drummers rather than synthesists. Much talk was talked about cutting the specs down to a price and offering young drummers value, and so on and on, but someone hadn't done their costing or their homework properly. It's got hard rubber practice-pad-type playing surfaces (Simmons wrist nostalgia, anyone?) very basic analogue sounds with a distinct resemblance to early drum machines such as the Drumatix, and a very SDS-8-ish look to the brain.



And the worst news? It'll cost around the £800 mark, making it a dreadfully weak competitor for the Simmons kits in all their varieties; not to mention all the other digital and sampled kits on offer. British may be best in some fields, but the Premier kit tried its hardest to disprove the theory in electronic drums.

It was a fairly gimmick-free stand for Rickenbacker this year. No Ribena-coloured MIDI guitars with programmable user-sampling drum pads; mind you, they did have a five-string bass.

This (although it was in a fair old state of prototypeness, ie unfinished to an alarming degree), looked very pleasant indeed, and though at £800 it won't be exactly budget-priced, it will have that distinctive sound and feel that has made Rickenbacker the very definition of 'individuality' for years. Other weirdies included an eight-string bass which, while it has been available for some considerable number of years as an option, is just going into full production. Probably a sensible move for a company whose basses and twelve-strings have always garnered acclaim, but equally probably it's an instrument that won't sell by the billion. Not at £945 anyway.

Non-guitar items were also in evidence, to everybody's surprise, and even more surprising they were power amps manufactured by Sony in Japan under the BIC (Rickenbacker) name. They look to be excellent studio quality, and undercut the Yamaha competition a trifle at £565 for the RAM (150 watts per channel stereo) and £785 for the RA600 (300 ditto).

The Roland stand was predictably overlarge and overcrowded, with yet again, a reluctance on the distributors side to allow the press into leer at their new products and in particular, the long awaited sampling keyboards. It seems that their S-50 and S-10 samplers are not finished yet and only prototypes were being demonstrated. The S-50 is the flash one, costing about £3000.00 and gives lucky owners 17.5 seconds of sampling with 16 note polystuff together with analog processing of samples through the synthesizer section, you know, VCF's, LFO's and envelope generators, have been ripped off the Emulator II anybody? The S-10 meanwhile is the 8 note little brother, with 4.4 seconds of sampling and apparently the same quality of sound as the Emulator rip off, sorry, the same quality of sound as its big brother (approximately) 1 grand to you mate.

The TR505 drum machine made its debut, sounds great, has both standard drum sounds as well as timbales, congas and other percussion stuff, superbly easy to program and with a chap-on-the-street price of £225.00 it looks like a cracker. Almost making its debut was Roland's MC500 midi sequencer. Again, if you could get near their demo, the MC500 would have been seen controlling thousands of keyboards and millions of rhythm units via its 4 music and one rhythm tracks, built in disc drive and massive internal memory. Thing is though, the software isn't finished (does that sound familiar?) so until they arrive in the country we will have to wait for a more detailed evaluation with the sweaty fingers and bleary eyes.

A hairy German Lederhosen laden person stopped us from checking out (man) the new JX10 polysynth and the MKB200 midi masterkeyboard. The JX10 is a 12 voiced version of the fab JX8P with 24 oscillators 76 note weighted keyboard with velocity and aftertouch and 3 keyboard modes allowing splitting and layering of voices. From what we could hear it sounds bigger than a tandoori for two. Gazing from a discreet distance, the MKB200 hosted a whole load of MIDI-mania inducing features with which to control more than enough MIDI sound sources. This 61 key beauty allows you to assign different MIDI channels to the upper and lower halves of the keyboard, whilst putting out all forms of pressure and velocity sensitivity known to man and MIDI. Of course, it also allows you to store 128 different memory settings on the supplied memory cartridge, including volume levels, split points, and program numbers. Faberoony indeed.

The keyboard of the show that made me go 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I want one now' was the new Sequential Circuits Prophet VS. A mega sounding synth based on a new design called Vector Synthesis (hence the VS). Basically, Brian, it has 4 oscillators per voice, each oscillator having 128 waveforms that can be controlled independently with a joystick, in real time. The resulting sound after going through 3 envelopes, filters, LFO's and God knows what else, comes out in a rather glorious stereo giving you those truly impressive big and fat, subtle and smooth, clanging and changing type sounds that nobody else seems to produce from one keyboard not forgetting velocity sensitivity of course... of course. As it's suggested price is £1,895.00 my thoughts immediately turned to raising the necessary ackers by begging, borrowing and probably stealing; form an orderly queue now for April delivery.

Also being lovably demonstrated was the new rack-mountable sampler, the 2002 which has exactly the same features as the recently released Prophet 2000, but with the keyboard sawn off. At £1795.00 the 2002 sounds impressive but it should really, bearing in mind that there is some extensively stiff competition in this market, the Mirage and Akai samplers frinstance.

We gazed at the editing (of samples) programs being shown on the Apple Macintosh and then we remembered that the 'Mac' (as it's known in the hi-tech circles) doesn't come at Commodore 64 prices in the UK. On a slightly more affordable note was the not-quite-DIY expansion kit for the Prophet 2000 and 2002 samplers giving you S12K of memory to make longer, more horrible noises with (£325 plus installation).

And now for the product that most reckoned won the MIDI guitar war — the Shadow Guitar-MIDI Converter. While all around people were trying the most unlikely marriages of strings and wires to get a guitar to trigger a synth, this one seemed to have got the theory and the practice correct. Mind you, they weren't letting that many people near it to play two-fingered hammer-ons, false harmonics and triple-octave glissandos, so the degree of tracking accuracy is still a little shrouded in mystery.

