Winter NAMM 2019 - part 2

Eventide

If you're into sculpting great guitar sounds with the use of processors, this is the guitar player's wet dream. The H9000 is a digital beast that should keep you occupied for year creating new sounds as well as being the envy of your peers. I'd love to own one!

Totally new for NAMM 2019 was the Eventide Rose, a delay pedal using op amp to get an analog character. Max delay time is 50 secods. The hit switch is cool as you can assign it to parameters for real time control.

EVH

EVH were displayed in the Fender booth and they showed both the Striped Series and the Wolfgang Series.

Fender

Ladies and gentlemen! Please welcome on stage, the Fender Acoustasonics Telecaster! Or in the studio! Or in your home! Or where ever you like!

The This guitar was probably the most discussed product at NAMM. As usual there where a lot of opinions coming from left and right about this guitar from people who had never come close to it and thus never tried it. I must admit being somewhat sceptical as I've never found a thinline acoustic I really like. But knowing Brian Swerdfeger who's the originator of this guitar had me cautiously optimistic.

I was lucky enough to get an early meeting with Brian and he sat down and went through the Acoustasonic Telecaster in detail.

I also got to play it and the first priority with this kind of guitar is that it sould sound good acoustically as well as feel good to play. The thing that immediately struck me was how comfortable this guitar is. It sits well balanced in my lap. Next I noticed that it sounded surprisingly fell on its own. This would make an excellent practice guitar for late nights or in apartments where you don't want to annoy your neighbours. A special mention goes to next neck profile which is full without being clunky.

What you have on the guitar is a volume control, a balance control and a 5-way switch. The 5-way selects a pair of sounds and then you can select eithor of those sounds or a mix between the two using the balance control. Dead simple and easy to use in all playing situations.

Switch positions:

The Acoustasonics Telecaster is not like anything I've played or heard before. This is undoubtably a new kind of guitar. You may like it or you may not but you really need to try it before you think you know what it is. It was definitely a lot more than I first thought.

Brian Swerdfeger and yours truly early Friday morning on Level 3.

Fender also displayed a lot of Custom Shop guitars.

Familiar shapes with not so familiar but utterly cool finishes.

Same here!

A matching guitar/amp set.

Amp cab made out of Lego bricks.

Free The Tone

Free The Tone has always sounded good to my ears.

But if you want simple pedals, this Future Factory may not be your cup of tea as it looks as it may have been part of the controls of the Millennium Falcon. But there's no denying it is a great sounding delay.

Galloup Guitars

Luthier Brian Galloup showed this artful combination of instrument and optimal playing environment.

The guitar has an understated yet beautiful rosette.

The design of the rosette is echoed on the back of the guitar as well as on the back of the chair, so when the guitar is hung, the chair and the guitar completes the pattern.

To provide the total experience there is a deawer with a bottle, a decanter and just one single glass. Brian mentioned it was for your own singular pleasure. I think I would offer the glass to my wife as a way of saying thank you if she let me spend $50.000 on this artwork.

Brian Galloup beside his art. I'd look happy too if I could make something like this.

Gibson

Gibsons return from the brink up financial disaster was on everybodys lips. What would they show? How would they show it? What would the general feeling be at the booth?

My first impression was that the whole booth excuded a sense of enthusiasm. The new CEO, James Curleigh, seems to have infused the company with hope. Having grown up playing Les Pauls it gave me a warm feeling walking into this room full ofrows upon rows of Les Pauls of different kinds.

The fact that I could sit down and play all these guitars made it all the better. There were more than one guitar of each model so you could compare and see if the guitars were of a uniform standard. I tried a few Les Paul Standards with the 50's neck shape and came away thinking that the new leadership at Gibson is on the right track.

Apart from the standard production line guitars, Gibson also displayed a number of instruments from their Custom Shop. I had the priviledge to visit the Custom Shop two years ago and there guitars are in line with what I saw then.

Glou-Glou

French company Glou-Glou displayed three pedals whose names made me hungry.

Gretsch

Also displayed as part of Fender, the Gretsch display was full of colour.

New entries in the Streamliner series. The series consists of three subdivisions, hollowbody (traditional Gretsch construction), Centerblock (not fully hollow) and the Centerblock Junior. All these guitars are aiming att giving the player the full taste of Gretsch but at a lower price point. They have received good reviews in reputable magazines and after having played a few of the I can see why.

