Tag: namm

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Effects

Gore Pedals Demo from Premier Guitar

NAMM was fun, though I’m paying a price with this dreaded flu I came home with. (“NAMMthrax,” they call it.) A highlight was getting interviewed on camera by my friend and frequent editor, Shawn Hammond.

Admittedly, there are some cringeworthy moments, especially when my entire Porkolator demo crashes and burns thanks to a funky cable. (I’ve played Shawn’s role at other tradeshows, and trust me, those guys sprint from booth to booth at speeds you wouldn’t believe — definitely no time for do-overs!) But you’ll get a decent idea of the other three. Soon I’ll have proper demos of the new releases, and I’ll share them here.

I was showing my stuff in the brand-new pro audio hall, miles away from most of the guitar stuff. That’s because my distributors, Vintage King/M1, work mainly in the high-end studio/audio realm. (I was set up right next to those magnificent Shadow Hills compressors.)

Still, I managed to see a few old friends and make some new ones. One reunion was with producer Matt Wallace (Faith No More, Maroon 5, Replacements, etc.) who I hadn’t seen in over 35 years, when I was his frickin’ “Intro to Music Appreciation” TA at UC Berkeley. Another was a middle-school friend with no connection to the music industry — his daughter just got a gig at Fender.

And when I wasn’t demoing, schmoozing, or contracting diseases, I was watching the nearby Mix With The Masters stage. That company sells online recording/mixing lessons featuring famed producers and engineers, many of whom gave live presentations in which they walked the audience through their productions. I saw my old pals Joe Chicarelli and Jacquire King, and I got to meet several others whose work I’ve long admired: longtime Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds accomplice Mick Launay, mastering legend Howie Weinberg, and Sylvia Massy. In addition to recording everyone from Tool to Johnny Cash to System of a Down to Julio Iglesias, Sylvia authrored the coolest book ever on creative recording.)

Totally off-topic: While driving from SF, I finally finished the audio book version of Alan Moore’s 1,255-page magnum opus, Jerusalem. Fuck me — the most amazing book I’ve encountered since David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas over a decade ago.

Okay — back to my flu meds!

Categories
Effects guitar

Nice NAMM Things

This doesn’t qualify as any kind of NAMM report. I was imprisoned behind the desk at my Gore Pedals booth, relieved only for bathroom breaks and a couple of visits with old friends. Even so, I saw some lovely and inspiring things, especially the visionary instruments at the Boutique Guitar Showcase and the ravishing stompbox visuals from Greece’s JAM Pedals. (JAM pedals sound great too.) Plus a few old friends dropped by. It was so fun, I went minutes at a time without thinking about the inauguration.

Jannis Anastasakis of JAM Pedals was kind enough to loan me one of the eye-popping pedalboards from his display (the last image in the slideshow). I’ll be posting a demo here soon!

Categories
Effects

Premier Guitar’s Winter NAMM Report on Gore Pedals

Lookit! My pals and colleagues at Premier Guitar just posted a video demo of my pedals shot at NAMM last month.

It was a trip being on the business end of that gear-review microphone! Shooting this clip was surprisingly nerve-racking. You have to make the gear sound good … try not to play too terribly … speak coherently … and not come off as a dick. It’s a tall order, at least for me.

Thanks to the gang at Voodoo Lab for letting me shoot this in their booth. (Which they did because they’re just plain cool.) Thanks also to Shabat Guitars for letting me borrow this pretty guitar, and to Fryette for letting me plug it into one of their spectacular Aether combo amps. Man, am I a freeloader, or what?

If you’d like to learn more about Gore Pedals, please visit my Gore Pedals page for studio-quality recordings with multiple guitars, more pedal settings, and lots of geeky tech info.

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Uncategorized

NAMM and Not NAMM 2016

Screenshot 2016-01-19 08.08.08How to tell holiday season is officially over: It’s time for NAMM 2016! And this will be the first time I attend not as a music magazine writer, but as a guy trying to sell guitar pedals. Or as Ray Liotta put it in Goodfellas: “Just another schnook.”

