Scott Sullivan waited patiently in line for his chance to meet drummer Gregg Bissonette at the NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday morning.
The line moved, and Sullivan, himself a drummer from Simi Valley, reached the table where Bissonnette, who has toured and recorded with stars including Ringo Starr, David Lee Roth, Duran Duran and Pat Boone (on that metal album the pop crooner once made).
Out came a glossy photograph of Bissonnette enlarged to the size of a small poster.
“I was younger and thinner then!” Bissonnette said, laughing, as he signed the image.
Sullivan arrived at the annual National Association of Music Merchants Show with a stack of similar photographs and a list of musicians he hoped to track down for autographs at signings in the exhibition halls.
“I have so many of these at home I have to rotate them,” he said of the past success of his efforts. “On the NAMM app, they have a list of who will be at the different booths. I came prepared for many people.”
At NAMM on Thursday, we wandered the floor checking out guitar manufacturers and technical gear, the occasional musical performance, and a panel or two.
Here’s what we found:
Music for the heart
Marcelo Dai was hard to miss as he jammed on electric bass with two guitarists at the Macmull Guitars booth. Between his retro maroon suit and his funky, string-popping riffs, it was impossible not to stop and watch.
“I came here from Brazil,” said Dai, who is from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and is actually a Tama Drums-sponsored drummer, not a bassist.
“Everybody’s got the same energy, the same good vibes,” Dai said, explaining he saw the bass untended and couldn’t resist picking it up to jam with two strangers. “Having a chance to be in the same space with everybody here, it’s good for the heart.”
Ripping some riffs
Sofia Dove, the musician influencer known as Sunfyre, looked like she was having the most ridiculous time of her life as she laughed and grinned while trying out a new guitar effects pedal at NAMM on Thursday.
And how could she not? The Fart Pedal does exactly what its name implies, converting each note played on a guitar into, well, a very cheeky range of semi-musical sounds.
“People like farts,” said Dove, whose live performances on Twitch feature her wearing one silly costume after another – Dora the Explorer, a Mario Toad, a camouflage ghillie suit – while playing drums and singing on a technicolor set. “It’s for people having fun.”
Fart Pedal creator Steve Gadlin said the product, which is packaged in a can of beans not a box, came unexpectedly about four years ago.
“I was googling it because I wanted one, and it didn’t exist,” he says of his desire to make guitars break like the wind.
He contacted a tech guy who made pedals, who told him he could make the pedal of Gadlin’s dreams, but wondered why he wanted one.
“I said, ‘Just go on the journey with me, man,” Gadlin said. “And we’ve been making a lot of Fart Pedals since.”
Art and soul inside
Before Luis Ortiz founded Cream Guitars in Monterrey, Mexico, he was a musician whose first love was a Stratocaster. And as he tried new guitars, a Les Paul, a Telecaster, a semi-hollow body, he says he learned new sounds and techniques.
With Cream, Ortiz hopes to inspire those who try his company’s custom guitars and basses to go like him to musical places they’ve never known before.
“The old designs stopped changing,” he said of the way that Strats and Les Pauls and similarly shaped and built guitars became standards. “Everything was like the same car from the ’50s with better brakes. No innovation.”
At NAMM, Cream’s Voltage DaVinci displayed plenty of that attitude thanks to the electronic paper made by E Ink that covers the guitar body and allows a guitarist to endlessly customize the colors and shapes and their movements as they play the instrument.
“We are a new attitude,” Ortiz said of the customization his instruments can offer even beyond the e-paper used on the DaVincis. “From a guitar that changes colors to guitars that have art and soul inside.”
Record Plant stories
The name of the Record Plant, a chain of recording studios in New York City, Los Angeles and Sausalito, appears in the credits on scores of beloved classic albums from the late ’60s for decades after.
Stevie Wonder’s “Innervisions” and his other legendary albums of the early ’70s. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and the Eagles‘ “Hotel California.”
At NAMM on Thursday, some of the people who build Record Plant studios and produce or engineer those records appeared on a panel titled “Buzz Me In – Birth of Record Plant Recording Studios: 1968-1978.”
Much of the conversation circled around Studio B at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, which panelists John Storyk and Robert Margouleff created for Stevie Wonder to use not only for “Innervisions” but other albums including “Talking Book” and “Songs in the Key of Life,” too.
Storyk, an architect and acoustician, built Electric Lady studio for Jimi Hendrix, whose album “Electric Ladyland,” was the first album recorded at the Record Plant after its creation by partners Chris Stone and Gary Kellgren. Engineer-producer Margouleff was working with Stevie Wonder in New York City, and neither of them was entirely happy with the studios they had to use.
Studio B at the Record Plant changed all that, Storyk and Margouleff said. It allowed space to house the massive bank of synthesizers called TONTO with which Wonder was making those albums. But even more significant, it expanded on the new kind of recording studio that Hendrix and Storyk built at Electric Lady, making them more like a living room and less like a science lab.
“The Record Plant, Electric Lady, and a few others were finally studios that said there should be a vibe in a studio,” Storyk said.
At the Record Plant studios, not only could an artist make a record that sounded fantastic, they could indulge in all manner of fun while they were doing it. In Los Angeles, the studios had a jacuzzi, a former Coke machine that dispensed cans of beer for a quarter, and themed bedrooms.
In Sausalito, there were two jacuzzis and a weekly delivery of nitrous oxide – laughing gas – which apparently could be enjoyed through devices built into the control room, though panelist Ken Caillat, an acclaimed producer, said he never saw the nitrous during the year he spent in Sausalito recording Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.”
The sex and drugs are stories now, some of them likely to appear in “Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios,” a book coming later this year from coauthors Martin Porter and David Goggin, the latter of whom moderated the panel in his online persona of Mr. Bonzai.
The music, though, will forever live on, Margouleff said.
“You couldn’t make a bad record in that room,” he said. “It was magical.”