Sweetwater Sound, the No. 1 online retailer of music instruments and pro audio equipment in the U.S., has announced that GearFest 2016 was a bigger success than ever, breaking every record established by previous GearFest events. Launched in 2002, Sweetwater’s free, annual GearFest is the nation’s largest customer-focused music and pro audio festival and trade show, featuring exhibits from manufacturers, workshops, clinics, seminars, live demos, special performances, a musician’s flea market, and much more.
This year’s two-day event, which took place June 17 and 18 at Sweetwater’s corporate headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, provided more opportunities than ever before for thousands of musicians, engineers, and producers to participate in the festivities, with customers traveling from all over the world to attend.
Attendance was record-breaking, with more than 12,000 participants, up 20% over 2015, and with sales up by more than 20% over last year.
Sweetwater Founder and President Chuck Surack remarked, “One of the most exciting experiences of my career was to personally greet thousands of our customers at the front door as they arrived. Their enthusiasm for Sweetwater and GearFest was both astounding and humbling. Also, I can’t say enough about our incredible employees and their personal, caring, and welcoming interactions with each and every attendee. All this, plus its continued growth in overall attendance and sales, has made GearFest a unique event in the music retail business.”
GearFest hosted a multitude of musicians performing and in workshops continuously on six different stages. Featured guests included Grammy Award-winning pianist and songwriter, Jim Brickman; guitarist Andy Timmons, who has performed with everyone from Joe Satriani to the Beach Boys, Styx drummer Todd Sucherman; the progressive-metal band Periphery; Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and Earth, Wind & Fire keyboardist Larry Dunn; Queen Cora Dunham, who spent multiple years as a drummer for both Prince and Beyonce, the Chris Tomlin Band, and many more.
In total, GearFest included more than 200 workshops and seminars, including sessions on guitar, recording, live sound, music creation with computers, acoustics, songwriting, and how to use electronic instruments.
Housed in more than 20 tents, more than 400 manufacturers of musical instruments, music technology, and audio equipment were on hand to provide GearFest attendees a look at the latest gear.
A new special attraction was Sweetwater’s recently completed outdoor pavilion, which played host to events over the two days, including a customer appreciation concert and party at the end of the first day. Music was provided by the Sweetwater All Stars, joined by special guests Queen Cora Dunham, Larry Dunn, Jordan Rudess, Paul Reed Smith, Nick Bowcott, Chad Wackerman, Geoff Daking, and Andy Timmons.
Also new this year, Sweetwater offered free camping for tents and RVs.
GearFest 2016 provided customers the opportunity to experience Sweetwater’s hugely expanded Music Store. Attendees experienced one of the largest music instrument and audio gear stores in the Midwest, with the largest on-site inventory of any music store in the country.
For those who couldn’t attend GearFest in person, videos, photos, and updates were posted on Sweetwater’s popular Facebook page, as well as on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.
For those in attendance, the opportunities for social media interaction included taking pictures in front of a Marshall Amp Wall, two Neil Peart drum kits from Rush’s R40 tour, and Alex Van Halen’s touring drum kit.
Using the hashtag #gearfest, attendees could view their social media posts on a large display in the Downbeat Diner. Estimated total attendee posts for the two days was more than 20,000.
In addition, hourly prizes were given away, totaling more than $88,000 worth of music instruments and equipment.
More than 40 videos, including interviews and product demos, were recorded and posted at Sweetwater’s YouTube channel at:
Chuck Surack added, “Where else can musicians and audio enthusiasts come to see, hear, enjoy – not to mention buy – what is usually reserved for music-industry insiders at your typical trade show. That’s what GearFest is all about.”
Bruce Springsteen: the last man standing.
Maybe these aren’t the first thoughts you’d expect to have after a rock ’n’ roll show, but rock ’n’ roll is getting old, and one of its most prolific stars has been telling us for the past few years that he’s getting his affairs in order. His current tour, which continues his 2023 world tour celebrated in the recent documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, follows his latest LP of original music, 2020’s Letter To You. That record was explicitly and thematically an exploration of the Boss’ mortality, and this year’s jubilant roadshow continues that chapter with shows across the U.S. and Canada.
“The older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs.”
I was at the Montreal show on Halloween night, where Bruce, the E Street Band—Steven Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, and Roy Bittan, along with Soozie Tyrell, Charles Giordano, and Jake Clemons—and a brilliant backing ensemble of singers and musicians performed for roughly three hours straight. The show rewired my brain. For days after, I was in a feverish state, hatching delusional schemes to get to his other Canadian shows, unconsciously singing the melody of “Dancing in the Dark” on a loop until my partner asked me to stop, listening to every Springsteen album front to back.
“The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
I had seen Bruce and the E Street Band in 2012, but something about this time was different, more urgent and powerful. Maybe it’s that the older you get, the more you realize that, unless you’re über-wealthy, you probably have a lot in common with the characters in Springsteen songs. When you’re young, they’re just great songs with abstract stories. Maybe some time around your late 20s, you realize that you aren’t one of the lucky ones anointed to escape the pressures of wage work and monthly rent, and suddenly the plight of the narrator of “Racing in the Street” isn’t so alien. The song’s wistful organ melody takes on a different weight, and the now-signature extended coda that the band played in Montreal, led by that organ, Bittan’s piano, and Weinberg’s tense snare rim snaps, washed across the arena over and again, like years slipping away.
The stakes implicit in most of these stories are that our time is always running out. The decades that we spend just keeping our heads above water foreclose a lot of possibility, the kind promised in the brash harmonica whine and piano strokes that open “Thunder Road” like an outstretched hand, or in the wild, determined sprint of “Born to Run.” If we could live forever, there’d be no urgency to our toils. But we don’t.
Springsteen has long has the ability to turn a sold-out arena into a space as intimate as a small rock club.
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Bruce has never shied away from these realities. Take “Atlantic City,” with its unambiguous chorus: “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.” (Then, of course, an inkling of hope: “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”) Springsteen used those phrases on Nebraska to tell the story of a working person twisted and cornered into despair and desperation, but on All Hallows Eve, as the band rocked through their electrified arrangement of the track, it was hard not to hear them outside of their context, too, as some of the plainest yet most potent words in rock ’n’ roll.
In Montreal, like on the rest of this tour, Bruce guided us through a lifecycle of music and emotion, framed around signposts that underlined our impermanence. In “Letter to You,” he gestured forcefully, his face tight and rippled with passion, an old man recapping the past 50 years of his creative life and his relationship to listeners in one song. “Nightshift,” the well-placed Commodores tune featured on his 2022 covers record, and “Last Man Standing,” were opportunities to mourn Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his E Street comrades who went before him, but also his bandmates in his first group, the Castiles. It all came to a head in the night’s elegiac closer, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” performed solo by Bruce with his acoustic guitar: “Go, and I’ll see you in my dreams,” he calls
I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly why the show felt so important. I’ve circled around it here, but I’m sure I haven’t quite hit on the heart of the matter. Perhaps it’s that, as we’re battered by worsening crises and cornered by impossible costs of living, songs about people trying desperately to feel alive and get free sound especially loud and helpful. Or it could be that having one of our favorite artists acknowledge his mortality, and ours, is like having a weight lifted: Now that it’s out in the open, we can live properly and honestly.
None of us know for sure what’s up around the bend, just out of sight. It could be something amazing; it could be nothing at all. Whatever it is, we’re in it together, and we’ll all get there in our time. Until then, no matter how bad things get, we’ll always have rock ’n’ roll.
