NAMM 2010

I’ve just returned from this year’s NAMM trade show in Anaheim (that’s the National Association of Music Merchants).   Interesting, fun, exhausting – not necessarily in that order 🙂   There’s lots of cool stuff to share, which I’ll post over the new few days.

I saw and played some interesting and amazing instruments and met the artisans, luthiers, engineers, and designers that made them.  They’re all there trying to get their ideas out, and hopefully make deals with retailers to carry their products.

As a software engineer for Korg R&D, I wasn’t there to make deals.   I had a couple meetings, sized up some of Korg’s competitors, visited a lot of old friends, and generally browsed around getting inspired.  I’ve been to this show nearly every year since 1994, and I always come away with some new energy and motivation (that is, after recovering from the soreness and dehydration).

It’s hard to describe the scale of the NAMM show.  It’s HUGE.  And there are just hoards of people of all kinds there- hip rockers, metal heads, punkrock girls, nerdy engineers, synth geeks, pinup girls, celeb lookalikes, and even a few business suits.   The official stats say there were 87,569 registrants present.

I also saw a few gen-u-ine stars. I walked past Joe Satriani and Slash, who were signing autographs for insanely long lines of fans.  Jordan Rudess always seems to be everywhere at once – really, I think he has cloned himself.   I got to hang out with synth pioneers Dave Smith and John Bowen.   I watched Joey DeFrancesco play some effortlessly incredible organ, Richard Devine do his knob twiddling thing with Ableton Live, and of course a number of lesser known (to me) musicians who ranged between total suck, and amazing.