Meeting the Plasmafarm guys was a happy surprise last night. It was an auspicious sign of what whas going to happen today when several people from the ReBirth User-Computer Controlled group came to the Musikmesse.

Pictured: Nina, Thomas , Tom , Paul "JackPlug", Ian , Matt, Franck "EP" Stauffer, and Irina. It has been 3 years since I last saw Paul, but this was the first time I met Ian, Matt and Franck...I'm on chat with them all the time so it's not like they're strangers.

The CC crew was rather impressed by the Neuron Synthesizer from the German company called Hartmann.

It's got some nice sounds but the price tag is pretty high around $5,000.

I was little obsessed with more of the old school technology. This one company called "The Swiss Cheese and Chocolate Company" had several A-100s and B-3s set up with lit interiors and pleiglass covers to show off the internal workings of classic Hammond Organs and Leslie Speaker cabinets.

The Arturia booth was decorated with some fine art pieces by Bitplant. Wolfgang, Sandra and jesuspark did the graphic design work for the Modular V package and brochures. JP and W. kept selling me to the arturia people and tried to get them interesting in having me develop a tutorial for the Modular V. While this is an interesting proposition, I'm going to be rather busy with something else for a bit. JP and W. generously gave me an NFR copy of the modular V which I played with. For a soft synth, it reallly does sound great. The TAE technology is PHAT, but it's a resource hog... i need a faster machine to use it.

Demonstrating the possibilities of the ee-body unit, Cyril from IRCAM had made a little shower scrubber control device with IR sensors and 8 knobs.

The ee-body interface is the newer version of the AtomixPro device Ircam introduced a few years ago.

The ee-body scrubber was demonstrated though a patch running on Max/MSP. Cyril let me sit down for a bit to play around with the device. I suggest to him that Ircam should mass produce the scrubber. That would probably sell really well as a unique MIDI controller :)

After the show, Wolfgang arranged for the CC crew and the Pheads to go to the same Italian restaurant, Osteria Safo.

If you're ever in Frankfurt, I highly recommend this place. The food is excellent and the service is really amazing.

Johan, Ian and Paul sharing some filthy humour. Since Johan was an ex-rocker and knowing that Ian and Paul have listened to a lot of rock, I knew these guys would get along quite well :-)

This shot of Stefan basically sums up what we did... Drank a lot of nice German Beer and smoked a lot of cigarettes...

I'm not going to tell the story of what happened with Stefan on this night, but it definitely goes down as one of the strangest things i've ever heard of.

I think the staff at Osteria Safo was a bit annoyed by us since we stayed until way past closing time.

This was just the beginning of the night...

Paul and Ian, pictured outside yet another fine dining establishment in Frankfurt, Germany.

After dinner, the Props decided to call it an early night. Meanwhile, the CC group decided that 2:00 am was too early for bed. We were going to meet up with the Merkles at a bar, but it was closed by the time we arrived.

Our Cab driver recommended another part of Frankfurt with a lot of bars that are open all night.

The Cabbie suggested that we go to the Irish Pub where there are a lot of nice looking english speaking women. When we stepped in we discovered that the Cabbie was absolutely wrong. We had a couple pints of Guiness to see if things looked better, but they didn't.

Ian wanted to go to some Table Dance club in Frankfurt...

We didn't quite make it there... Next time, the Girlfriends stay home!

Paul suggested that we stop in the Fenstergucker, but the German contingent said they didn't want to go into some place called "Fenstergucker". Transliterally, it's "Window Looker", but I think it means something like "Peeping Tom"

So we ended up at some type of Brazillian Bar where the CC reunion continued until about 4:00 am... I don't have a watch so I couldn't really tell. It was really late.

we met up downstairs of the hotel lobby for a few coffees. We were all staying at the Hilton Frankfurt so it was rather convenient to meet.

Nope, the next morning wasn't a pretty sight, but the night before was definitely worth it...

I had an early meeting with Tage and Ernst. I had to present them with some ideas for my new project and get their "OK" on things. The meeting went well, and I have the support and cooperation of the Props for this thingy... :)

After the meeting, I had a chance to check out Messe. We stumbled across a German dealer of Analog Synthesizers. Their booth was quite cool (not quite as vintage as Turn Key, but cool nontheless). They had all latest and greatest stuff like the Minimoog as well as retrofits for Memorymoogs.

I was happy to see that they even had some of the Metasonix stuff as well as the MFB Synths that I had seen earlier this year at NAMM. This best describes my experience at messe...I've seen most of the new technology at NAMM, but there are a few suprise gems.

Digital Performer users will be happy to know that DP4 for MacOS X was officially announced. It features all the bells and whistles including surround sound mixing and support for quicktime movies. They are also boasting the most accurate MIDI timing in the industry (provided you use a MOTU interface).

Another Swedish company, Elektron (makers of such cool devices as the Sidstation and MachineDrum), had a very interesting piece of gear under glass. A prototype of The Monomachine SFX-6. I'm not sure what it will sound like, but the interesting design has a keyboard controller and a sequencer all in one unit. It looks like a two person keyboard :)

Tage pointed out this new device from Korg. The EMX-1 is the evolution of their Electribe series and features a Vacuum Tube preamp section. It looks cool, and has a pretty tight sound, but I kept asking myself, how much power the device uses. The tubes aren't hot, and it looks like a low voltage DC input powering the device.

My friend, Tom, is notorious for his text messaging skills. While checking my e-mail at the show, I received a couple of messages from him and we met up to go have lunch. He's a bit overly polite (or indecisive), and we ended up walking about 2km before stopping in at this really nice Thai restaurant near the Hauptbahnhof.

