Frankfurt Musikmesse 2014 In Pictures

This year’s Musikmesse in Frankfurt has been quite a treat for the eyes and ears, here are some of our highlights in pictures…..

Of the many (many) sets of monitors at Frankfurt 2014 the Focal Alpha range caused the biggest stir…

It wasn’t all speakers though thankfully. AMS Neve had its Genesys Black console on display. Yes it was announced last year but you will want one (even though you might not be able to stretch to its £30k asking price). It’s essentially a complete studio in one console, all the outboard you could possibly ever want with all the connectivity you could ever need with a touch screen Mac Daw controller in the middle. Yes, you read that right, a touch screen Mac, something that Apple themselves seem to have forgotten to develop. Neve has made it work though and I had a quick go at grabbing some audio in Pro Tools and it works (also with Logic and other DAWs).

Arturia were arguably making the biggest noise with the KeyLab range of keyboards and the special edition MiniBrute SE…

And here’s the company’s KeyLab 61 – check out the review of the 49 in the next issue of MusicTech

Akai had more releases than ever including the very colourful APC40

And the star of the show, the very cool Rhythm Wolf. We already love it just because of its name…

We’ve not seen the keyboard version yet but Nord released the rack version of the A1 at Frankfurt. Check out the review soon

Seriously how many monitors does a musician need? I’ve got two sets only because I couldn’t decide between them and that’s probably 100% more than I need. But the music tech industry thinks that I, and indeed you, need more. And more, and more, so this years Frankfurt Musik Messe was a monitor messe.

So we saw generally sets of three monitor releases from *takes gulp of air* Focal, Akai, Alesis, Fostex, Fluid Audio, Sonodyne, Unity Audio, Avantone, Eve and Mackie. Oh, and these from Dynaudio…

Admittedly though, this top of the range £4k beauty from Sonodyne does look and sound amazing…

And finally the new RME Fireface 802 interface which threatens to revolutionise iPad music production.
So this year’s Frankfurt was quiet – we’d say ‘solid’ just to be polite. Maybe the organisers might like to think about moving it further away from the NAMM show next year? And maybe not inviting 5000 children in? Just a thought…