Thoughts on NAMM

Does anyone remember the phrase “lunchbag letdown”? I do. It referred to opening your lunch from home, prepared for you with work by someone else and you going, blah. It was just fine, but not exciting, and you’d seen it before.

Welcome to NAMM

NAMM is the annual (?) music manufacturer trade show. Like most trade shows, it has diminished in size and scope over the years, and COVID definitely kneecapped it. So did the Internet. Makers no longer only sell through retailers who visited NAMM in the past and would define their purchasing plans in accordance with what they saw. Buyers like you and I could not get into NAMM, and looked forward to what was new and exciting coming from the manufacturers. Now of course, manufacturers announce something new every other Tuesday via social media and many of them are choosing to exclude the retail channel completely. A pox on them, because I want to see touch and play an instrument or effect before I buy it.

I trust my local music stores not to screw me around. They want my continued business. The Internet store will care less and most often do. Try before you buy is vanishing. Grrr, but that’s a different rant entirely.

I do look forward to the NAMM announcements, which will show up if a maker attends NAMM. But a bunch of them do not attend any longer. They have decided that the Trade Show is no longer relevant to them. For example, Fender, Gibson and PRS are not attending. The NAMM organizers have not helped themselves either, behaving like it is still 2012 and doing some strange and arrogant things particularly at last year’s Summer NAMM which really annoyed some people. Smells like when Apple stopped going to MacWorld.

For folks like you and I, that sort of thing should not be part of our lives. And it really isn’t. What we look for is what is new and dare I say innovative.

And that’s where it gets depressing.

Another copy of an existing guitar in a different colour is not innovative. Putting the silkscreened signature of some “famous player” does not warrant a massive price hike, although the makers think it is. The guitar is the tool, the musician is the player. That there is now a Lzzy Hale signature Explorer something or other will not improve your playing if you buy it, presuming that you even know who Lzzy Hale is. (She’s a musician fronting the band Halestorm - not my kind of thing but you may love it). Another “colourway” which is a marketing bullshit bingo word does not make a new Stratocaster. Nor do incremental changes with $500 price increases. It is nice to see some Taylor acoustics with different woods used in construction or ornamentation, but not for thousands of dollars more than the already rather expensive guitars that the company makes. Signature guitars and reissues of old guitars does not make for a compelling reason to rush out now and get a new Martin.

Gibson hasn’t made anything new in forever and the initial promise of the reinvestment in Epiphone produced good instruments for the money for a period but then quality started to slide. The Generation acoustic guitars are pretty horrible constructions. What we do see is a focus on ‘custom shop” work at outlandish prices where the instruments that most people with a bit of money can afford are coming out with very inconsistent, and often bad QA.

Innovation does not come from a new paint colour. Makers should be focusing on QA in their regular lines. Fine go build all kinds of custom shop stuff, but who will be left to buy your stuff when the doctors and dentists find a new place to throw money. Look what happened to Harley Davidson when those buyers moved on from being weekend badasses. The same is coming in the guitar space.

I will credit the smaller builders for showing up and showing their wares to retailers. I wish them good luck in their sales efforts. One change I did notice is that there were more guitars that were not just clones of existing Gibsons and Fenders. That’s been done. Let’s see something a bit different. The risk is that buyers can be narrowminded in terms of looks. Remember that the original Les Pauls did not sell well and the Flying V and Explorer were sales disasters. So too the Jazzmaster and the Jaguar.

What I did see was a dearth of inexpensive guitars for new musicians. Maybe that market is all sewn up by some of the superb Squiers and the randomly good Epiphanies. Honestly that’s where signature guitars belong not in the $6,000 price point. While I saw some interesting work from small builders, the cost of entry is really high and with inflation happening, it will be difficult for a retailer to pay up front for an instrument that could hang on the wall for months or years.

I’m a serious pedal junkie and what I have seen from NAMM this year is meh. Announcements in this space happen year round and there is not a ton of money in pedals. There were lots of pedals announced and while I credit those believing that they’ve got something unique, there are already more than enough overdrives, fuzzes, distortions, delay and modulation options, so many in fact that most people find themselves drowning in choices. A very tough market to grow in.

Fender has a full range of effects pedals and in general reviews have been positive. I tried a few and found at best nothing special. But now there’s a whole new line under the Hammertone branding. They look cheap and are definitely built to achieve a price point, but why? Does the world need another copy of a Tube Screamer? Or another analog delay? Or a tremolo pedal? No. There are lots out there to choose from, so the only thing unique is the Fender logo. Who is the buyer? Maybe someone who has never seen a pedal before and assumes that if a Fender guitar is good, so is a Fender pedal? That works on the Internet, but rarely works in a retail store where most of the employees are actually musicians. Do I care about any of this stuff? I don’t, there is nothing even worth me taking a second look at that I have seen.

NAMM was once the big event in music. Just like COMDEX was once the big event in computers and look where that went.

Not only is NAMM increasingly irrelevant the big names are wholly dependent on making copies of stuff that’s 60+ years old and most of that vintage iconic authentic babble is just that, babble. Apparently there are now reissues of “vintage” 70s instruments. I was around and playing then and nothing built in that decade from Gibson or Fender was decent and everyone who was around then knows it. Bullshit baffles brains.

Me? I’m going to spend more time recording with my Quad Cortex and look at a new Strandberg Classic 6 NX. That’s where the future is being made.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next time, peace.