Musikmesse isn’t what it used to be, show veterans say. Attendance is far from peak. There are fewer full exhibition halls. High participation costs (and the ability to announce and publicize products digitally) have prompted numerous companies to bypass the once-essential event.
But you know what? Messe is still huge.
NAMM’s European equivalent, held each year in Frankfurt, Germany, is substantially larger than its Anaheim counterpart. Far louder, too: As at NAMM, “sound police” armed with decibel meters patrol the floor, but they’re slackers. Messe is deafening.
But, hey, what’s a little tinnitus when you get to spend four days ogling so many cool new music products? From March 12th through 16th we roamed the vast halls, marveling at superbly crafted boutique instruments, solid working-player tools, and some remarkable budget-gear bargains.
The show highlights? For North American players like us, it’s probably the chance to fondle the phenomenal creations of small-production European shops whose instruments tend to be scarce in the States. The phrase “Old World craftsmanship” may be a cliché, but Messe schools you on how it became one. You can hardly turn around without being dumbstruck by a ravishing instrument that blends the engineering chops of Stuttgart or Turin with the design elegance of Milan or Barcelona.
But our report isn’t just some glamour-gear buyers’ guide for investment bankers and lottery winners indulging in a European grand tour. Quality work and compelling style were equally evident in mid-priced gear for working stiffs and in some remarkable entry-level bargains.
It’s hard to summarize such a vast event with a simple tag—but if pressed, I’d go with “retro fun.” Per usual, vintage-inspired designs reigned supreme. But we saw more manufactures playing with vintage aesthetics, recombining old-school elements in winning new ways. By and large, manufacturers seem to be having fun. We certainly were—and it’s not just the beer and schnitzel talking!
Rafiq Bhatia’s guitar is a Flip Scipio Flippercaster with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups and has a strikingly original voice, even without effects or processing.
“Where [neuroscience and economics] intersect is the science of decision making,” explains Bhatia. Back when he was a new student at Oberlin College, “the lab that I was the most interested in being a part of was focused on decision making under various levels of risk and uncertainty, and trying to pick apart aspects of what happens in the brain before cognition kicks in. What are the precognitive aspects of decision making, and do they predict in any way the decisions that you will actually make?
“And that, I think, is part of the same underlying spirit of inquiry that making music, and especially improvised music with other people, is born of,” he continues. “You’re in these situations where there is uncertainty and there is also risk—and if there’s not enough risk, then it’s not that compelling.”
Bhatia’s latest solo release—his first in five years—is the EP Each Dream, A Melting Door, made in collaboration with pianist Chris Pattishall. The duo improvise their way through the five-track record, unwinding an extended impressionistic world wherein dreamlike piano underscores a range of guitar tones that glimmer in an abstract light. It’s clear that Bhatia has no intention of conveying a traditional sonic image of a guitar, instead preferring to manipulate the instrument as a device for painting colors of sound.
Bhatia’s collaborator on his new EP is pianist and composer Chris Pattishall, at left.
Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Of course, before even getting into the methods of how he achieves those sounds, Bhatia says, “I think it’s less important how I get the sounds out of the guitar than the reasons why I might choose to go looking for them. And the way I get them out of the guitar today might be drastically different than the way I get them out of the guitar tomorrow. I care deeply about the sounds that are made, but I’m so not about the perception that you have to acquire all these ‘things’ to make it.”
His prized 6-string, the Flippercaster, was designed by the reclusive-yet-storied luthier Flip Scipio, who’s built and worked on guitars and basses for Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. After coming to recognize Scipio’s trademark on builds he came across in various New York studios, Bhatia sought him out in an effort he compares to the search for the legendary swordsmith, Hattori Hanzō, in Kill Bill. “He’s the nicest dude ever; it just took me a while to find him. But if you go visit him, he’ll make you either an amazing AeroPress coffee or a mug of smoky lapsang tea and then sit and talk with you,” Bhatia adds, smiling.
The guitar is equipped with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups wired to a blend knob in place of a switch, which Bhatia loves. “I usually don’t want half and half; I want a little bit of one and mostly all of the other. And to me it’s very dependent on what the room sounds like and what musical context I’m in,” he explains. The Flippercaster goes into a small pedalboard, the brain of which is a custom Eventide H90. Bhatia collaborated with the pedal manufacturer on the development of the device’s design.
