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Finding Music in the noise of NAMM

Friday, February 05, 2010

Posted by: Will Cady | Posted in: Music Reviews

My first NAMM.  Every time I shared that fun little fact with anyone mingling around Anaheim this past January, I was treated to the same unsettling wry grin.

I’m going to kick this thing off with a fantastically obvious statement.  There are many, many faces to the music industry.  At this point in my life, I’ve experienced full immersion into three of them.  As a music student in Boston, I submerged myself in the disciplined but sterile academic side by day and the inspired but naive indie band side by night.  Since joining the business world with Source Audio, and more specifically, since being dropped into the chaos of NAMM, I’m getting to know the sleek but artificial products & accessories side.

At NAMM, the words are technique and image.  Slap bass, shred guitar, tapping insanity, expensive sunglasses and camera phones.  As a player in the midst of it all, I asked myself, how does anyone stand out in this?  As I looked around, I saw that the way most people chose was to play faster or harder and louder.  My reaction?  Can’t do it.  That’s not me.  I don’t want to do that.  I like the nuances of music, the way it can reach into my humanity and explain something I just can’t put into words.  If that emotion I’m trying to explain involves slap, I’ll play slap.  If it involves speed, I’ll play speed.  It works from the inside out.  Technique should follow me, not the other way around.

Yet, by the second day, after hours spent standing at the Source Audio booth with my bass in my hands and noise coming at me from every angle, something changed.  I felt tiny.  I can’t pin down the reason why.  Maybe it was the fact that I had mind-bending slap bassists on either side of me playing non-stop.  Maybe it was the occasional run-ins with my childhood heroes.  Maybe I too just needed to find a way to rise above the constant cacophony and lavish displays of…I don’t know what…and be heard.  I suspended my faux-mature musical ideology and slapped my brains out, flew up and down my scales as quickly as my aching fingers could go.  All I could think about was how I wished I had practiced just a bit more.  My mind went back to school…

Pat Pattison, a stellar songwriting teacher of mine, referred to class as The Gym.  “What are you going to do,” he would ask, “when you’ve just released your debut album of music that you’ve been writing for the last ten years of your life and now you have three months to write the follow-up?”  Pray you’ve worked all the right muscles into shape, that’s what.  At NAMM those muscles were all in my hands and you better believe I was praying for them to speed up.

At the end of that day, I felt like I was eighty.  My joints throbbed; I couldn’t hear a thing and I just wanted to lay down and watch Hard Copy. With glazed eyes, I dragged my feet back to my hotel room at the Hilton, breathing in that musky Disneyland air on my way.  Ain’t no rest for the wicked though, right?  Not at NAMM, that’s for sure.

An hour later, I descended the escalators to meet the rest of the Source Audio guys in the Hilton Lobby bar, now flanked with stages.  “Your first NAMM!”  Wry grins.  I can’t blame them.  I must have looked like a cat that just came out of  the dryer.  With drinks in hand, we turned to the stage and set our eyes on the action in front of us.  The band was tearing it up.  Notes were coming out of everywhere.  At one point, I’m pretty sure the guitarist started playing with his toes.  That’s not true, but it might as well be.  I looked around at the people milling around and I saw what looked like a sea of apathy surrounding the few dedicated friends and fans huddled in front of the stage.  The music wasn’t holding anyone.  Noise.  This was a real musical setting, a performance on stage in a bar, and that technical approach fell flat.  They were selling themselves as hard as they could.  The music was a pitch and no one was buying.  There was no substance.  

When I woke up the next morning and headed back out to the convention room floor with my ears ringing from the night before, I thought about what I saw and I realized then why I’m at Source Audio.  These music effects are not supporting flashy technical playing or solely catering to an image.  Rather than providing slippery string sprays or thinner guitar necks or cheap sounds in loud packaging, Source Audio is creating effects that expand and even inspire a musician’s ability to express him or herself. 

Sure, the Hot Hand could be downplayed as a gimmicky device, but in reality, it adds an entirely new dimension of manipulation to any instrument’s sound.  It allows a musician to open and close the timbre of the sounds they are producing with a wave of their hand or even within the strum of their guitar line.  Our new bass pedal, the Multiwave Bass Distortion, is a remarkably customizable effect yet it still maintains the fundamental strength of the instrument: low end.  In essence, it is a pedal that can help bassists hold it down stronger and funkier or step up and sing on top with thickness.  The Multiwave makes the experience of being the foundation of a band more rewarding.

When I stepped back onto our modest Source Audio stage, I changed my approach.  I worked with the effects.  I let them speak.  I left the slap bass and speed playing behind and worked for the groove.  That simple change in attitude made for a great day.  At one point, I brought my pedal board over to another booth for a blues jam with three organ players.  All of these dudes were just there to play.  I remember thinking to myself, “Now this is what I came here for”. 

NAMM is a business convention.  The real music is out there, but it’s not trying to rise above the noise.  Now, when I think back to all of those different faces of the music industry I’ve looked into, I see the same thing.  I’ve been a student who thought music was about conquering other players.  I’ve been a band member who needed to be the coolest person in the room.  At NAMM, I was a marketer looking to sell.  At Source Audio, I’m the lucky kid who gets to play with sweet pedals in front of the Internet.

The beauty of the work on all sides of our industry is that everyone wants to be here.  The ugliness of our work is that we don’t always have something to offer, but we still try to stay.  What I stay for are the moments that happen in between the give and take of our relationship with the music.  Give practice, give innovation, give messages.  Take attention, take money, take credit.  The blues jam captured the essence of what I’m here for.  No give and take, just music.  The Source Audio pitchman in me had his pedals, but they were not on display.  Instead, they were there to expand my musical presence and to help me to enjoy myself.  In those few minutes that we were creating, the clatter of NAMM disappeared and my thoughts descended into silence.  We gave nothing and we took nothing.  We just played music.

Here’s the video:

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