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If you’re a musician, walking the floor of the NAMM Show is like taking a trip to Candy Mountain.
All the latest music gear gets trotted out at the massive industry expo in Anaheim, California. We’re talking five or six football fields worth of the newest guitars, amps, basses, drums, mikes, keyboards, sousaphones, electric oboes — think Guitar Center cranked up to 11. It’s pretty intense.
What follows is a list of the coolest, most creative stuff we saw at this year’s NAMM Show in January. These aren’t in-depth reviews, but we did get to play with, touch and listen to scores of different products, including everything shown here. If we were cut from lesser moral cloth, these are the things we would have smuggled out under our overcoats.
(Oh, the NAMM name? The show is put on by the National Association of Music Merchants.)
Above:
Minarik Lotus Double-Neck
Guitar maker M.E. Minarik is known for his wild designs, but this gorgeously lysergic double-neck version of his classic Lotus takes the space cake. The looks are outrageous: The mother-of-pearl binding, fretboard inlays and the intricately carved figures of Hindu gods and goddesses had us wishing we’d brought the bell bottoms and the incense.
The Lotus is all mahogany under the quilted maple top, so the gold Tone Perfect pickups give off a nice, warm, Gibson-style sound. Standard, Chinese-built Minarik Lotus models start at around $500. This fitted out, fully custom, U.S.-built double-neck version runs upwards of $3,500.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
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