Not like I can afford a proper booth or anything. I’ll just be wandering around with a sack of goods like some frickin’ crack dealer. I’ll have a pedalboard with new four new releases (plus a couple of surprises) on display at the Vintage King booth in Hall A. But sadly, it won’t be hooked up to anything — there just isn’t enough room for live pedal demos. However, my awesome friends at Voodoo Lab will have my new Filth Fuzz in the demo pedalboard at their booth. (No business connection there — they’re just doing me a favor ’cause they’re cool.) So you can stop by and try it out while sampling Voodoo Lab’s latest and greatest.

If you’re attending NAMM and would like to check out my stuff — or just meet and say hi — drop me a note. I’ll be at the show Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. (Sorry, I can’t help obtain passes. I had to scuffle for my own like … a regular schnook.)

But I’m skipping the show on Friday. Friday night I’ve got a gig at Taix restaurant in Los Angeles, performing my solo looping material and sharing the bill with my longtime pals, Double Naught Spy Car. I haven’t played L.A. in several years, and this is the first time playing solo. I’ll be stoked if folks stop by.

And during the day, I’m teaching a master class at LACM, where my dear pal Adam Levy oversees the guitar department. The focus is modes — or rather, my irreverent crackpot theories about the most musically profitable ways to regard and use modes. I’ve been kicking around these notions for many years, and I’ll probably adopt them into a tonefiend post soon.

I hope to see some old friends and make some new ones. So don’t be a stranger!

Categories
Amps Effects guitar Music

NAMM 2013: The Analog Edition

NAMM

UPDATE: My apologies if this page failed to load properly before. After a much screaming and crying some careful troubleshooting, it seems to be working correctly now.

I put together a little slideshow of some of the interesting things I saw last week at the 2013 NAMM show in Anaheim.

I covered some of the coolest new digital gear in this post. This time, the focus is analog guitars, amps, and effects. Plus: an ultra-rare sighting of a true California celebrity!

Categories
Digital guitar Music

NAMM 2013: Digital Discoveries

This first installment of my 2013 NAMM report focuses on products for the digital guitarist. In the coming days I’ll be doing posts on analog amps, guitar, stompboxes, and accessories. (But maybe not as quickly as I’d like, because I’ve also got to cover MacWorld in San Francisco this weekend.) This is cross-posted from Create Digital Music, one of the few music sites I visit every frickin’ day. 

Source Audio's Hot Hand USB wireless controller.
Source Audio’s Hot Hand USB wireless controller.

We guitarists tend to be a technologically conservative bunch, yet there was no shortage of forward-looking products at NAMM 2013.

Not that everyone was looking in the same direction. Guitar processors are getting smarter, but they’re doing so in different ways. Are we entering an era when every guitar, amp, and pedal in our effect chain will boast powerful processors and a dedicated editing environment? Or will we just simply centralize everything in some future i-device? (I suspect that latter, and tend to think that smart pedals and smart amps represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac. But that cul-de-sac might be a real nice place to hang out for a couple of years.)

Eventide's H9 can play all the sounds from the company's software-intensive stompboxes, and you can edit and control them wirelessly.
Eventide’s H9 can play all the sounds from the company’s software-intensive stompboxes, and you can edit and control them wirelessly.

One release I found particularly telling was Eventide’s H9, the latest addition to the company’s software-intensive stompbox line. The H9 has few new sounds, but can run all the DSP algorithms from Eventide’s other guitar stompboxes. The $499 box will ship late this quarter, preloaded with 9 of Eventide’s 43 current algorithms. Players hungry for more will be able to purchase them а la carte from an online store. (Eventide hasn’t yet finalized the add-on pricing.) The H9 also includes a handsome and full-featured iOS app for editing and managing patches via Bluetooth. There are no current plans to release an editor for OSX or Windows.

Continue reading “NAMM 2013: Digital Discoveries”