Nikki Sixx looked pretty decent actually. Not bad given his history.
Today I basically just covered ground. I tried to walk through the entire show and pick up swag, wasn't able to see everything. Tomorrow is going to be my play day where I just play stuff all day, and then on Sunday I'm going to ask questions and talk to people all day.
Here is a sampling of some of the stuff I saw today:
- About 8 million guitars. It's like if you put 50 Guitar Centers together. The show is about the size of 5 or 6 football fields.
- About 2 million drum kits. That was definitely the loudest area of the convention center.
- A TON of guitars and basses with burl tops. Everywhere I went there was burl. I guess burl is really in right now.
- Probably 3 or 4 booths with just wood... gorgeous wood. Mostly maples.
- A 6 string electric violin that is tuned like a guitar and is fretted like a guitar, which I thought was pretty cool because I kind of want to play violin. It sounded awesome too.
- Drum sticks and guitar picks made of wheat! I got a wheat pick.
- The Heritage guitar booth... I love those guys! They had some great stuff.
- Some really crazy looking guitars made out of metal (like...Les Pauls made of metal), some even crazier regular guitars with bizarre finishes. Some of them were holographic.
- Lots of Guitar Hero/Rock Band style learning tools for various instruments
- The new Ovation guitar with a built in mp3 recorder for songwriting... it's cooler than it sounds, it actually does a lot of stuff.
- Some really gorgeous acoustic guitars and mandolins at the Breedlove booth. I got a free Breedlove calendar.
Really, the coolest aspect of NAMM is that when you find a booth, a lot of the time the booth has everything that the company makes in it. For example, the Martin booth is huge and has a sample of every instrument they make. You could try all of them if you wanted to. Of course, the down side is that unless you are plugged in, you can't hear sh*t because there is so much music going on everywhere. The Roland room is cool because they have headphoned testing stations. You just pick a pedal and grab a guitar off the wall and play and can actually hear it. Gibson, Fender, and Taylor all have their own rooms upstairs though, which are much easier to hear in. There was some nice new stuff from Taylor.
Hardware wise, I went to the Schaller, TonePros, Gotoh, Hipshot, and Sperzel booths. I didn't see any crazy new products, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time at any one booth today. I will say though, that the people at the Hipshot booth were the most friendly, and they gave me a keychain made out of a bass tuning key.
One interesting fact: almost all of the violin/cello/viola makers were Asian. I'm not really sure why that is.
Anywho, I still have two days left to check stuff out. When all is said and done, I will write a more detailed post with the really cool stuff and links to websites. I'll have to go through the cards and brochures and pick out the interesting things. There were so many amazing guitars made out of awesome woods, and I will post links to them for you guys to check out later on.
Oh, I also met the guy who designed the Martin backpacker. He was nice, and kind of funny.