Afterwards we took a walk down Kaiserstraße, which turns out to be a rather dodgy neighborhood :)

Needless to say, my trip to Germany has been nothing short of a gastronomical paradise. The food in Frankfurt has been amazing.

After the show, I met up with the Merkles again to dine at an Italian Osteria with the company of the people of Arturia and Ircam. Bitplant has done some work for Arturia with the new Moog Modular V--Virtual Moog Modular Synthesizer.

After dinner, we managed to arrive at the Propellerheads -Ableton-M-Audio party. Unfortunately, I missed the Lapjockey's performance but I arrived just in time to catch Tage and Stefan (the Puff) perform their Reason 2.5 on TiBook set.

In the middle of the performance, the beta crashed on Tage and there was a brief awkward moment of silence. After a quick ReLaunch, they were back in business and put on a great set... as usual :)

Since the party was kind of a ReWire fest, there were a lot of different companies there. I even had a chance to meet up with this nice guy named Adrian. He happens to work for Digidesign, working on the ReWire stuff for Pro Tools. Being in a drunken stupor as we were, he told me all about the alpha versions. I would have bought him a few more beers to try and get copies of this alpha, but drinks were free :-/ Apparently, there is an alpha version of PT6 with ReWire, and it looks like they are going to get it out on schedule (he was drunk so that means we will see a beta at the next NAMM Show).

Adrian started to get a little technical on me, so I introduced him to Peter Jubel and they went off talking in coderspeak.

I have to post this image of Peter in a stunning disco shirt...

Simon, Stefan, Tom (turned away), Sandra & Nina (who shall be known as the Bitplant Babes), Thomas (jesuspark) and Tage. Tage was always showing people pictures of his baby (his Son, not his TiBook).

Another ReBirth reunion moment! I met up with Andi S. and DJ Solid--the Plasmafarm guys who created the Plasmafire mod for ReBirth. It's always great to meet fellow ReBirthers, and especially nice to meet people who have taken on the daunting task of creating a RBM.

Wolfram - Propellerheads Representative in Germany... always doing PR and sporting one of the new ad campaign Reason T-Shirts.

He's definitely one of the coolest guys around.

After a night of drinking, there's nothing like a can of whipped cream to keep it all down :-p

I was up early this morning (about 6:00 gmt). I had to repack my stuff prepare for my flight to Frankfurt. I'm pretty comfortable with eurotime now, so jet-lag is not really a factor. However I'm trying to shift myself to CET, for my stay in Germany.

I was really surprised to see my friends, Sandra and Wolfgang Merkle at the airport when i exited from customs. It was really nice of them to take time out of their schedule to pick me up. We drove from the airport straight over to Frankfurt Musikmesse.

The Frankfurt Messe is a huge complex. I think there are a total of nine buildings on the convention grounds, and they have shuttle busses that ferry people between the buildings and the parking structure.

I phoned up Tage to tell them that I had arrived and Ernst came out to meet me in Hall 1. We treked all the way back to Hall 5 where the Propellerheads have their booth set up on the 1st (2nd Floor) level.

I'm still overwhelmed by the size of this convention. It's much larger in scale than NAMM, so much that it took it's toll on me. This was just the first few hours i was there.

The Props booth is much more elaborate than the one they have at NAMM. Nearly as high as the hall's ceiling, the cylindrical booth is framed with lighting trusses and draped with red and green fabrics. A disco ball hangs over the center with a stylish red carpet with arabesque patterns on the floor giving the booth a definite "lounge" feel. The Bose sound system is really impressive and visitors are surrounded by the voice of Reason as they enter this unique booth.

After the show, we met up with the Propellerheads crew at a nice German restaurant near the university in Frankfurt. I had a massive plate of various sausages and sauerkraut and washed it down with... Bier of course :)

It was a nice chance to catch up with the props and the Merkles. Pictured: Kristoffer and Jonas.

The beginning of the ReBirth User Reunion: Thomas and Wolfgang...their bosses, Sandra and Nina, and Tom. We were out on the streets trying to find some party organized by "Waves" at the U-bar? It's a club located in an old underground station. So it looks like you're going to a train platform that plays thumping german techno music :)

Reason:: Today is the first day of Messe, and it has been announced...Reason 2.5! I actually had a chance to see the beta yesterday since Ian was preparing some demos for Musik Messe. Technically I'm not allowed to talk about it so you can find out more from the Propellerheads website :)

Today, Hami took me over to his office, which is only about a 5 minute walk from the hotel (super convenient). It turned out to be a small Computer Controlled Reunion. At the desk behind hami is Alex, who hung out with the CC gang online when he lived in New Zealand. Now he's in London and Hami gave him a job with Team Soho. Hami's desk is quite interesting...it's littered with various toys and figures. Any 8 year old would have a lot of fun there :)

Later on, Hami and Vicky took me on the tour of the entire building. One of the highlights is the fake pub that was build on the executive floor.

I've heard about the new Studio that was installed, but Hami said to wait until next week when Dave was back so that he could personally show me the room.

I met up with Hami in the early afternoon, and we took a little walk in a different direction. We eventually made it (I was dying from a lack of sleep) down to the music shops in London, and we went to check out the "Turnkey Synth Nirvana". There are some beautiful pieces here including a Moog Modular system, a wall full of Roland System 100 modules, an ARP 2500 and 2600 to name a few of the things you will find here.

After an exhausting walk from Oxford Circus to Trafalgar Square, it was about 4:30, so we hopped in a Taxi to head over to meet up with Ian and Su (from the lapjockeys). They were at the studio (which goes nameless other than being "The Studio" or "Andy's Studio). It's a huge space in North West London, and currently it's under renovations. Su gave us the grand tour of the place and I kept laughing to myself as Hami gawked in amazement. This place does have a lot of stuff--so much that gear was just piled up on the floor and in various rooms through the complex!