Frankfurt' Musikmesse, the world's biggest musical instrument and studio equipment show was held last week, and we were there of course to have an insider view of the current state of the music industry. We experienced slightly even worse mood than last year, the industry's weaking and transforming rapidly. Three sharp process can be observed:

1. The music industry's backlash goes down to the instruments' market coninuously. The big publishers' business failure, the weaker-than-ever cash flow from the music consumers cause drastic changes to the instruments' manufacturers, too. It is proven that the pay-per-download model cannot replace CD sales, its figures will never have such highs. There is no killer online model, ad-supported downloads and monthly suscription for P2P is at the early stage only.

2. China rocks the market with cheap alternatives in every area. Though the quality of their instruments are mostly determines them to compete in the lower fields (for beginners' purpose only), it still can cause significantly less demand for the middle-cathegory instruments.

3. On the electronic market, software's dominancy is evident, most hardware units are only supporting on of the software platforms. But software companies has no schedule for the Messe: they are competing and fighting so heavily that they are on the main stage whole year. You will not notice too much software maker in the Messe area: at first, they don't need it, second, they have no budget for it. Even Native Instruments, one of the biggest names had no booth at the Messe.

This year's biggest electronic instrument hit was Yamaha's Tenori-On, no doubt. Its worldwide launch was held in Wednesday's evening, in the heart of Frankfurt city, in a night club called Nachtleben. Toshio Iwai, media artist and inventor of the device presented the process of planning and manufacturing Tenori-On personally. An audience of few hundred people were watching and listening, and after the speech, some nice names of the experimental music field seized the stage and showed how to perform with Tenori-On, live. While going on with the show, in the bar anybody can test and try one of the eight Tenori-Ons exhibited. What was not clear for us: Yamaha has doubled the 16 x 16 led matrix on the lower side of the instrument so audience can follow with their eyes what is happening in front of the musician. (Toshio said they wanted to make it transparent at first but it wouldn't be an easy task.)

Staying with Yamaha, they premiered a new USB interface family, Audiogram. Smaller instance, Audiogram 3 is a 2-in-2-out box with mic connection, while Audiogram 6 has a small analog mixer design with two additional stereo inputs. Here is a web page of them.

Yamaha's property, Steinberg brought hardware only: CC121 is a new controller unit for Cubase 4, dedicated. Point and control, says the brochure: some of the knobs are mouse-sensitive so they tweak the parameter where the mouse cursor can be found on the screen. The big fader on the left is motorised, of course. It will be hit the shops autumn. Here is the preliminary web page. If you go on reading, you will notice Steinberg's new interfaces also, MR816 CSX and MR816 X. They are all Firewire, have eight channels, DSP inside, and are directly accessible from Cubase.

Scanning the whole building of the keyboard companies, it was surprising that virtually no new synthesizer model was issued. Roland showed their new flagship, Fantom G with big screen, and Korg's only news is world's first professional synth software for the Nintendo DS platform. DS-10 is a kind of an emulation of the old MS-10 analog synthesizer - it contains two pieces of it, plus a simple drum machine. You can enter keypresses, and tweak the sounds with the ordinary stylus of the small game machine. (Korg's another news was the free 512-pack of sound library for the M3 workstation.)

Roland produced an interesting device under the Edirol name: R-09HR is an advanced version of the popular pocket recorder. It records now up to 24/96 quality, has a pair of fine condenser mics, has a remote controller, and covered with rubber. Check it here.

This worm on the picture is produced by M-Audio and called ProKeys 88 Sono. It also has a 61-keys version - no, not a hammer-action keyboard but a nicely semi-weighted synthesizer keyboard. It has six well-sampled preset sound, a small GM sound set, and a 2-in-2-out USB interface for computers. Quality is only 16/44,1 - but has XLR connectors for microphones. The bigger costs no more than 550 USD.

M-Audio also has a new big, rack-mountable USB interface, Fast Track Ultra 8R, with eight ins and outs, plus DSP - click here for more.

Alesis invented the cymbal. Yes, they did it. These nice brass plates are super silent electronic cymbals, the very first of the kind in the world. They are called Surge, has three zones, and are chokable perfectly. Here is the product page, read it. Another drum news from there: a late successor of the very popular HR-16, SR-18 is a new desktop drum module, with a not-so-exciting quantity of 32 megabyte sound samples. SR can run on batteries, too, that's the main advantage we think.

Speaking of drums, we mention a small company with a great new product: Traps Drums makes rubber plates and electronic sensors for the real acoustic kits to cover them - with it, you can play your favourite acoustic drums at home silently, with headphones. (Their home page still does not feature this product at the time.)

Probably the heaviest drum sales figures will be reached by Ion, the company that are famous of USB-based turntables, cassette decks, and cheap drum pads. Now they took Rock Band, a musical game for the Xbox platform (very similar to Guitar Hero but you can play more instruments), and produced a color-coded electronic drum pad set with real size, dedicated for this game. In opposite of Guitar Hero, it can develop real musical abilities. The drum set will be out in Christmas.

DJ supporting companies have strong presence still, and we consider a subjective tendency of performing more and more women in the Messe-booths - check the evidences.

This pretty DJ controller was made by Numark. It is recommended for MixMeister, their software package, but of course works well with anything on the market. It's called MixMeister Control. Tweaks 94 controller parameter at a time - check the product's page for more info.

Focusrite widened the palette with Liquid Mix 16. It does the same task like the bigger Liquid Mix, but on 16 channels instead of 32. Real time EQs per channel are also present - check here.

TC Electronic has a new effect plugin for the PowerCore platform, Tap Factory. It is a multitap delay and early reflection generator with a nice interface, for 300 euro. Here.

SSL's Soundscape division showed a new PCIe sound card, MadiXtreme. It has two version, with 64 audio channels (1 MADI connector), and 128 channels (two connectors). Here.

N-Tune is a great invention for the guitarist - it is a small tuner that can be fitted into the volume knob of every electric guitar, within minutes. Check here.

We don't know whether E-mu was present on the Messe - we didn't met them - but they announced a new sampler software, Emulator X3. It has a maximum of 24/192 sound quality, streams samples from disk, runs on 32 and 64 bit operating systems also, and costs 500 USD. Sound library bundled with it weighs only 3 gigabytes. Check here.