The duo improvise their way through the five-track record, unwinding an extended impressionistic world wherein dreamlike piano underscores a range of guitar tones that glimmer in an abstract light.
“I was really excited,” Bhatia shares. “I was like, ‘Can you make it switch other pedals in and out of the chain like one of those pedalboard controllers? And let’s say I’m using one of your reverbs, but I want to put distortion on it. Can you make it only affect the wet signal?’ I thought they’d maybe do 10 percent of what I asked, and they did basically all of it,” he concludes, laughing.
Aside from his expression and volume pedals, his pedalboard is otherwise made up of a Klon KTR and a ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory, the latter of which he has particular fun with. “I’m very jealous of saxophone players because they have breath,” he prefaces. “But what I’ve found is that if you play in such a way where you flirt with the edge of the [Fat Fuzz Factory’s built-in] gate, you can get the ends of notes to crackle and decay, almost like when you hear a saxophone player breathe out at the end of the note.”
His pedalboard then goes through a Universal Audio Apollo Twin MkII interface, which connects to Ableton Live on his MacBook Pro. Bhatia then uses two MIDI controllers—one on the floor with a digital display, and one with knobs that he controls with his left hand—that are both color-coded to match the lanes of his session in the DAW. “I can then grab these little bits of things that I’m playing, and bring them in and out and manipulate them while I’m also playing the guitar and generating other ones. I’m excited about it because it’s a process that is helping me erase the line between what I’ve been doing on the guitar and what I’ve been doing away from the guitar. I feel like I’m getting a little bit closer to where I can play, and the sound is saying who I am.”
Rafiq Bhatia’s Gear
Filmmaker David Lynch has been a powerful influence on Bhatia—a cover of “The Voice of Love,” from Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, appears at the end of Each Dream, A Melting Door—as have a number of hip-hop producers and jazz musicians.
Photo by John Klukas
Guitars
- 2018 Flip Scipio Flippercaster with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups
Amps
Live:
- Strymon Iridium (with replaced IRs and EQ tweaks) > Telefunken TDA-2 DI > Universal Audio Apollo Twin MkII > MacBook Pro running Ableton Live > FOH
Studio:
- Swart Atomic Space Tone Pro
- Anderson custom 1x12
- Swart Space Tone Atomic Jr.
Effects
- Ableton Live controlled by Morningstar MC6 PRO and DJ TechTools Midi Fighter Twister
- Eventide H90
- ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory
- Klon KTR Overdrive
- Lehle Dual Expression
- Sound Sculpture Volcano Volume
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL Balanced Tension (.011–.050)
- Bluebird 1.5 mm custom picks, handmade from vintage Galalith poker chips
Filmmaker David Lynch has been a powerful influence on Bhatia—a cover of “The Voice of Love,” from Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, appears at the end of Each Dream, A Melting Door—as have a number of hip-hop producers and jazz musicians. Bhatia shares, “If you listen to Madlib beats, sometimes he’s doing a lot and it’s a million different small elements that have been collaged together, but other times it’s just a sample that he flipped and he didn’t change anything except for the loop point. But whether it’s something he made while fussing over all these little ingredients, or it’s just something he looped, you hear two seconds of it and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s Madlib.’”
He mentions how that effect similarly belongs to icons such as Thelonious Monk and Jimi Hendrix. “Those are all the heroes, and they say something that’s so personal and honest to who they are and their experience that right away, you just know [snaps fingers]—it’s them. To me it sounds like honesty, and it sounds like an expression in many cases of hybridity.
“I was in class in 9th grade when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and it was on our school news channel,” he continues, emphasizing the discomfort it created for him as someone of Muslim origin, which drew unwanted speculation from his non-Muslim peers. “That was the backdrop to how I got into playing the guitar and listening to music. So, when I would hear folks who seemed to be able to take all these different aspects of who they were and what their experience was and distill it into a way of communicating through sound, that was really inspiring. It just felt like therapy to engage in trying to figure out how to do that.”
For the release of his last solo album, Breaking English, Bhatia performs here with a trio, showcasing his uniquely creative approach on the instrument in a more traditional context.
With Is, My Morning Jacket turned to an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and many others.
