It’s that time of year again! NAMM is upon us and we are all gearing up for the trip out to California to show at what is arguably the biggest and best musical instrument trade show in the world!
Descending upon L.A. from Indiana, Virginia and the U.K., the 2016 Wampler team are geared up for a great show and are excited at the prospect of potentially (emphasis intended) showing some prototypes! We are currently in a blind panic rush to get them ready, it’s looking good but we may even be at the position where we are putting them together on the show floor on Wednesday… if this was Facebook we’d make a meme asking for positive vibes/good wishes/prayers etc to help us along! 😉
So, what do we expect from NAMM this year? Well, for a start MUCH nicer surroundings than the last 3 years. Let’s put it this way, last year we were directly opposite a cymbal manufacturer, the year before within the main drum section and the year before that we were directly opposite a Korean metronome manufacturer, who had about 80 on display, all going, all the time, completely out of synch with each other. I remember looking at Travis at one point and the look in his eyes were telling me he was plotting the same ill fates for those things as I was! This year we are in B5267 which is right in the middle of the guitar sections, we back onto companies like Friedman and Morgan, we are opposite Martin, round the corner from Seymour Duncan and within reach of Marshall, Randall and some of the other serious manufacturers! I must admit, when I saw the show map I was delighted to be no where near the drum section!
The run down of gear this year is as follows, Max has spent a couple of days wiring up the show board with the following… to ensure we have enough clean power with masses of headroom we’re utilizing 3 Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 Plus supplies, that way we can be certain that all of our digital and analogue based pedals receive enough power to make sure they perform to Brian’s exacting standards. We are of course having a complete board with the potential of 3 new prototypes… As I mentioned above, these are going to be on the line in terms of time to get them ready so fingers crossed!
The boards, as usual, are from the brain of Bob Hebert who makes all of our cabs and boards. The board will be fed into the front end of our trusty Port City 50w Pearl into a stock 2×12” Port City non ported. Both of these are kept in solid Bruton Road Cases. We’ll of course be having a couple of tiered show boards (just so people can rock up and have a good look at the pedals) there as well – all instrument cables are our branded ones, because they just sound ace. Patch cables was interesting, we started off with an extremely well known brand of cable, but they sounded so bad we ditched them instantly. So, we went with some pretty generic low cost ones because they don’t suck too much tone, but enough for us to show what out buffer does so well… We thought that we should get some cables that people are likely to use themselves that way they can hear exactly what difference it will make.
We hope to have a fair selection of guitars at NAMM for testing, at this stage I can only guarantee Brian is bringing his Whitfill Telecaster and the HSS Strat made famous in the Dual Fusion video when he broke it… Helping us demo on the booth this year are ace players Greg Marro and Tommy Baldwin. Notes will be plucked and a couple of faces will be melted, in the best possible way. It is NAMM after all…
So, that’s our run down of pre NAMM stuff… between Brian, Max, Alex and myself we’ll be jamming our social network channels with all manner of stuff from the show floor, and uploading many photos when we get back to the hotel… Make sure you are subscribed to our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter channels… Also, this would be the prefect time to download Periscope and have that ready, you never know what or who you might see on it!
We will be filming the last ever Chasing Tone Podcast from NAMM, would be great if you’d all check it out when it’s released! See you on the other side tone chasers!