There I was, crouched in the jungle, low on ammo, VC
crawling all around me, oops wrong Nam story, my apologies for the off
color joke but I couldn’t resist. No offense was meant to any veterans.
It was great to see and schmooze many of the looping
community who stopped by our booth at Looperlative. Visits from the Andre
Lafosse, Chris Murphy, Matthias Grob, Jim Goodin, and Kim Flint, who showed me
his photo of the empty booth where Electrix was supposed to be (!), to name a
few.
Namm began for me with an 8 am Friday morning breakfast gig
put on by The Museum of Making music at the Hilton, I played lap steel for
about 20 minutes and had a pretty groggy performance, luckily most everyone
else was half asleep as well. My first demo at Looperlative on Friday afternoon
coincided with a young guy looking like a Big Pink era Rick Danko, complete
with porkpie hat, blazing away on a James Trussart aluminum Tele through a very
loud London 65
amp, just across the aisle. But luckily the builder liked what I was doing,
offered to let me play his guitars, and kept a lid on the volume for the most
part. Such is the scenario when demoing at NAMM, and I felt lucky to be in the
basement hall E which is mostly acoustic instruments , small companies, and
start ups, and doesn’t attract as many rockers intent on showing everyone
just how fast they can play. I friend of mine referred to Hall E as the island
of lost toys. I brought of few different instruments down including my Asher
lap steel, and an amazing new lap steel from a local Santa Cruz builder called a Cruz tone, that
has pedal steel like sustain, due to its wouod and aluminum construction. The
rig I brought was a mesa formula pre-amp, TC electronics G-sharp, the
Looperlative, a Keeley compressor, the Gordius Lilttle Giant foot controller,
and a couple of expression pedals, and extra footswitches. I ran through Bob’s
Bose linear array system with two subs, and the sound was awesome, better than
I expected considering the circumstances. I had several people compliment me
on the sound and ask what I was using, and were kind of shocked to find out I
was getting great clean and overdriven sounds out of this set up. I think the
key was using the mesas recording outputs that have a speaker emulator which
made the sound very warm without too much treble spikeyness. Also the Bose’
s ability to throw the sound in a wider field gave my sound a more enveloping
quality even under such noisy conditions.The Gordius performed flawlessly
controlling the looperlative, and even though I’m still getting used to
its layout, it is really and extraordinary midi/usb foot controller. Thanks to
Xavier for accommodating us. And the looperlative’s capabilities really
had people stopping in there tracks to see where all of the sound was coming from.
At one point I was demoing the scramble function with the feedback set low so
that as I added new content the loop would not get over saturated. I just
played melody as this constantly evolving bed of loop fragments percolated
behind me. One guy kept looking at the pedal and then looking at me back and
forth so I kept pointing to my rack to let him know what was generating the
sound.. In fact, I had to explain on numerous occasions that the loops were not
coming out of the foot pedal! People see you pushing buttons and figure that it’s
the box that’s making all of that sound. We got a lot of people
interested in not only the Looperlative but the Gordius footcontroller, needless
to say.
Highlights of the show gear-wise were the Eventide foot
pedals, Rolf Spulers Paradis guitars, a Breedlove koa wood Weissenborn style
lap guitar, playing a Trussart guitar with mini humbuckers that had great
coupling sustain and feedback even through the Bose system. And of course the
stuff at our booth! Also Friday night Matthias and I went to a hotel room to
check out a bunch if high end acoustic guitars. I was particularly enamored of
a small body guitar with fan frets and a Stella like yellow to black sunburst
made by Bruce Sexauer. Also Matthias got to see some nice fireworks from the
balcony of my hotel room.
I got a chance to check out powered speakers somewhat and I
don’t think the Mackie SRM150’s that you were inquiring about would
be adequate for you, Ted. I’d check out the RCF speakers that are the
same size as the SRM350’s, but have better low frequency response and are
lighter weight. The SRM150’s seam like great monitors for a singer song
writer , but not much more. The RCF’s are made in italy by the same manufacturer who built
mackies stuff before mackie moved to China. They are a bit more
expensive but worth it I believe.
OK that’s enough blather.
Bill