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Looper's Delight
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Oooops, I wrote this two days ago and was so tired I forgot to post it. Here's my NAMM wrapup: *********** Monday, January 21st Bill and I just drove back from NAMM last night, making good time we loaded out at 5 p.m. and were on the road by 5:20 which is pretty fast. We made it back to Santa Cruz by a little after midnight, exhausted completely. NAMM is always fun and chaotic in the last hour of the show: Many merchandisers just don't want to have to take a lot of their gear home so they sell it really cheaply. Consequently, there is a feeding frenzy of people trying to buy cheap instruments dealing with all of the people who are truly burnt out by four or five days of continual noise and schmoozing. I made out like a bandit and got an alto strumstick, a chromatic tenor strumstick and a really funny little flying V miniature electric guitar (for $65!). Also, at the end of the show, the two Chinese vendors who listened to us demo all weekend long came over and gave Bill and I each a little clip on chromatic tuner as a gift. It was really sweet and it really touched us. They, and a lot of vendors, had to sit in their booth that sold miniature tuners and metronomes for long hours at a time. I'm always sensitive to the fact that the vendors on either side of demo booths have to put up with the music being played hour after hour as a captive audience, so I made sure I went to all three of the vendors next and across from us to apologize to them if it ever got too much. Kim Flint had told Bob Amstadt earlier that he had gone over the whole NAMM show and our booth had the weirdest music of the entire show. LOL, what a great compliment, but I was worried at whether straighter, captive audiences would appreciate it, but was really surprised that they universally thanked us for the music and said it made the show much more enjoyable. That makes a lot of sense with the beautiful music of my brother Bill (who was on fire with this slide playing through the looperlative), Steve Lawson and Lobelia, but I really felt good that my found sound, orange plastic madness was also cool to them. Bob and Looperlative had a really good show with a lot of orders and a lot of interest. Guitar Player columnist (and fellow looper), Barry Cleveland came by the booth and interviewed Bill while he and I were playing for the Guitar Player Video Blog so we look forward to seeing that online. We had luminaries like Lyle Workman (Sting, Beck, composer of 'SuperBad' and "40 Year Old Virgin" soundtracks) and Jerry Marotta (Peter Gabriel, Tony Levin, et. al.) come by and check out the demos so that was exciting. I got my first taste of the Gordius, which is a really powerful midi controller, but it was too dilfferent from the FCB 1010 for me to get comfortable with it in real time, so I switched back to the FCB for Saturday and Sundays shows. Tell me, why can't an American company put out a midi foot controller with room for a couple of expression pedals that doesn't take up such a large footprint? All the good ones are now no longer made. The Gordius is really hip, but we're just being slaughtered by the weak dollar in Europe now so you really have to be financially solvent to get one. The FCB 1010 is great but it's just too big for touring of any kind. ******** Let's see, what else? There was a hip stomp box company called HOTHAND that had a wireless ring controller with a bright blue LED in it that enables a guitarist (or anyone) to control parameters in their pedals like cutoff frequency, depth of effects, amount of distortion. The CC controller also can send midi messages to other effects with other companies. The demoing guitarist had it hooked up to a Digitech Red Whammy Pedal with a midi input and was controlling the 2 octave sweep with this finger like a theremin................how cool is that? Loopers are always looking for ways to make their performances interesting and this bright blue LED lit ring is really arresting. At around $120 for the ring and wireless assembly and with effects ranging. ******* NAMM DAYGLO PLASTIC REPORT: There was also, and this probably only excites me, a hell of a lot of Dayglo stuff at the show as well. I bought two translucent lime green guitar stands that are bright under UV light; a set of of bright dayglo lime green 5 string Bass guitar strings, a couple of bright Orange plastic drumsticks. ******** Oh yeah, I also got to debut the Pro Chopper pedal for GiG-FX as the first endorsement I have with this innovative company and was really pleased with this sophisticated tremelo box. It has two sides, one a square wave tremelo effect and one a more sine wavey tremelo effect that you can play separately or in tandem (which can allow for some really cool polyrhythmic possibilities which I used to good advantage in my show. Combined with the Looperlatives 'Random Scramble' function I had some very hip 'slice and dice' capabilities with my loops..........an aesthetic I'm really fond of. You also have the option of using the incredibly smooth and quiet expression pedal on the unit (in a attractive, compact and sturdily built but not heavy case) to either change the speed of the tremelo or to just trigger it as an on off pedal. The kicker is that the machine also has a midi IN function that allows one to control the tremelo speed (in increments of multiples of two) of a looper that spits out a midi clock. I didn't have a chance to try this as I just got the pedal the day before I drove to NAMM, but this is very exciting to me. In essence, it has a capability simlar to the 'quantize' function in the EDP of driving rhythmic ostinato rhythms that are synced to your midi synced Loop. As soon as I recover from the weekend I'll begin trying that out. I'm also eager to try out their MegaWah (which also functions as a really good, smooth and quiet volume pedal) and their VOD pedal which is a three increment Distortion pedal with a ton of control over eq and timbre of the distortion. These all look good, have a small footprint and are really high quality pedals designed by the accopmlished guitarist Jeff Purchon case)