King Says Re: SUMMER NAMM 2008 - What Do You Think?

Submitted On: Monday, Jun 30, 2008 - 9:41 AM

Yeah it was pretty slow from a drumming perspective. If you were a guitar player you had it made cause they were everywhere! Lots of cool displays and products to check out, not to mention all the SWAG (picks,cables,straps and blah blah blah) BUT....they were missing PRS and a few other major vendors as well but guitars still represented themselves well. With as much as shipping costs I can see why Summer NAMM is more guitar oriented.DW is one thing, but Pearl's factory is just a few miles from the convention and THEY didn't even show up!

dafunkman Says Re: SUMMER NAMM 2008 - What Do You Think?

Submitted On: Sunday, Jun 29, 2008 - 10:55 PM

This year's Summer show as slow, but it wasn't a bad turn out.  I think overall if you didn't have to travel far with these really high gas prices, it would have been worth the drive to go if you could swing the gas money!

drumfreak Says Re: SUMMER NAMM 2008 - What Do You Think?

Submitted On: Friday, Jun 27, 2008 - 11:38 AM

After recovering from the show, I think I have to say that unless we go back to the Drum-o-farm next year, I doubt I will be going back to SUMMER NAMM 2008. I am trying my best to speak about the positive at that show, but there's really not much to say.  For a drummer, this show was no more informational than going to a Drum store and looking around. Sure there were vendors there, and they were more than happy to talk about their products, but the show itself just didn't have anything worth traveling half-way across the country to go see.

I think the NAMM staff did a great job. We had no hassles from them whatsoever and it was easy to get in / out of the show. For the size of the show, they did a great job, unfortunately there wasn't much of a turnout.  From what I heard in the past, this show was a definite improvement and the location was not too bad.  There were plenty of events downtown going on in local clubs and on the streets to keep us occupied enough that we at least had some fun.

As far as big name drum vendors, the following turned out from the mainstream names that you're use to seeing:

[list]
[li]Roland (with Johnny Rabb - always a pleasure to see Johnny!)[/li]
[li]Tama (probably the best drum display, but conversations at the booth were not so heavy)[/li]
[li]Mapex[/li]
[li]Ludwig[/li]
[li]Yamaha (very small drum display)[/li]
[li]Taye (very small booth)[/li]
[li]Remo (very very small booth)[/li]
[li]Sabian (Moderate sized booth)[/li]
[li]Meinl (right next to Sabian, moderate sized booth)[/li]
[/list]

There were a handful of other smaller vendors such as RoboKey (Drum tuning Key), Stagg Cymbals, and other miscellaneous drummer gadgets.

Other names such as DW, Pearl, Zildjian, Vic Firth, etc had no presence other than a possible Meet and Greet that you had to be exclusively invited to, but the possibility of that was slim to none.

We had a Pearl Factory tour scheduled in advance for Thursday right before NAMM and when we got up there, we found out that we wasted our time, money and effort by trusting a company such as this to hold their word. They canceled the tour and didn't even give us a courtesy call. We ended up being handled by the receptionist all day long and nobody bothered to call us back, so we hung out and did nothing while waiting until about 4 PM on the callback that didn't happen despite numerous voicemails to people we know of up at Pearl.

I am in no way trying to blast Pearl here, but we expected something a little more than that. We didn't ask for any specialty treatment, we had a tour scheduled and it was canceled with no communication to us, so that was a real bummer. That and coupled with the fact no Pearl booth, and the only representative we saw from Pearl was from their Flute department and he didn't know where anyone was as he was just walking the floor.  I'm suprised, but a later explanation came to be that Pearl didn't want to spend the money on two NAMM shows a year, despite the fact that a simple table and some SHWAG to hand out wouldn't have drawn the company into bankruptcy (we hope!).

Overall, Summer NAMM 2008 was a show that I wouldn't get too excited about next year. The Winter NAMM is most definitely going to kick ass, so we hope to make up for this show then.

On a side note, the one thing that rescued us from having a lousy trip was a trip out to the Drum-o-Farm where [url=http://boomcafee.com/]Boo McAfee[/url], inventor of the Drumometer invited us to his Farm for a stay overnight and one of the most amazing lessons in Drum physics I could imagine.  Boo and Laura, thank you so much. We only hope we can return someday soon!