Welcome to Part 9 of 9 of Modular NAMM 2017. I’m going to wrap up this year’s marathon reports with a series of quick takes about what a number of other companies were showing this year, including 1010Music, Detachment 3, Division 6, Dreadbox, Erica Synths, Eventide, Koma, Moon, Roland, Synthrotek, and Waldorf.
If there’s a theme to this installment, it’s promising modules we saw previewed last year (and that we thought were going to ship last year) getting refined and re-introduced this year. I’m not complaining; all benefitted from the additional thought and user feedback. It’s not like there’s an outcry that new modules aren’t being introduced fast enough…
After covering a few lesser-known (in the US) European modular companies in the previous installment, this time around I’m going to cover three of the better known US manufacturers. The themes running through this installment are live performance and sample manipulation.
Many European synth module manufacturers that we are less familiar with here in the US focus on higher end modules with a focus on features, sound quality, or both (admittedly, with a correspondingly higher price tag). I’m going to look at four of those companies in this installment.