NAMM Show had Opportunities for All

The Winter 2017 NAMM show ended yesterday here in Anaheim, California.  For four days, thousands packed the Anaheim Convention Center to talk, view, and demonstrate audio technology.  The attendees ranged from beginners to intermediate to pros.  The latter included the likes of Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, Billy Bob Thornton, and even Johnny Depp, among others.

At the same time, it was great to see “friends of the show” attending the event, including Karen Waldrup, Chase Miller, Ashley E. Norton, Melissa Brethauer, and Shevonne Philidor, all of whom have been guests on “Now Hear This Entertainment.”

For four days, home base was the TASCAM booth.  Specifically, a stage at their space, which was in a prime spot at the front of the main audio hall, lending itself to a heavily trafficked area where passersby would stop to watch the artists who were performing and then sitting down for an interview for a future episode of NHTE.

It was a great opportunity for NHTE to change things up a bit for the worldwide listening audience that the show has gathered in its almost three years of weekly offerings.  The recordings will have a very different sound to them, both due to the live performances on them as well as the room noise from the goings-on at NAMM.

It was also great to work with TASCAM and to meet so many great new artists (new to NHTE), many of whom – as is said each week in the lead-in to the “Bruce’s Bonus” segment – are “out there trying hard to make a go of it.”  Don’t mistake being at NAMM for meaning that these folks are set and have “made it.”

In fact, during the Whiterward interview, Ashley E. Norton looked back on when she had first been on NHTE and had just been signed by a record label.  She talked this weekend about how nothing ever ended up happening with that deal – at all.  To her and her duo partner’s credit, however, they came into NAMM with no endorsement deals and left with three!

The whole reason Karen Waldrup was at NAMM was because of an endorsement deal that she has, which prompted a trip out west from her Nashville home so that she could perform at that company’s exhibit.

Even meeting other folks who are doing or thinking of starting a podcast was encouraging, as the medium continues to grow and grow (and grow).

The interviews will be very different but certainly entertaining and insightful/educational.  Fittingly, the series with this new sound will begin when the new month opens, on February 1st.  There will be two interviews per episode and this series will run for 12 weeks.  The hope is that the listening audience will come away with the same satisfied experience that so many NAMM show goers certainly had this weekend.