NAMM 2012: Delicious New Guitar Products

Our friends at Delicious Audio were out at NAMM, tracking down all the cool new guitar products. Check out some of their finds, and click to read the full rundown…

It’s a beautiful thing when a large selection of the world’s music equipment manufacturers get together to show off their goods in hopes of impressing buyers and exciting faithful followers for what’s to come. Although, buyers and manufacturers aren’t the only ones in attendance. I got reminded of this when I was jamming out on the new Dave Smith Instruments’ Drum Machine called Tempest. I looked to my right whilst in the middle of pounding out a beat and saw none other than the great Stevie Wonder standing next to me!

DigiTech iStomp

Celebrity sightings aside, all in all NAMM 2012 was overwhelmingly iOS-centric. So many iPads and the like. However, there was an interesting nod to the vintage and analog sounds of yesteryear as well. I am expecting a great year of new music in 2012. As always it will be fueled by all of this new and exciting equipment.

There were some things that caught my attention and stood out as being new and noteworthy. First off we’ve got the iStomp from Digitech. We will be reviewing the pedal in its entirety soon but just a quick explanation: it’s a programmable single stomp box that requires an Apple iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch running the latest OS and a Digitech app called Stomp Shop to operate. The idea is that you buy a single iStomp pedal which is just a basic black stomp box with 4 knobs and you can program it to be any of the desired effects from the app.

Some of the pedals to select from include emulations of the Rat distortion, tape delay, tube screamer, analog chorus, jet flanger, and plate reverb just to name a few. They range $5-10 and will continue to grow in number and evolution. It’s great for times when you need “that sound” but you don’t want to invest an arm and a leg considering you may not use it again for six months.

A similar iOS accessory is coming to us from IK Multimedia. The iRig Stomp is a stomp version of the already popular Amplitube iRig. It adds an attenuator, bypass switch and stereo 1/4″ IO to the feature set and is meant to be a guitar interface for iOS amp modeling software. Looks nice in its sleek black casing, and definitely more appealing for live guitar players rather than the original version.  – Gus Green and Paolo De Gregorio

Read the rest of the NAMM report, featuring new products by Alesis, Pigtronix, Vox, TC Electronic and Moog.

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