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about NAMM, Ted's powered speakers ?



There I was, crouched in the jungle, low on ammo, VC crawling all around me, oops wrong Nam story, my apologies for the off color joke but I couldn’t resist. No offense was meant to any veterans.

 It was great to see and schmooze many of the looping community who stopped by our booth at Looperlative.  Visits from the  Andre Lafosse,  Chris Murphy, Matthias Grob, Jim Goodin, and Kim Flint, who showed me his photo of the empty booth where Electrix was supposed to be (!),  to name a few.

Namm began for me with an 8 am Friday morning breakfast gig put on by The Museum of Making music at the Hilton, I played lap steel  for about 20 minutes and had a pretty groggy performance, luckily most everyone else was half asleep as well. My first demo at Looperlative on Friday afternoon coincided with a young guy looking like a Big Pink era Rick Danko, complete with porkpie hat, blazing away on a James Trussart aluminum Tele through a very loud London 65 amp, just across the aisle. But luckily the builder liked what I was doing, offered to let me play his guitars, and kept a lid on the volume for the most part.  Such is the scenario when demoing at NAMM, and I felt lucky to be in the basement hall E which is mostly acoustic instruments , small companies, and start ups, and doesn’t attract as many rockers intent on showing everyone just how fast they can play. I friend of mine referred to Hall E as the island of lost toys.  I brought of few different instruments down including my Asher lap steel, and an  amazing new lap steel from a local Santa Cruz builder called a Cruz tone, that has pedal steel like sustain, due to its wouod and aluminum construction. The rig I brought was a mesa formula pre-amp, TC electronics G-sharp, the Looperlative, a Keeley compressor, the Gordius Lilttle Giant foot controller, and a couple of expression pedals, and extra footswitches. I ran through Bob’s Bose linear array system with two subs, and the sound was awesome, better than I expected considering the circumstances.  I had several people compliment me on the sound and ask what I was using, and were kind of shocked to find out I was getting great clean and overdriven sounds out of this set up. I think the key was using the mesas  recording outputs that have a speaker emulator which made the sound very warm without too much treble spikeyness.  Also the Bose’ s ability to throw the sound in a wider field gave my sound a more enveloping quality even under such noisy conditions.The Gordius performed flawlessly controlling the looperlative, and even though I’m still getting used to its layout, it is really and extraordinary midi/usb foot controller. Thanks to Xavier for accommodating us. And the looperlative’s capabilities really had people stopping in there tracks to see where all of the sound was coming from. At one point I was demoing the scramble function with the feedback set low so that as I added new content the loop would not get over saturated. I just played melody as this constantly evolving bed of loop fragments percolated behind me. One guy kept looking at the pedal and then looking at me back and forth so I kept pointing to my rack to let him know what was generating the sound.. In fact, I had to explain on numerous occasions that the loops were not coming out of the foot pedal! People see you pushing buttons and figure that it’s the box that’s making all of that sound. We got a lot of people interested in not only the Looperlative but the Gordius footcontroller, needless to say.

 Highlights of the show gear-wise were the Eventide foot pedals,  Rolf Spulers Paradis guitars, a Breedlove koa wood Weissenborn style lap guitar, playing a Trussart guitar with mini humbuckers that had great coupling sustain and feedback even through the Bose system. And of course the stuff at our booth!  Also Friday night Matthias and I went to a hotel room to check out a bunch if high end acoustic guitars. I was particularly enamored of a small body guitar with fan frets and a Stella like yellow to black sunburst made by Bruce Sexauer. Also Matthias got to see some nice fireworks from the balcony of my hotel room.

 I got a chance to check out powered speakers somewhat and  I don’t think the Mackie SRM150’s that you were inquiring about would be adequate for you, Ted. I’d check out the RCF speakers that are the same size as the SRM350’s, but have better low frequency response and are lighter weight. The SRM150’s seam like great monitors for a singer song writer , but not much more. The RCF’s are made in italy  by the same manufacturer who built mackies stuff before mackie moved to China. They are a bit more expensive but worth it I believe.

 OK that’s enough blather.

Bill