From the demo, however, it sounded suitably impressive — most certainly it out-tracked the early Roland efforts by a long way. The device consists of a neat rack-mounting unit, a replacement bridge for your Les Paul/Strat/classical guitar/bass/whatever and a foot pedal. And that was it. The synth pickup is hidden in the bridge saddles (actually a system Shadow have been making for some time as a normal guitar pickup) which has the dual advantages of unobtrusive and and easy mounting — no drilling hideous great hollows in your '51 Strat — and giving superclean, harmonically pure signal output to drive the finicky pitch-to-voltage circuits that have always been the bugbear of this sort of system.

So far, so good. But what about the ackers? Well, at £999 retail (approximately) it's not overpriced. Obviously you have to have a guitar already and something to stick on the other end of a MIDI lead (the demo used an Akai sampler which sounded great) but even so it's not bad at all. Oh, and it doubles as a pickup system for acoustic guitars as well; it has a sequencer built-in with more than 1,000 notes capacity; it has a tuner in it; there are two MIDI outs; and so on and on. Not a bad package at all.

Incidentally, Charvel had exactly the same unit with their name on the front — but apparently it's Shadow's device licensed to the Yank guitar-builders. Copying hasn't got that fast yet.

Don't you just love packed, sweaty, loud demonstrations? Simmons certainly do. Their demo with Bill Bruford and Yank keyboards ace T. Lavitz was a masterpiece of the art of packing hundreds of people into a very small room indeed and subjecting them to barrages of percussive noise.

And very successful it was too. Umpteen people were impressed by all the new gear even if a few were too deafened to hear the specifications.



The SDS1000 was the brand new kit, and a dead cert to clean up at around £650. With its five user and five factory preset patches footswitch programme changing and digitally sampled snare sounds, it's going to make every other manufacturer of electronic drums take a deep breath and go back to the drawing board. Again.

Another good gadget was the TMI MIDI interface which makes all Simmons drums (and probably most others, although obviously they weren't telling) able to play MIDI gear.

The drum combo that's been much rumoured turned up in the wedge-shaped form of the SDC200. Two hundred watts and dinky little knobs like the Porta One's rubber Trebor mints make it suitable for onstage usage for little and medium-sized bands, and even as monitoring for great big ones.

The MTM interface is a smart version of the TMI interface, MIDI-ing anything to anything else via codes, triggers, 100 memory patches, and much else too complicated to explain but probably vastly useful to anyone using drums in a studio anywhere.

And lastly, the SDE expander makes tuned percussion, gongs, maracas, bells, and whatever else you fancy available to your flailing arms. Ideal for the more adventurous drummer. Why not replace that boring boom-baff-boom-baff with ting-boing-plang-bink?

Sonor made a sensible entry into the playable plug-in percussion area with their own kit — a combination of sampled sounds on slot-in cartridges and user-alterable parameter control made the kit sound both good and versatile, and the real Remo drum heads made it very hittable. Price, however, may prove a barrier; Sonor gear is not cheap in the UK. It may be a little while getting here, too, as the version we saw was very much a prototype and full production will be a matter of working out the final bugs as well as getting the factory tooled up for the task. Prospective prices translate from the German as about £2000 for the six-channel system all in.

Surprisingly enough, one thing that was not as noticeable as many expected was the drum amplifier. One of the few apart from Simmons' was a small, cheap-looking and obviously keyboard-amp-based one from Tama. In shape and size not unlike the old Carlsbro combos (ie tall and thin) it appeared to have all you'd expect on a drum combo, like lots of inputs and a reasonably full-range speaker system and was rated at 60 watts.



Of course, the thing they were plugging into it was their Techstar electronic kit, which now comes with drum sequencer and trigger modules as well as the standard pad/brain configuration. Like so many kits, it has moved away from the Simmons shape (due mainly to much stroppiness on the part of those owning the copyright on the hexagonal pads) and is a squarish shape. As for the sounds, what can I say? It went 'boof', 'dosh' and 'bing' pretty well, but like most electronic kits it's very much a matter of taste as to whether you like the resultant noises or not.

What can possibly be said about the Yamaha stand apart from 'waaarrghhh!'? It was a reasonable-sized trade fair on its own, covering what seemed like about three acres and showing more products both new and recent than you could shake a weinerschnitzel at. I should know, I tried.

The stand was also phenomenally crowded, with zillions of youths (German youths, which is worse — all sporting straggly moustaches, ill-fitting brown leather trousers and hair slightly too long to be neat and just too short to be Rock and Roll) crowded around everything worth even a vague look.

The multi-function do-everything SPX-90 effects processor was attracting a lot of interest, as were the Motion series of guitars and basses — small bodies and headstocks, big writing on the body, and that Ribena colour again. Yag.

The new MT1X four-track cassette machine was being fractally fiddled with by absolutely everyone and the CX5M computer system was also attracting a lot of attention, even if it was mainly from people who were trying to get pretty colours, shapes and patterns on the screen. New guitars and effects were getting a hammering, and that's not even mentioning the pianos, organs and FM electronic keyboards, the sequencers, acoustic guitars...

In short, Yamaha had lots of everything and a few real winners including the aforementioned SPX90, which at £599 could be a real stormer. Likewise, the pf70 and pf80 pianos (£899/£999) and the mini DX100 synth (£349) which is going down well as a MIDI expander for those with an analogue synth and a hankering for cheap FM. The MT1X at £449 has to find a niche in the market between the X-15/Porta One end and the posh types, but well have to wart and see.

Oh, and they also had a five-string bass.