Respected bass building father and son team of Michael and Daniel Tobias brought the MIDI equipped Andrew Gouche Signature Model to NAMM, and a new 7-string guitar-the MTD Rubicon. The 35" scale, 24 fret bass offers spot on tracking, a maple burl top, alder body, maple neck, MTD Bartolini pickups, a bloodwood fretboard and mated with the Roland GK3B bass synth.
Pickup artist TV Jones has a brand new old-school humbucker in the wings, but his new Strat style Starwood single-coil set, show here at NAMM by Chris Casello, boasts a high wound bridge pickup with extra steel for super warmth and robust tones across the board, including a rich, smooth-voiced neck pickup.
NAMM newcomers Action Figure Studios debuted four new guitars--all hand built by owner Mehmet Dogu: the Duane, the Steves, the Knot for Everyone and the Eddie. All have mastery bridges and other high quality appointments including finishes that show off their highly figured, hand-picked wood. Dogu also builds a series of amplifiers.
The micro-sized new Philosopher's Tone from Pigtronix contains an improved version of the popular circuit. One of the most head-turning features is the implementation of parallel optical compression via the blend knob. Plenty of tones from squishy to subtle are on tap. Available in August for $119.
The 1600 Supreme from Supro is a tribute to one of Keith Richard's legendary Oahu amps that he used on many classic Stones hits. It's based around a pair of 6V6 power tubes and delivers 25 watts of Class A breakup. It's surprisingly loud for its size making it an excellent option for club gigs. It will hit the street in August for $1,249.
3rdPowerAmps new Citizen Gain CSR is a dual-channel, 50-watt head that takes the clean tones from the original Dual Citizen and combines it with a totally original high-gain channel via a pair of EL34L power tubes. Each side features independent reverb controls and EQ settings. It will be available in a month or so.
Alexander Pedals makes no secret of their appetite for weird. And for those that similarly embrace this ethos, the Radical Reverse delay will be as welcome as the first blooms of spring. The key to the reverse delay is a truly effective mix control that lends the summed output a more integrated, tape-like quality. The effect is compounded by a cool, rangy modulation (tweak) control. It's also switchable between spiral and fractured granular delays. At $189, that's a lot of weird for the price too.
California-based guitar builder Jason Z. Schroeder Guitars recently expanded into offering new hardware options for both smaller builders and DIYers. Here's a look at a portion of their bridge options.
The clever minds at Yellowcake brought out a new germanium/silicon fuzz aptly titled Your Mom. Everything from mostly controllable overdrive to nasty gutbucket fuzz. It's available now for $185.
PRA Audio was busy the last year developing these two very nice overdrives for NAMM which, despite the 'prototype' label seen here are very close to production. The ODs, which are vaguely TS and Bluesbreaker inspired each have a very effective 'variac' control that produces cool voltage starvation textures. No firm pricing yet, but something in the area of $150 looks probable.
Fuzz with buzz: the Greer Super Hornet by Greer Amplification debuts at NAMM. It's a powerhouse octave fuzz inspired by the classic Foxx Tone Machine, with NOS BC-107B transistors juicing up the circuit. With a momentary Stinger switch to goose up the tone and make it slice, it goes from proud octave roar to wall of raging sound instantly.
Eastwood's collaborating with respected guitar builders to create a line of more affordable "boutique style" guitars. New for NAMM, Nashville builder Jeff Senn's retro mojo heavy entry, the Senn.
XEN Stringed Instruments just finished this 6-string bass, Nebula, right before the show. It has a bolt-on neck with a swamp ash body, and Bartolini pickups. It will be offered as a production model but there will be options available for different woods, electronics, and even up to nine strings! They are available now with 4-strings starting at $2,699.
Swope Guitars is showing this lovely offset bass prototype at NAMM that spins J- and P-Bass cues into a pretty distinctive whole. With a proprietary humbucker it's also unique under the hood. No firm pricing yet, though Chris Swope says it should fall in line with his Geronimo solidbody six string, which is just less than three grand.
Birmingham, Alabama's Swindler Effects showed this prototype of their Red Mountain tremolo at NAMM, which will likely hit the streets in August. It's pretty loaded for a compact tremolo circuit, with expression options for depth and rate, a phase inversion switch, a preset, five wave forms and a stutter switch you can use to create momentary tremolo effects a hyper speeds. Street price will be around $175.
