NAMM 2024: In sight - Sand, software and sound

It’s that time of year again! NAMM 2024 starts January 25th.

Unlike 2023, the run-up to NAMM 2024 is much shorter. Fewer manufacturers have pre-announced new products.

The daikaiju (Yamaha, Korg, Roland) rolled out a number of major products during the pre-holiday period:

And that’s just a partial list! It’s like the post-pandemic floodgates opened.

Given the out-pouring of goodies over the last year, I don’t expect NAMM 2024 to be super exciting as far as keyboard announcements are concerned.

Yamaha — in particular — has upgraded nearly every major product line. It will be a year, two or three before we see follow-on products to the new flagships. However, I think Yamaha will have a few major announcements at NAMM 2024. Given Yamaha’s secrecy, I’m guessing. [All pundits should be so honest. 🙂 ]

Last year was Clavinova’s 40th anniversary and Yamaha rolled out the CSP 200 series and the CVP 900 series. The CVP 900s are an incremental spiff of the CVP 800 series. The CVP spiff reminds me of Yamaha’s final kiss to the PSR-S series when Yamaha said “good-bye” with the PSR-S975 spiff (“the ultimate S-series arranger”). Having hands-on experience with the CSP Smart Piano line, I’m going to make a bold prediction — CVP is end-of-life. Too expensive and too ugly for a living room. I see Yamaha expanding the P-S500 touch panel concept into a very clean and elegant parlor room auto-accompaniment instrument.

With CSP and CVP accounted for, whither CLP? NAMM 2024. I’d like to see CLP 800 series add the pianos included in Montage M and Genos2: cinematic piano, character piano, felt piano, U3 upright and so on. The upper end 700s have period piano instruments; it’s time to get modern. Will we see Yamaha’s new magnetic induction contactless sensing? It’s time for that tech to trickle down from the AvantGrands.

Moving on from keys, I expect to see the Yamaha SEQTRAK™ groove box or “Music Production Studio” — finally. “SEQTRAK” is the only remaining product name from last Fall’s accidental spill. No doubt, Yamaha have watched others cash-in on the beat production craze, notably Teenage Engineering printing money with the wide-margin OP-1.

The SEQTRAK is about the size of a QWERTY keyboard and cops some teenage attitude in form and color. I expect an on-board sequencer, two synth channels, a sampler, Cubase integration, and a ton of content. Yamaha have been working on this product for quite some time and it needs to begin earning back its development money.

KORG and Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have included KORG synthesizers in its collection of Raspberry Pi success stories.

KORG is a company that consistently punches above its weight in sales and size. They achieve this efficiency by exploiting off-the-shelf technology like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Raspberry Pi is committed to the kind of long-term roadmap that gives potential adopters confidence and stability.

The customer case study (PDF) focuses on KORG’s adoption and use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3. Enjoy the read!