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The trip to NAMM this year was packed! I thought I’d write a post of some things that personally caught my eye in a head-scratching way. My francophone counterpart, Marc-Andre and I walked dozens of kilometers over the past four days.    Here’s a few of the things that made me go hmmm …   (including the 24 string bass guitar shown here!)

From what I understand, Best Buy and ESP are negotiating an exclusive model of their guitars that you can only get through Best Buy. Unfortunately, I can’t share any details about that deal at this point in time.   However, I took a spin through the ESP booth today and was left speechless by what I saw. There are some beautifully crafted guitars hanging on the walls throughout the booth. The folks at ESP obviously like building guitars and are very creative …. to the extreme! To placate your interest, take a look at the photos of the models we found there…

Gibson showed us some truly beautiful guitars in the Melody Maker and SG lines. They are celebrating their 120th anniversary this year and have added some really tasteful extras to their lines to celebrate.   What I really found exciting was the Min-ETune feature hardware that Gibson demonstrated to us. Will this be the end of manual tuning?

IK Multimedia makes a number of well-respected products for the pro-audio market, but has struck a chord, in a big way, by creating simple devices and apps for the iOS platform.    Their “i” line of hardware products allow musicians and music lovers to create, record and produce music on their iOS device in a way that is not intimidating, but also gives access to deep features.   They’ve come out with two new iOS products this year: the iRig Mic HD and the iRing.

While we’ve been at NAMM, we’ve been hearing about the dreaded Saturday crush from the vendors and NAMM ventrans we’ve talked to. Up until today, it’s been fairly easy to navigate the aisles between the booths. You might get the odd small crowd gathering around a performance, but nothing that would put you out.   Today, the artists showed up for their endorsement deals obligations and the crowds followed.

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The Fender booth was a treat for us. Why wouldn’t anyone like strolling through a large room full of iconic guitars, basses and amps.    There are some new things from Fender that will please both their established clientelle as well as their new ones. We got treated to a look at a few of the treats that Fender has in store for Strat lovers.  

The Fender booth was a treat for us. Why wouldn’t anyone like strolling through a large room full of iconic guitars, basses and amps.    There are some new things from Fender that will please both their established clientelle as well as their new ones. We got treated to a look at a couple of the Fender Amps that will be carried by Best Buy.

We had the opportunity to take a look at some of the keyboards from Casio that will be appearing in Best Buy. We even got some killer video of two of their products being played ever so skillfully.

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