Sunday, February 14, 2016

DanceFair/Musicfair Pro Audio Summit Impression

Victor Coral
School of House
This weekend I attended the annual DanceFair/Musicfair Pro Audio Summit, the biggest in the Netherlands at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.
A gathering of more than 6000 music makers, industry professionals, 80 record labels and manufacturers of musical instruments, producer and dj gear.
It was the 5th time that Dancefair was held, and the first time that Musicfair joined in.
All together a great event for DJ's, producers and other fanatics for networking, learning and exploring, with inspiring workshops in different rooms and a nice Expo-floor.

We started off our Saturday quite relaxed with an interesting talk about the History of House, presented by Victor Coral from the Dutch School of House.
After that we learned a little more about audio-compression with some interesting views on side-chaining at a Pro Audio session.

DJ Magazine talk at the expo-floor
There was plenty of room for the younger audience and new talents with various production-sessions and workshops for the different styles of dancemusic by Hardwell and Chocolate Puma (amongst others) and a large demo-dropoff zone hosted by national and international record-labels.

The expo floor wasn't huge but filled with a wide variety of exhibitors.
It wasn't too busy on the Saturday, the people in the booths were very accessable for info and plenty of headphones were available for the public to listen to all the new synths and stuff...

Roland Eurorack Modules
Aira Modular, System 500
and Effectors
I had a lot of fun with (finally) playing around with the Moog Mother32, Korg Minilogue, the Novation MiniNova and BassStation 2, plus the modules from the Roland Boutique range JP-03, JX-08, and A-01.
Besides that, Roland showed the whole AIRA-range and a big rack with all their Eurorack modules including the  Aira Modular, System 500 and Effectors...

Arturia showed their Maxibrute for the first time in Europe.
The MatrixBrute is a programmable monophonic / duophonic analog synthesizer, outfitted with three ‘Brute’ oscillators, Steiner-Parker and ladder filters, three envelope generators, analogue effects and a matrix-style modulation matrix.

A short talk with Andy Mac from Akai learned me that they will shoot new MPC-Touch tutorials next week... I hope they will be online soon, as the last 4 Basic Workflow Tutorials that they released (a few weeks ago) were pretty useful for an MPC-noob like me, someone who is totally unfamiliar with the whole MPC-workflow.

One of the 2 Doepfer cases at the Alex4 booth
The most interesting booth (for me) was the one from European Eurorackdistibutor Alex4 that showed a diverse range of Eurorack modules from brands like Doepfer (with most of their new modules), AJH Synth, Verbos, Endorphin.es and Vermona
That last one als showed the prototype Vermona TwinCussion, a percussion module that is capable of very nice 'syncussion' sounds.
DJ/Producer Lucien Foort
The modules from the Austrian Birdkids brand were also on display at the Alex4 booth and the engineer from AQAElektrix showed me their full range of Eurorack modules. More on this in my next blogpost.
Allert from SonarTraffic, who also helped out at the booth  took the time to explain the interesting concept of their studio at Kytopia.

We spent the last hours of the day back at the workshop area from the Herman Brood Academy, where Lucien Foort (from Quadrophonia and more) presented a workshop. He first went through a short history about modular synths, up to the recent Eurorack-boom before he gave an intuitive tutorial on how to integrate modulars in your curent DAW setup.

Overall it was a great atmosphere at the whole event with almost everything you'd expect, including overexpensive drinks and food... and yesssss.... BoothBabes! :)

You can find the rest of my pictures from the Dancefair Saturday at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1103743713004246.1073741844.143124692399491 …

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