NAMM Wrap-Up...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Okay, I know long-time readers are used to a daily NAMM round-up, wherein I make biting comments about the latest and greatest from our fine business. Long-time readers also know that I’m not, as a habit, an exhibitor at NAMM. That all changed this year.
I’m not going to apologize for not walking the floor and trying out every new thing under the sun. While I would have greatly enjoyed doing exactly that, the simple fact of the matter is that it was virtually impossible to make the time. Not only was I generally tied to the Audio Damage booth, but this NAMM was unusually crowded, at least relative to the last few I’ve been to. And the Eurorack format is really exploding. At this rate, we’ll have an entire hall in two years.
So, as I say, I was unable to either poke or prod any new things. The only instrument I did spend a total of about 45 seconds with was the Sequential Prophet 6. That was long enough to decide it was the modern analog synth of my dreams. Keybed: great. Control surface: great. Sound: great. I saw almost nothing else during the show, I’m sorry to report.
We did get a lot of good business done, which is, I guess, the point of the operation. We discovered that both Adam and I are really shitty at giving demos and doing sales pitches. Adam gets in to the minutia of the device so quickly that the potential customer’s eyes glaze over, while I take a more patronizing “well, it’s shit-hot, and you should buy it, unless you’re stupid or something” meta-approach. We will, in the future, be paying Jeremy Highhouse to do our pitching for us, because we suck at it, plain and simple.
I had big plans to film the 10 Questions answers on the show floor, but a raging bout of insomnia that waylaid me for virtually the entire trip kept me in this sort of strange FML zone that prevented me from being extemporaneous, at least in any intelligible fashion. I’ll do the answers in the next couple days.
Anyhow, if I was able to meet you during the week, rest assured that I think you are both handsome and charming, and I’ll tell anyone who asks. Don’t bother posting anything like “hey, did you check out the new DeeJay EZ-Tron 5000 XS?” because I didn’t.
A very special thanks to WMD for organizing the group booth, and to Stan Cotey and Fender for saving our bacon in at least two ways. When the largest American music equipment company takes time out of their ludicrously busy show schedule to help out one of the smallest, it makes you feel good about the future in general, and this business in particular.
(Side note: those in the general know of things might view the previous paragraph as an attempt to lay the blame for the noise warnings WMD received at Fender’s feet. NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!!!)
15 comments
how much for the cactus?
Shoot, I didn't get to play with the Prophet AND I missed the EZ-TRON.
I'm actually currently sitting in my NAMM hotel room waiting for 4 billion pounds of snow to finish falling on the airport I'm supposed to go home to. Anaheim really loses it's charm after the freaks and nerds roll out.
Dan, go to Disneyland. It's really your only option.
-CR
Every product video I saw from NAMM was little more then an a foley loop of "crowded mall" or "group of men talking indistinctly." Some of that kit looks cool, tho. Even if I don't always dig the results, props to Korg for making fun toys and reasonably priced tools. And, yeah, Prophet 6. Props to everyone who made that happen.
Oh, and make fun of the DeeJay EZ-Tron 5000 XS all you want. My next party is gonna be OFF THE HOOK!!!
We were all talking about how light the traffic was this year. Especially on Saturday.
That's because everyone was at our booth. Shit was nuts to butts the whole weekend.
-CR
Congrats! Sounds like it was a success for AD! I was looking at the pic and my eyes fell on to the neat stickers...and that reminded me that you'd mentioned new shirts a little while back. Any updates?
http://www.audiodamage.com/hardware/product.php?pid=ADT01
-CR
NAMM themselves says it was arecord-breaking show, both in number of exhibitors and number of registrants: https://www.namm.org/news/press-releases/global-music-industry-comes-together-record
Good times in any case. I don't have much to add to what CR said, but I will say thanks again to everyone who stopped by our booth.
--Adam
just ordered one of them purty T-Shirts. Thank you for the link, I hadn't checked the hardware section of your site in a while.
It's kind of funny, because we used to use the "Hardware" section just for shirts and stickers and such-like. Since we never intended to release real hardware, it was just another indication of our perhaps-misguided sense of humor.
When we actually started releasing actual hardware, we started using it for that. Because obvious. So it's mildly confusing; there should probably be a "tchotchkes" section or something. I dunno. We're not (at least with this company) really in the business of selling t-shirts, so it's not something we'll lose sleep over, at least in the short term.
-CR
I'm with nuts to butts.
OT, but can we register AD Basic from Splice?
Thanks!
I'll actually have a full post up about Splice later today. But long story short: if you acquire one of our products from them, you are in their ecosystem. You can write us for support, of course, but transactions/licensing/updates etc. all come from them.
-CR
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