Usually during winter or summer NAMM, I keep close watch on the press releases and trade rags to make announcements about new gear. I’ve received plenty of press releases for this current Winter NAMM 2011, but there really haven’t been any new sounds lately to get me excited. Maybe it’s because I have the flu, and I’m a bit grumpy, but nothing I’ve seen thus far has really wowed me. The trade rags still tend to play to the major manufacturers, so all you normally get is the expected set of gear from the expected set of manufacturers, though I do have to say that at least Premier Guitar makes an effort to showcase non-mainstream, boutique gear, as they seem to cater a lot to “The Gear Page Forum” crowd.
So the fact that I hadn’t seen anything new and exciting led me to the question: Do we have all the tones we can get? And by that I mean new classes of tones outside the standard amplitude, frequency, and time modulation classes; and let’s not forget envelope filters and the like. Frankly, all that territory has been well-explored. But some genius may come up with some other thing that will add yet another dimension to guitar tone in the future – it’s just not now.
So where does that leave us?
Well luckily we’re no longer in the days when only a few manufacturers existed and the selection of gear was fairly narrow. With all the boutique manufacturers out there now, there’re all sorts of choices at our disposal. We may not have any new classes of tones being developed, but we do have fairly limitless possibilities to combine gear within the existing classes. That’s a great thing!
For me, there’s still undiscovered country in what’s currently out there. I think my next avenue of exploration will be envelope filters. A lot of my latest music has had a real funk feel to it, and an envelope filter or an auto-wah may just add that little funky zest to my rhythm lines.
I did see this one very interesting – maybe weird – “guitar” called the Kitara by Misa Digital Instruments that’s completely digital. No strings. Each “fret” has a button. The right hand (it also can be flipped to be a lefty) uses a touchpad to generate sound. The Kitara is connected to a synth or software. Interesting concept, but I’m not sure if this will be the future of guitar. It does provide some very interesting possibilities, though. Here’s a demo:
Guitar Gear 
The most exciting news in recent memory has been the announcement of Marshall’s new signature amps. The built in power attenuation, valve fault indicator (why did they ever stop using this after the JCM 900 SL-X?!), and auto-bias among other features has me contemplating buying a brand spanking new amp instead a used one for the first time in my life. That’s more than enough for me to be excited about. The hard part is going to be picking between the YJM 100 and the AFD 100…
So they could bring it back and charge you more… 🙂 Seriously though, that AFD amp looks VERY sweet.
I watched the digital guitar demo with interest. The crazy sounds it produced in the first few clips made me think it was somewhat uncontrollable and therefore a bit hit and miss as to what actually came out through the amp.
But later on it became apparent that the player did have a say in the sounds being generated and it is possible to play quite precisely.
Conclusion – I want to have a go. Not sure I’d buy one, but I’d definitely love to have a mess around on one for a couple of days.
It sure would be an interesting thing to play with.