JOE WALLACE: I’m Joe Wallace.

ROB WARMOWSKI: I’m Rob Warmowski.

JOE WALLACE: This is Gearwire.Com and this is our video blog wrap-up of Thursday’s Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Germany, and it’s raining.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Well, it’s going to rain again but we figured we get this done before it rains.

JOE WALLACE: [LAUGHING]

ROB WARMOWSKI: Let’s hope.

JOE WALLACE: Yeah. Big news today.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Well, Steinberg rolled out Sequel, did they not?

JOE WALLACE: Yes they did. Yes they did. And we have loads and loads of in-depth video about Sequel and it’s various applications, it’s uses. Those are huge sample libraries. It’s basically aimed at beginners. It’s great for entry-level people.

ROB WARMOWSKI: It looks like Steinberg took a lot of features from a lot of powerful and popular applications such as Acid and their own products and sort of put them all together.

JOE WALLACE: Yeah. It looks good, and they are basically saying that there are some features in there that established producers which they had had way back when. They’re now saying, “Well, it could have been that easy when I started, you know, feeling the playing.”

ROB WARMOWSKI: One thing we see a lot more of is a combining of software development approaches in music software, and we heard it today about a big piece of news where Cycling ’74 and Ableton have decided to co-develop new products in the future, and we’re going to see more than likely that’s going to be where we’re going to see a combination of the Ableton Live application and Max/MSP from Cycling ’74, a big modular music and multimedia development tool. It’s going to be some amazing stuff in the near future.

JOE WALLACE: Now, that comes on the heel of yesterday’s announcement that Moog Music and IK Multimedia and Sonic Reality are all teaming up to do a huge library of Moog samples. And it just seems like the trade shows or the places -- they save up all these big partnership and merger announcement for the trade shows. I don't know if you noticed but Peavey and Damage Control at Summer NAMM, now IK Multimedia and Moog Music and Sonic Reality, and now Cycling ’74 and Ableton.

ROB WARMOWSKI: I think it’s probably because the people who care about those announcements go to these shows, and the customers and the stores probably don’t. They just want to see cool software.

JOE WALLACE: And it looks like there’s going to be plenty coming. The IK Multimedia folks were very, very happy to talk to us about our partnership with Moog. They had a lot to say and you’ll be seeing that on Gearwire really soon. And you’re also going to be seeing the Jimi Hendrix Amplitube guitar effects modeling, all based on the Jimi Hendrix series of classic pedals, and we got a nice up close demo of all that stuff today at Musikmesse.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Do those come with a roach clip?

JOE WALLACE: You know, they don’t but you can buy one and you can tell people that you got the special edition.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Nice.

JOE WALLACE: Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. What other news happened today? I’m drawing a big blank here.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Well, I actually didn’t get to spend as much time on the floor as I would have liked because I had to stay on top of developments in the industry as they say and also fight some local demons with connectivity, but ultimately an interesting story came out of Shure, the microphone manufacturer, back at our hometown of Chicago that they caught a ring of pirates and counterfeiters in Southern Asia, specifically in Thailand and India, who are counterfeiting popular Shure Microphones, so take a close look at your SM57 and makes sure it doesn’t say SW57.

JOE WALLACE: [LAUGHING] Yeah, and I think it’s ironic that only yesterday we are observing there is a big booth on the floor just outside the main hall of Musikmesse that said “Musikmesse against copying”.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Yeah, and apparently protecting intellectual property rights is a big theme here, and it may be not too surprising seeing how many software developers there are.

JOE WALLACE: Indeed. Indeed. But there is a lot of software. In the MIDI hall, which is Hall 5 of Musikmesse, there is -- they have put all of what they call “data” into that hall, so all the software is there and some really interesting hybrid stuff, not necessarily software but we got a new line of Korg mixers that incorporate the KAOSS Pad into the DJ mixer.

ROB WARMOWSKI: KAOSS Pad of course big product in the past year or so out of Korg, the finger control, more than past year. There’s been a new one. The new one came out at NAMM a couple of months ago, and now there are even smaller versions fo the KAOSS Pad and they’re actually inserting the KAOSS Pad control into other instruments.

JOE WALLACE: And finger control is not just what -- What am I trying to say? Finger control is not limited to Korg. We went over and paid a visit to JazzMutant, and their new product is called Dexter. This is a multi-touch, touch screen which is basically to give you an actual, honest-to-God control surface for just about anything you can imagine. If you want to edit waveforms, if you want to do very highly specialized stereo surround and five-channel surround, you can use the touch pad to manipulate all of these things very, very specifically, and we’ve got tons of video on that, as well as an update for the JazzMutant Lemur, which, as you know, has been out for a while, but now there are some additional features, some tweaks, and we’ll show you that pretty soon.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Hopefully, we’re going to be able to get some comments from Cycling ’74, and we’re pretty sure they’re at the show. We’ll get some comments from them, and also from Ableton who we know are about the merger we were talking about, not a merger of companies but rather that the announcement that they will be co-developing music applications in the future. That’s to me that’s the biggest thing I’ve heard in quite a while.

JOE WALLACE: It’s going to be interesting, and you really should keep your eyes peeled to the site in the next several days to several weeks because the ever-growing pile of content -- Well, it just keeps getting bigger, and we got our eyes on some additional coverage of the modular synth area in hall 5 where all the lovely keyboard and MIDI stuff is, and we’ve got extensive coverage of the guitar section.

ROB WARMOWSKI: That’s assuming we get out of jail because they’ve come to arrest us.

JOE WALLACE: [LAUGHING]

ROB WARMOWSKI: So --

JOE WALLACE: I think that’s our cue to wrap it up.

ROB WARMOWSKI: I think the city of Frankfurt is telling us to wrap it up. I’m Rob Warmowski.

JOE WALLACE: I’m Joe Wallace.