© 3-9-01 Joe Carson

In January I had an opportunity to attend the 2001 NAMM International Music Market in Anaheim, California. This is the premiere industry trade show for the International Music Products Association. While there I felt like a little kid set loose in a candy factory. On occasion I have been known to make musical instruments, so I had a wonderful time getting contacts for wood and instrument hardware. I also had a fine time talking to other instrument makers about the fine points of string instrument making. There were exhibitors from nearly every portion of this planet we occupy. I happily examined the efforts of Chinese and Korean violin makers, American makers of canoe paddles... er... solid bodied electric guitars and had a nice conversation with Dr. Alfio Leone, an Italian mandolin and guitar maker who has a business called Musikalia even though I speak no Italian and his English was nearly non-existent.

I met several musical friends of mine I have made over the years, some as attendees and a few as exhibitors, like Mickey Zeckley who had a booth full of the instruments he sells at his business Lark in The Morning. There is nothing quite like bumping into old friends.

I also came across a booth run by Viken Najarian, an oud maker based in California. An oud is a Middle Eastern lute. Coincidentally, there were several Armenian musician acquaintances of mine sitting in the booth, and so I took down one of Viken's ouds (nice instruments, by the way...) and we jammed on some music for a while. Berch was on kanun (a highly sophisticated Turkish zither), myself on oud, Tom Bozigian on dumbek (a goblet-shaped drum), and another fellow whose name escapes me on clarinet. Ah, yes, I had a LOT of fun.

However, while I was busy having a good time I also noticed something very interesting. There were Macs all over the show floor. Yes, there were PCs there too, but they were seriously outnumbered by the Macs and they tended to look just a bit out of place... like a balding, paunchy middle aged man in a business suit at a punk rock concert.

Of course there were Macs demonstrating the latest and greatest music software in dominance, but I was surprised to see how many iMacs were being used to act as computerized Point Of Sale terminals. I was definitely getting a different message from these industry pros than I get from our usual gaggle of garage band wannabee kids who think they can use the same PC they play the umpteenth rehash of Doom to do serious music work. The pros had Macs in every nook and cranny doing just about everything except serve the coffee. Ah yes, the PC Weenie crowd can sneer all they want, but they are fooling themselves.

Most of the demonstrations of computer technology at NAMM involved computerized sound system controls, sound mixing, MIDI, music engraving, recording systems, etc. One of the big names in this area is Pro Tools from digidesign. While there I picked up two of their brochures... one for the Pro Tools for Home Studios (Pro Tools LE) and one for the Pro Tools for Professional Music. There was a distinct difference between the brochures, aside from the differences in the two offered systems. In the home version the screen shots were about half Mac and half PC. In fact, one picture showed a Mac and PC monitor side by side. However, in the Professional version there were only Mac screen shots. I had to search the brochure for a very small reference to a Windows version that said that they had versions for "qualified" Mac and Windows 98/ME systems in the Pro Tools LE version, and "qualified" Mac and Windows NT systems for the professional version. It is very strange for myself as a Mac user to actually see a provider of cross-platform software to shine the spotlight on the Mac version and a passing, "Oh yeah, that other system too..." to the Windows version. This pattern tended to repeat from one system provider to the next, with the exception of one German exhibitor whose product was Windows only. Their booth looked a little neglected. It really isn't very hard to read between the lines about what this means about Macs in the music industry.

The main area of music for which I use my Mac is music engraving: that is, making professional style printable scores of music. Naturally I took a look at some of the offerings at NAMM. There are currently four major players in music engraving that I am aware of. Finale from Coda Music Technology is the Grand Curmudgeon of music engraving (US$545 MSRP). It is also about as obtuse a program as one could get, rather like Microsoft Word, or PhotoShop, or AutoCAD, despite its immense power and capabilities. Sibelius is hot new contender for the top spot and has become the preferred standard for Hal Leonard music, ASCAP and Boosey & Hawkes. For a description of Sibelius (US$599 MSRP), I find it hard to top this quote from from Wired:

"If Quark Xpress had a musical cousin who took lots of steroids, the result might be something like Sibelius."

If prices approaching six hundred US dollars seems a bit steep, you may ease the pain a bit by checking out Opus (US$299 MSRP) or Amadeus (US$89) from Allegroassai. If even that seems too steep, then try going to Noteheads for their Igor Engraver. Igor Engraver's price is a big fat goose egg... nada... zip. Yup, if you want to try your hand at music engraving, then Igor Engraver 1.5 is a free download from the site. This isn't a limited time demo or crippleware, it's a truly free program. Noteheads AB is a Swedish firm that is involved in music publishing and wants to get the software into the hands of an international community of music writers. The idea seems to be to create a community of Igor Engraver users that may be predisposed to going to Noteheads for publishing their material. Regardless of the reasons, the software is powerful and free, as well as being constantly updated.

I also had a talk with the reps from both Sibelius and Igor Engraver. Since I have extensive experience with the needs of the three main Middle Eastern musical notation systems (Turkish, Cairo Convention & Iranian), I offered to provide help in opening their products to a rather large potential market since current music engraving software is very weak for non-Western needs. Both seemed quite interested. On the other hand, the booth rep at Finale was literally the only middle-aged man in a business suit who wasn't a professional buyer in a booth, except for Dr. Leone at Musikalia. He definitely looked out of place in a sea of black-clad music industry types. Somehow I didn't feel that trying to talk to him about adding these capabilities to Finale would produce anything like fruitful results, especially after several people I know have repeatedly gotten a "thank you, but no thank you" response from Coda Technology in the past about these needs.

In any case, I did get my information for woods, looked at the new software and computerized music production systems, saw a LOT of Macs on the floor, jammed music with friends and had more fun that I have had in a long time.

Short Takes

Ahem... Who is "beleaguered" now?

An article by Joe Wilcox at ZDNet, "It's official: PC sales stink" posted on February 20, 2001 informs us that the PC industry is in a sales slump.

Okay, Mr. Wilcox is telling what we already know... computer sales are in the toilet. The question is... who will recover their sales first and best? Big PC Makers will probably do passably well over the next few months and some little PC makers may go *poof*.

Another article at ZDNet on February 15, 2001 by Ian Fried, "Time to kiss those big PC rebates good-bye?" blows a hole in the myth of the "cheap" PC. Someone was eating the costs of those el-cheapo kitty-litter boxes in special internet promo schemes. Now it seems likely that PCs will now have to be sold at real world prices so PC makers can survive the current sales growth declines.

Of course, the average PC sufferer will continue to parrot the myth of the "expensive" Mac even as the prices of the PCs they buy sharply increase to reflect real world costs.

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