Their latest album, Is, represents not just a continuation of the rebirth that began with 2021’s self-titled effort, but a profound evolution in their creative process: Currently, MMJ—which also includes guitarist Carl Broemel, bassist Tom Blankenship, keyboardist Bo Koster, and drummer Patrick Hallahan—find themselves in the midst of what Broemel characterizes as a “special and interesting era,” one marked by newfound inner peace, a willingness to relinquish control, and, as James simply puts it, “the freedom to do whatever the fuck we want,” that has resulted in some of their most focused and dynamic work to date.
Is emerges as the product of this revitalized My Morning Jacket, distilled from a wealth of material that James had accumulated, throwing “every single idea into the pot,” he says, rather than reserving some for solo projects as he’d done in the past. The result is both concentrated and adventurous, a tightly focused 10-song collection that still, in characteristic MMJ fashion, roams freely across stylistic boundaries. From the soaring leadoff track “Out in the Open,” a sort of rootsy take on U2’s widescreen anthem rock, to the evocative and soulful first single “Time Waited,” the heavy-riffing “Squid Ink” to the hypnotic psych-folk workout “Beginning From the Ending,” the lilting, harmony-laden pop nugget “I Can Hear Your Love” to the ominous minor-key prowl “River Road,” the album covers vast musical territory. “Jim has a giant archive of song ideas and it’s always growing,” Broemel says, and then laughs. “I think it’s the good and the bad thing about having a digital recording device in your hand at all times—you can capture every idea. So we had so much to work through.”
SoundStream
But Is also marks something of a letting go for James, who, for the first time in years, welcomed an outside producer into the fold. And not just any producer, but capital-P producer Brendan O’Brien, whose extensive resume spans music’s biggest names, from Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Rage Against the Machine to Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and AC/DC. For James, who had long acted as the band’s producer in an effort to “play all the positions myself,” this surrender of control was unusual. As for why they went with O’Brien, James says, “The thing that really struck me about Brendan was once I started playing him demos, he immediately had ideas and opinions that were really constructive without making it about his ego. He’s really great about telling you, ‘Ah, I don’t think this song’s as good as the rest.’ Or, ‘I don’t really like this chorus, what if we replaced it with something else?’ He was just always about the song.”
Adds Broemel, “He managed to pull us out of us, if that makes sense.”
“I think it’s the good and the bad thing about having a digital recording device in your hand at all times—you can capture every idea.” - Carl Broemel
To be sure, many of these songs both took shape and transformed in the studio. “I Can Hear Your Love” and “Beginning From the Ending,” for example, evolved from solo recordings with drum programming and sound effects into fuller band arrangements. But perhaps the most dramatic metamorphosis was “Out in the Open.” The song originated during the pandemic as a ukulele riff that James found so complex he “couldn’t even play it,” and that he eventually arranged into what he calls “kind of a ballad.” It sat for a couple years before he brought it to the band during these sessions. “When we listened to it, everybody had the same feeling as I did: ‘We like the riff, but where does it go? What does it do?’” James recalls. O’Brien provided the breakthrough. “He said, ‘What if we turn this into a rock song? Bring in the electric guitar, amp it up, and keep it getting bigger?’” The final version blends James’ original ukulele recording with a full-band, big-rock arrangement—what he describes as “a really cool merging of the unknown inspired by Brendan.”
Jim James' Gear
In addition to his Flying V, Jim James’ Gibson arsenal includes three ES-335s, an ES-355 prototype, a vintage Gibson Barney Kessel, a modded 1962 Reissue Les Paul Custom (pre-SG), and a Hummingbird.
