Awards

 

Several of the following awards were made at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) trade show held each January at the Anaheim Convention Center.  The largest US music trade show with a 115 year history, in 2016 it attracted over 100,000 trade-only (not open to the public) attendees.  Over one third of the 1700 exhibitors come from countries outside the US

 

  • TEC Award 1990 NAMM for Digitech Whammy Pedal.  TEC Awards are prestigious recognitions of breakthroughs in technology innovation for the music industry.  One of the most successful guitar effects pedals of all time, the Whammy was designed and manufactured by IVL.  The device simulates the mechanical whammy bar on a guitar but achieves the effect electronically, permitting the player to prform radical pitch shiftint effects.  Some the notable artists using the Whammy include Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Joe Perry and Nels Cline.  See Premier Guitar Magazine article below.
  • Two TEC Awards at 1992 NAMM for Digitech Vocalist – “Most Innovative Products of the Year” and “Most Innovative Effect Device”.  Providing vocal harmony using the lead singer’s melody, the Vocalist was a breakthrough product offering distortion-free pitch shifting eliminating the need for backing singers.
  • Business Week/USA Today “Best Products of 2002” Award for Karaoke TV Star.  Incorporating “Onkey” pitch correction and providing recorded instrumental backing, IVL introduced the first music download web site in 2001 – several years before Apple launched iTunes
  • BPM Tech Award (2011.)  BPM is Europe’s biggest DJ event.  DJ Magazine is a respected and influential UK publication which awarded the “DJ Controller under 600 pounds(symbol?)”
  • “Best DJ Innovation of 2011-12”.  Crystal Disk Award from DJ zone – NAMM 2012.  Stanton SCS4.DJ developed by IVL
  • Electronic Musician “Editor’s Choice Award”.  Best DJ Innovation 2011-12 for the Beat Thang.  NAMM 2012
Selected as one of \

Selected as one of "10 Stompboxes that Changed the World" published in Premier Guitar Magazine Sept 2012

"When Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut exploded like a cluster bomb in 1992, the consensus wtf? moment among guitar heads came at about the 3:50mark in the album’s lead-off single, “Killing in the Name.” Tom Morello’s impossibly elastic solo was the boldest use yet of DigiTech’s WH-1 Whammy pedal, introduced in 1989. The Ferrari-red unit featured pitch-bending and harmonizing technology developed by IVL Audio, and with its expression pedal allowed squeals and dive-bombs that could extend as low (or as high) as three octaves.

For Morello, the Whammy offered an intuitive way, especially in the higher octaves, to emulate the siren-like samples he heard in the southern California gangsta rap sound of Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, and Ice Cube. “I was basically designated to be the band’s DJ,” he said in a 2008 interview, “and I found, with very simple manipulations of a very simple pedal, that all of a sudden the guitar, for me, was finding a lot of very new sonic possibilities.” Morello tapped into the unit’s harmonizing capabilities as well, most notably on the devastatingly funky “Know Your Enemy,” which opens with an infectious stacked-fifths riff and culminates in one of the nuttiest guitar solos of the ’90s."