Eastman Guitars brought the lush new E40D to Nashville NAMM. Dressed in extravagant details like snowflake-, oval-, and diamond-shaped inlays, abalone binding and rosette, and intricate headstock ornamentation, the all-solid, Adirondack spruce-topped dreadnought takes its place at the top of the company's line with a street price of around $2,499.
In addition to introducing a couple of new Pacifica solidbodies, Yamaha came to NAMM with two tweaks to its swaggering new Revstar line. At left is the Japanese master-luthier-built version ($1,799 street) with vintage-toned alnico-7 pickups and a copper pickguard, while the standard Indonesian-made Revstar at right displays the new Bigsby option.
Epiphone came to NAMM with a massive line of swanky new Masterbilt Century acoustic-electric archtops, ranging from the small-bodied Olympic to the medium-sized Zenith and Zenith Classic, and the larger De Luxe and De Luxe Classic. All feature solid spruce tops and practically invisible transducer-based electronics, and street prices go from about $500 to $899.
Coppersound Pedals' first NAMM appearance was distinguished by the Deadelus. It's a dual reverb box with extreme clarity, depth, atmosphere and can stand up to overdrives without flinching. And it's priced at a reasonable $199.
The Boston, MA area outfit, Coppersound Pedals, also debuted the Telegraph Stutter, a simple kill pedal that looks like something your grandpappy might have used to warn the next town that a buffalo stampede was on the way. Imaginative and basic all at once, and tagged at only $45.
DigiTech's new entries at summer NAMM are the Nautila chorus/flanger, with 8 chorus voices and 4 flange options, and the Whammy Ricochet, which pares down the original Whammy pedal to a standard single-slot size. It doesn't have all the settings on the classic Whammy pedal, but zeroes in on the octave up/down and pitch bending possibilities with a simple stomp switch rather than a treadle. It's Tom Morello and Jonny Greenwood in a box for less than $190.
We're big fans of just about everything Valve Train Amps has built, but the company had been relatively quiet of late. That'll change this autumn with the release of the Santa Monica (you're seeing a late-stage prototype here)--a '63 Bassman inspired howler that will be around 45 ways and in the neighborhood of $1,600 when it hits the street. Stay tuned!
First-time NAMM-ers Valeton brought a bunch of new miniature stomps to Nashville, including the shrunken yet very familiar-looking Loft series—nine pedals with all-analog signal paths based on classic Japanese pedals of yore. Shown here, the pink HB Flanger is based on the old HF-2 Hi-Band Flanger, the blue Analog Chorus aims for old CE-2 tones, and the root-beer-colored Octave goes for the endearingly glitchy vibe of yesteryear's OC-2.
EVH Gear came to NAMM with the new Wolfgang Special Red, Black, and White Stripes. With a street price of$1,599, it differs from past striped Wolfs in that it features an ebony fretboard, chrome hardware, all-black pickup bobbins, and black headstock finish.
Richland, Washington, stomp outfit Foxpedal made its NAMM debut with a diverse line of pedals that includes the Wave reverb/delay (left)—which has Echorec-, Space Echo-, and Echoplex-style modes, as well as a self-oscillation "wash" footswitch—and the Russian-style Defector fuzz. The latter has a unique pre-gain stage, as well as a footswitch that sends your signal into an instant feedback frenzy.
Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson brought his most tantalizing signature 12-string bass ever to this year's Summer NAMM. The Fender Custom Shop-built anachronistic wonder doesn't come cheap with its street price of $11,999, but it looks 100-percent badass—as if it's seen decades of loving yet gentle road use. Features include Filter'Tron-style blade humbuckers, a metal armrest, and a faithfully quirky ol' belt-buckle protector around back.
Relentlessly, provocatively, and endearingly wacko pedal builder Ben Hinz at Dwarfcraft Devices came to NAMM with yet another sonic sonofabitch. Featuring the company's most mundane name ever, the Happiness resonant filter features high-, low-, and band-pass modes, continuous-controller capability, LFO-wave scrambling, and more.