Photo by Nick Langlois
Guitars
- Gibson ES-335 (black)
- Gibson ES-335 (sunburst)
- Epiphone Jim James ES-335
- Gibson ES-355 prototype
- Fender Custom Shop Tele
- Fender Custom Shop Strat
- Reuben Cox Custom Plywood T-Style
- Gibson Barney Kessel (vintage)
- Gretsch Country Gentleman (vintage)
- Modified Gibson 1962 Reissue Les Paul Custom (pre-SG)
- Gibson Flying V
- Gibson Hummingbird
- Gibson J-45
Amps
- 3 Monkeys Orangutan
- 3 Monkeys cab
- Rivera Silent Sister isolation cabinet with Mesa/Boogie Celestion speaker
Effects
- Devi Ever US Fuzz Monster
- MXR MC406 CAE Buffer
- ISP Deci-Mate G Decimator
- Boss BD-2W Waza Craft Blues Driver
- Boss OC-2
- Electro-Harmonix MEL9
- Malekko Spring Chicken
- EarthQuaker Devices Ghost Echo
- EarthQuaker Devices Spatial Delivery V2
- Universal Audio Golden Reverberator
- Universal Audio Astra Modulation Machine
- Universal Audio Starlight Echo Station
- Spaceman Orion
- SoloDallas The Schaffer Boost
- Radial SGI-44
- Strymon blueSky
- Boss DD-7 Digital Delay
- Strymon Zuma
- Strymon Ojai
- D’Addario CT-20 Tuner
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario Pure Nickel (.009–.045)
- D’Addario Phosphor Bronze Acoustic Extra Light (.010–.047)
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
This anything-goes mindset extended to the band’s approach to guitars and amplification. While James and Broemel brought their recent arsenal—including James’ Fender Princeton amp, his Gibson ES-335 signature model, a Gibson ES-355 prototype “that Gibson made me when we were first figuring out my guitar that I use a lot in the studio,” and his custom Reuben Cox plywood T-style guitar, alongside Broemel’s treasured 1988 Bigsby-equipped Les Paul Standard and Duesenberg Starplayer TV—O’Brien’s studio offered what Broemel describes as “a disgusting amount of amazing guitars.” The amp selection was equally impressive, running the gamut of Fender classics (“the brown amps, the black amps, the silver amps,” as Broemel puts it) along with discoveries like a Port City head that became a frequent go-to. Rather than being fussy about gear choices, the band found themselves drawn to whatever served the song best. “Half the time I wound up with one of Brendan’s SGs in my hand through one of Brendan’s amps,” James recalls. “I used to be more precious about it, but now I really just don’t give a shit at all, as long as it sounds right with the song.” This approach yielded particularly dramatic results on “Die For It,” where Broemel created a massive guitar solo by positioning two amps—“a Super Reverb and something else,” he says—in the middle of the room, capturing what he calls a “giant stereo thing that’s so wide and washed-out and crazy, kind of like what it feels like at our shows.”
“Half the time I wound up with one of Brendan’s SGs in my hand through one of Brendan’s amps.” - Jim James
It’s this sort of liberation from old habits that has helped recharge the band after almost three decades together. Although, James admits, “It ebbs and flows. There’s been periods where it’s been very easy and periods where it’s been very difficult.” Is reflects this hard-won wisdom; its title speaks to the fact that the music “just is what it is,” James says. “The record always makes itself. You really have to let go.”
Carl Broemel's Gear
Carl Broemel’s favorite 6-string is his 1988 Bigsby-equipped Les Paul Standard, which he puts to the test here during a Savannah, Georgia, concert.
Photo by Chris Mollere
Guitars
- 1988 Gibson Les Paul Standard with Bigsby
- Duesenberg Starplayer TV
- Duesenberg Caribou
- Creston Custom
Amps
- Carr Slant 6V head
- Emperor 4x12 cab with Warehouse speakers
- Rivera Silent Sister isolation cabinet with Warehouse speaker
Effects
- Hologram Electronics Chroma Console
- Electro-Harmonix POG
- Kingsley Harlot V3 Tube Overdrive
- JAM Pedals Delay Llama Xtreme
- Origin Effects SlideRIG Compact Deluxe MkII Compressor
- Eventide H9
- Boss TU-2
- Strymon Zuma
- GigRig G3 Switching System
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario EXL140 (.010–.052)
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
It’s a perspective that has enabled My Morning Jacket to find a path forward. As Broemel notes, “In some ways, all we want to be is like a brand-new band again, but that’s impossible. So we’ve just gotta keep going.” One thing that never changes, he adds, “is that the feeling of playing a good show never gets old. It’s like catching a huge fish. That’s evergreen for me.”
James agrees, noting that the band has never sounded better. “Music’s infinite,” he says. “We’ll never exhaust all the possibilities. As long as you’re trying something new, that’s what keeps it fun and fresh, hopefully for us and for the listener.”
YouTube It
Broemel, with his Creston Custom, and James, with a Fender Strat (and purple heart-shaped sunglasses), lead My Morning Jacket through the heavy riffs, deep grooves, and big unison bends of “Squid Ink” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