Guild

It nice to see Guild back and showing some nice instruments. Funny thing about the Jetstar on the right is that I've only seen it in magazine ads and in trade show displays. I've never seen anyone play a Jetstar. Not even at NAMM.

A good old jazz box with a floating DeArmondfloating pickup, capable of producing authentic jazz tones.

One should not forget that Guild builds some very nice acoustic guitars.

Gullfoss

Gullfoss uses something they call computational perception technology to identify and resolve problems in the frequency balance of the signal. I can't say I understand what it is or how it does what it claims to be doing. But I can say that the result was very good and this is definitely something I would like pursue in my work.

Henrietta Engineering

There are people who wants an easy to use pedalboard. What better way then, to populate the pedalboard with these one switch pedals from Henrietta Engineering. On/off is all you get. At least on the outside. The pedals have some internal trimpots you can use to change to sound but they have been set at the factory to what they consider the optimal points. Anoher upside of a pedalboard with these pedals is that it will be small and light. My personal favourite is the Orange Whip compressor which is based on the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer.

Hughes 6 Kettner

The Black Spirit 200 was first shown by Hughes & Kettner at the Guitar Summit 2018 in Mannheim, Germany. I was very much intrigued by the sounds I heard from their demos so I was very keen on getting to try it first hand. I was politely asked to seat myself in a comfortable sofa in front of this setup and was allowed free rain in trying it out through a pair of studio monitors which was my preference. As always NAMM is not the best critical listening environment but it did sound very good and was impressively versatile. What really got my attention is how good it felt to play the amp. The sag parameter allowed me to tailor the touch sensitivity to my playing style. As it is programmable, you can set it to whatever you like per preset. Everything is storable except Master Volume and you can edit it from an iPad. If you haven't checked out the demo with Jay Leaonard J you own it to yourself to do just that.

Ibanez

Ibanez displayed the entire history of arguably the worlds most popular (and copied) overdrive, the Tube Screamer. Starting from the left with the original TS-808 ...

... continuing along the years with more or less successful and/or obscure models moving along to ...

... more modern versions of the Tube Screamer and ending up with ...

... with the latest Tube Screamer and the first one bearing the Ibanez name that is not green but a rather eye catching sparkle red.

The TSV-808 is a collaboration between Ibanez and Vemuram and a brief playing session at the Vermuram booth showed it to be a VERY nice take on the TS concept. According to Vemuram this is a limited edition of 1500 pedals and it will be on the expensive side.

In front of the Andy Timmons poster is Mr Timmons himself interacting with a NAMM Show visitor.

Iconic Guitars

In the Iconic booth you could find a number of, well, iconic shapes.

IK Multimedia

While I realize both the flexibility and creative potential of using guitar amplifier plugins, I have always preferred hardware for my amp modeling needs. It's mainly because the hardware modelers has an input stage that's been designed with the guitar in mind and most audio interfaces only have plain DI style high-Z inputs, if at all.

Now this may change as IK Multimedia has introduced the AXE I/O. This is an audio interface with the general requirements of an audio I/F fulfilled but with the addition of inputs especially tuned for electric guitars and basses with some super interesting features and functions, among them the Z-Tone impedance adapting circuit that will interact with the guitar you use and two input stages named Pure and JFET. I'm very much heartened that someone has realized the very obvious fact that the first thing an electric guitar sees in an amp is an input stage specifically designed for, you guessed it, electric guitar, and then gone about finding a solution in such an interesting way. I give the AXE I/O my "NAMM 2019 Best Audio Interface Award". I can't wait to get my hands on this.

After the massive success with the iLoud Micro Monitors, IK Multimedia presented the slightly larger iLoud MTM, using digital technology and ARC self-calibration to suit many rooms and especially desks and small spaces. My initial thought when I had listened to them was that they would probably work very well besida a larger set of monitors fo comparion purposes as well.

The iRig Micro Amp is a 3-channel analog guitar amplifier with the possibility to connect it to an iPhone, iPad or Mac/PCvia USB and the amp come with the Amplitube CS app and Amplitube for Mac/PC.