This year’s NAMM Show was smaller than recent NAMM Shows – with few companies showing up, fewer attendees and fewer gear announcements.

Nevertheless, there were still quite a few interesting music instruments and applications being introduced. Here are some of the more interesting items that we saw on the first day of NAMM.

Eigenlabs introduced the Eigenharp Tau, which offers most of the functionality of their top-of-the-line Eigenharp Alpha, but at less than half the price. The Eigenharps are an amazing piece of work – both as new music technology and as desirable instruments to play. See our NAMM Photos on Flickr for more shots from the introduction.

Jordan Rudess was at the Spectrasonics booth demoing OmniSphere using a Zen Riffer, above, and his iPhone. His demo higlighted how powerful OmniSphere is and, even more important, how playable it is.

Teenage Engineering was demoing their OP-1 Synthesizer, which is very impressive and powerful – but expensive at the expected $700 retail price. They expect the release date to be about a year off, and they are working on finishing the software and looking for ways to make the synth more efficiently.

This is just scratching the surface of what we saw. See our complete NAMM Show coverage for more!