It's been a crazy year here at Gearwire to say the least. We covered Winter Namm, Summer NAMM, and AES in San Francisco while also delivering so much video content that my memory has been wiped of anything we produced pre-2008. I found myself somehow in the position of being host of Crosstalk, Drew Krag spontaneously combusted, and Owen O'Malley spearheaded a series of critically acclaimed guitar demos. Given how crazy it has been, I thought it would be good to round up the year and take a look at some of the products we've had the privilege of covering.

We were admittedly skeptical about the robot guitar from Gibson, but after having Jason Donnelly come in and show off his new purchase, we were somewhat won over. The robotic tuning, once mastered, provides a quick and easy way to access a variety of tunings and proves that technology can even help make a Les Paul even better.

In fact, it seemed to be the year for technologically beefing up guitars as we also saw the release of the Moog guitar. While our first impression was that it was some kind of glorified ebow device, we quickly realized that Moog had once again exceeded our expectations. Now, if we can just see the price of this and the Robot Gibsons drop in the next year, I think we will all be very happy.

At the end of last year, Ableton released version 7, and again challenged us to think about how we produce, score, or even DJ. Rex file support, beat slicing, and DJ features proved to be everything electronic producers wished for this past year. Serato Scratch, Traktor Scratch, and Torq all received updates that proved that their respective developers understand the need for a tactile DJing experience.

Sony challenged Cakewalk, Digidesign, Ableton, Apple and others toward the end of the year through their release of ACID 7 which boasts many of the features previously thought missing from the application. Now it is not only a powerful loop-based application, but also can be used as a complete DAW for recording anything from voiceovers to your own band.

Max/MSP/Jitter continued to impress us this year, not only through their collaborative tutorials with Ableton, but also through the individual work we have seen over the last year from various programmers and artists. Not only that, but more and more we have seen musicians and producers taking advantage of the vast open source and shareware development community. Before last year, I never would have expected to have seen a friend of mine DJing with Pure Data applications or a number of VJs using custom Jitter programs during live performance.

While there are many more items and products I could cover, I will leave to you to explore and decide was was great about 2008. Thank you for reading/watching Gearwire.com, and have a great New Year!