NAMGLA, Day Two...

I hit all the obvious highlights yesterday, so this morning I spent some quality time in Hall E, the Basement Of Failed Dreams And Sadness. This is the fun hall, because it has all the booths where an inventor is risking everything on a throw, plus all the hyper-aggressive English-challenged Chinese clone-mills. (Remember last year’s classic signage: “Nearly Zero Defects!”) There’s a lot of heart in Hall E. I tweeted a lot of the fun stuff I came across, and for most of it there’s not much more to tell than that. I mean, Chord Dice? Those are so patently obvious, it doesn’t bear explaining. Lots of that sort of thing.

One thing I did spend a little time with was the Rhizome SXE. Aside from Empowering Your Creativity™, it is actually a pretty cool live performance tool, especially if you’re in to the whole streamlined workflow thing. Unlike a lot of Linux-based all-in-one tools, it is _very_ quick. I tweeted a video of me switching modes and such on it. While I tend to give this sort of thing the Hairy Eyeball, the Rhizome actually intrigues me a bit, surprisingly. The creator wasn’t in his booth when I stopped by, so I’m going to hit it again tomorrow (twss) in the hopes of getting a full demo.

It seems like there are about 20,000 boutique pedal makers at NAMM. The vast majority of them are slinging the usual clones (Octavia, FuzzFace, Tubescreamer, Orange Squeezer, etc.) and Jam Pedals is no exception. However, what sets them apart is that each and every pedal is hand-painted; not like ZVex, where there’s a general style for a particular kind of pedal, but rather each individual one is its own work of art. Jam is a Greek company, if that matters. One thing they do is combine their pedals in to single multi-pedals, where you pick the signal flow and features (within reasonable limits) and they make you your pedal. Each one is decorated uniquely, and you effectively have an all-in-one pedalboard built to your specs, that is also a small work of art unto itself. I like their style. Pure Hall E.

I went through all the guitar displays in the main hall today, and came across a couple nice guitars (the Fano stuff really caught my eye) but NAMM really isn’t the environment for noodling with something, and honestly, one quirky tube amp sounds pretty much like another after a while. And the guitar area is right next to the drum area, and you know how I feel about drums, so it was just pretty stressful all around.

Saturday is my reward for a job well-done. This reward consists of hanging out in the Fender area, where I have several friends, and spending some seriously quality time in the piano room, fondling $200,000 instruments and pretending I can, like, play and stuff. I’ll also attempt to get to any questions that you have that I didn’t manage to answer today via the twatscape. And the Trash Audio BBQ is tomorrow night, of course.