I spend Saturday at the NAMM show. My bandmate picked me up early in the morning and we met their long-time friends, Chuck and Barbara Wackerman for breakfast. Getting to the show at 7:30am was brilliant. We had easy parking and no lines getting badges and sitting down for breakfast.
I wanted to see some live music and check out some iPhone audio devices.
Jesse Henry — Inventor of the Jazzbone.
The Jazzbone is a tenor trombone with the slide folded over. Each position is 1/2 of a standard trombone and should facilitate faster playing. I wasn’t very successful with it on my first try but a few other people were able to do well.
While in the Kanstul booth I met Chris and Steven, the inventors of the pBone and had an interesting dialog with them. Essentially, use water only on the slide, clean it with each use, use any mouthpiece that fits, the ABS doesn’t photograph well, and that the pBone is the proof of concept for a paper postulating that the surface of the instrument as as much or more to do with the tone than the substance of the instrument.
I stopped by the Apogee booth to check out what’s new with one of my favorite companies. They where giving away stuff.
In the morning I sat through a Line 6 demo of the new live sound products Stage Source. The demo was fantastic and they really showed how a component-ized system could scale up and down. I really want one of these systems.
Bones West gave a fantastic concert in the patio. My friend Greg played a nice bass trombone solo. He had to follow Bill Watrous though and that would have made me nervous!
After lunch I stopped by the PreSonus booth to see Katelyn Benton’s demo with the USB One 2 (a DAW).
I met with some more friends at the MXL booth to watch a stunning performance by Laurence Juber. That guy is an inspiring player.
I happened to see the iNuke — Behringer’s 10,000 watt iPod dock. They couldn’t demo it due to noise restrictions though .. ah well.
At the end of the day I was able to see my friend Keren Taylor singing with The Band from TV (a celebrity charity band). They put on a lively show with lots of guest artists.
Throughout the day I saw some fantastic gear, innovative stuff all around. I really enjoyed the Yamaha building and the very nice keyboards they had on display.
I came back on Sunday to play with my klezmer band for the good people of NAMM 2012.