Interview with Guitarist/Author Orren Merton

I had an opportunity to talk with Orren Merton, guitarist and music technology book author, just after he returned home from the 2007 NAMM show in Anaheim, CA a few weeks ago. He had some very cool things to say about some new tools in the guitar realm, and also a few interesting observations about the trade show itself, which he has been attending for many years. Interviewed January 23, 2007

So, I know you wear many hats, tell me what you've been doing professionally these days, and how long have you been going to NAMM (The National Association of Music Merchants trade show)?

I am currently a professional editor and writer in the pro audio field, I have been doing this for probably 7 or more years now. Like many people who write about music and audio, I got into this because I was a musician, and also liked to write, and so it all sort of fell into place as I began writing articles for magazines about the tools and the toys that I was using and that I knew how to manipulate. From there, I started writing and editing books on Logic. Flash forward to this year, where in addition to writing articles and tutorials for magazines—and also being a freelance technical editor writing and editing manuals for music software technology and music instrument companies—I'm a full time editor for the music technology line of books by Thompson Course Technology. I've been going to NAMM now, for all of those years.

NAMM is the industry trade show for the music instrument industry, where exhibitors form all over the world go to demonstrate their wares to music instrument buyers and music instrument press form all over the world. It's mostly an attempt to bring in as many orders as humanly possible, and for some little companies, NAMM is truly and amazing thing: it can actually give them most of their year's worth of business in one trade show. So it really serves a valuable purpose.

it's ancillary purpose is to get people excited about the music instrument industry by having a lot of great new press releases, by having musicians and music performances and generally trying to drum up as much music instrument industry press as possible for each individual company and for the industry as a whole.

For what specific reason do you attend NAMM?

I attend NAMM—and have been for years—for basically two purposes. One would be the business purpose. And that is as a writer editor, I specifically go to interface with development companies, with other authors and to suss out the industry and to see what other authors are writing about, which authors might want to write for Course Technology PTR, and see what sort of synergies there are between other companies and Course Technology and that type of thing. When I wear that hat, I take in a lot of business meetings and talk to a lot of people and get as much information about the industry as I can and try to get to know people who want to write, who have something to say, and know how to say it.

My other purpose for going—the other hat I wear—is simply as a really excited musician who is absolutely thrilled that I can make an entire album at home using wonderful software and affordable hardware and collaborate with other wonderful musicians, and I just get excited about the tools and toys myself, and I just want to see what people are producing.

In the musician part of your life - what instruments do you play, are you a songwriter?

I am a songwriter, guitar player, keyboard player, drum and synth programmer... I joke, somewhat on the mark, that my main instrument is Logic Pro. Of course, my main instrument would be the instruments I play, guitar and singing, and keyboards, but these days the tools become such an important part of the composition process, that you almost could say that I play guitar/keyboards/vocals/Logic Pro. My project Ember After is my own industrial metal goth project that Im quite proud of, and hopefully will have its first album out in 2007.

Excellent, I cant wait to hear that. Now, you're working on that with Don Gunn in Seattle, right?

Don plays all the drums, he's done many of the mixes, he's also contributed keyboard programming, and he's an integral part of this, in my opinion. And there's a couple of other collaborators who have done a fair amount - and again, I have to thank Logic Pro, and I have to thank the Internet.

Yes, it really makes it possible to not have creative limitations while working with what used to be such a formidable limitation - a limitation of distance. Its no longer just "oh yeah we can send files back and forth," it's "we can send files back and forth at a rate and with a consistency and reliability that makes it so we can continue to work and create."

So when you were in Anaheim this year, did you have a chance to see any of the performances? I know at NAMM there are usually several celebrity appearances and different sorts of clinics and endorsement performances - did you catch any?

There are... and I never ever get to catch them. I almost always spend all of those evenings either in business meetings or social meetings where I get to meet the people who live in other countries or other states of America that I really don't get to see other than at the trade shows, so it's a lot of fun to go and have dinner and kick back with people that you only get to see on these occasions and then the rest is business meetings.

How about on the product and new announcement front? Anything that got you excited seeing things coming out from all these vendors?

