BERKELEY, California – December 8, 2009 – Keith McMillen Instruments (KMI) will be unveiling SoftStep at the Winter NAMM 2010 conference, as well as showing K-Bow, Stringport, and Batt-O-Meter to attendees. KMI will be providing one-on-one meetings with their inventors, sales team, and demonstrators. All KMI innovations will be on display at booth #6227 in Hall A on January 14-17, 2010 in Anaheim, CA.

SoftStep is a leap forward in the portability and functionality of footpedal controllers. Weighing in at just over a pound and fitting into many laptop cases, SoftStep has limitless flexibility compared to standard footswitches. Ten square sensor keys go beyond the simple on and off commands by supporting multiple transducers per key, providing five degrees of control freedom. Now each key can be used to manipulate effects, computer programs, and multimedia. SoftStep also has a four-direction navigation pedal, an alphanumeric LED display, and backlit keys. SoftStep connects to your computer through USB and contains Expansion and Expression ports. With the MIDI expansion module, SoftStep can be used without a computer. Whether used with an ef fects rack or popular software programs, this innovative device frees musicians from heavy footswitch pedals while expanding their control.

New for NAMM, Batt-O-Meter, the first battery tester for musicians, will also be presented. Batt-O-Meter shows the voltage and remaining hours of life in batteries without removing them from active instruments and pedals. Often described as indispensable, Batt-O-Meter tells musicians whether their batteries are going to die onstage while saving them time and money from changing healthy batteries unnecessarily.

Violinists will be demonstrating K-Bow, a Bluetooth sensor bow, to reveal the bevy of sounds that can be created by the extensive K-Apps software. K-Bow has ushered in a new era of expression for string players, freeing them from cables and traditional sounds. It even allows the player to control surround sound and videos with the wave of a bow.

KMI demonstrators will also have Stringport on hand to show how KMI has greatly expanded the processing and synthesis palette of string players. Stringport is a unique polyphonic string-to-USB2 converter that allows string players to feed their string sounds into a computer at blinding speeds where they can tap into the powerful software suite.

If interested in providing KMI products to your customers, please email sales@keithmcmillen.com.

About Keith McMillen Instruments

McMillen opened up the world of electronic music to string players when he started Zeta Music and built what has become the “gold standard” for electric string instruments. Since then he has invented the first programmable mixer for Akai; lead the research and development department at Gibson and Oberheim; he produced the popular Volume Logic multiband processing plug-in for iTunes; and brought over 100 cutting edge products to market. Since its inception in 2005, KMI has created StringPort, K-Bow Bluetooth Sensor Bow, Batt-O-Meter, and Softstep. Touring with clunky gear lead McMillen to the KMI mission of freeing musicians to focus on their performance, not their technology. In addition to running KMI and BEAM Foundation, McMillen also performs with TrioMetrik, a string trio using McMillen’s technology to create a new genre of music he calls “NuRoque.”