You know, I would have to say that this year, probably I wasn't as excited as I have been during some other shows. Even though there was cool stuff, and always is, this was more a year of evolution rather than revolution. There weren't any new products that really I could look at and say this is going to change the way that I personally make music, or the way that music is being made by hobbyists and professionals alike. More evolutions of things that already exist. There were a fair amount of really nice sample libraries and sample playback instruments and that's great. You know it's that someone's coming out with a better piano, and it's great that someone else is coming out with a great brass section instrument, but these things aren't things that are necessarily going to change anything they just make what people are already doing sound a little bit better.

The things that interested me... As a guitar player, I was quite interested in the Roland VG99, and for those guitarists who do have guitars with 13-pin outputs that use either the Roland GK pickup a piezo pickup with a 13-pin system. The VG99 is an update of the VG88, and it adds an awful lot of really good stuff, that we've been looking for for a long time, and the technology is great. It's basically a guitar modeler like a Line 6 Variax plus an amp modeler plus it have all kinds of real time neat D-Beams from the Roland V-Synth, as well as now a computer interface and it does pitch to midi, so you can also use this one box to control software synthesizers and midi outboard hardware as well as just a DSP modeler, it looks like a very nice unit. That really had me going as a guitar player.

I read this week that Fender is also releasing a Stratocaster with modeling, how does this product relate to that one?

Exactly, that's another nice thing. It uses the same technology. Roland's DSP, the VG technology. Fender has released a VG Strat. Its basically their evolution on the Line 6 Variax. The Variax is a guitar that allows you to select modeled guitars so it's one guitar that can sound like a Telecaster, Stratocaster, Les Paul, humbucking pickups, single coil, acoustic guitars etc., and the Fender does the same using Roland's technology . Both instruments also allow you to do alternate tunings via internal pitch shifting algorithms so rather than having to change strings or de-tune your guitar, you can flip a switch and be in drop D tuning, for example. That's also really nice. The nicer thing in my opinion, about the VG strat than the Variax, is that the Variax really isn't a guitar that you can plug into anything without modeling, it doesn't have regular pickups it's not a regular guitar, but the VG stratocaster is truly a stratocaster, you can bypass the electronics and it;s a 3 single coil American made Fender stratocaster like any other strat you'd buy. So it's a very nice combination of the classic stratocaster with Roland's forward thinking VG technology. So, yeah the VG strat is very interesting as well.

I also like something new from Moog music it was the Moogerfooger FreqBox - that looked very interesting. It's basically an oscillator in a box, that uses an audio signal as a trigger as well as being able to sync to it. So the example of this is they had one hooked up to their Voyager and it could either be an outboard effects separate oscillator, or what's more interesting to me, is you can run your guitar through it - and it almost makes is sound like a guitar synth - like your guitar is making the sound of an oscillator, instead of the strings. SO that was interesting as well... though again evolution not revolution, people have been using modular synths to process their guitars for ever. But this one I found every interesting.

Arturia had a very nice new product called Origin, which is a hardware box that contains the elements - the modules - of their software synthesizers, and you can build your own preset using elements of all of them, so for example you can select an oscillator from the Modular V and then a filter from the CS-80V and some effects from the Prophet V and really create your own hybrid virtual analog in it's hardware and have dedicated hardware controllers to manipulate it in real time. As well as being a hardware unit, it also has USB to interface with a computer, and it also has an audio unit or a VST front end so you can use it within your sequencer as if it were a software instrument and not a hardware instrument. And as a fan or Arturia synthesizers this looks very nice and this looks like something that I think will be both a great performance and a studio tool. But again, this kind of integration into the host and everything else has been done by others. Access has the Virus T1, Roland has at least one synth that has an editor like this.

Other things... Redmatica's Key Map is an absolutely spectacular sample editor and sample library creation tool for EXS format samples. Also, Audio Ease was showing the absolutely amazing Speaker Phone which allows you to put any audio signal into a speaker space, and that can be anything from a radio to a cell phone to a guitar cabinet - anything - with all kinds of controls and parameters. These have all been already announce however on each company's website, so while they were exciting and fantastic, they were not new to NAMM.

This is the age of the Internet, there is really nothing you can learn at a trade show, other than hands on - touching and feeling new gear - that you can't get from the website and then later going to your dealer. So to me, the main point and purpose of NAMM is the networking. The interfacing with the people who make the products and getting to know them, and getting to know the faces behind the gear and the equipment, and just gaining an understanding of the industry as a whole.

fin.