NAMM 2015
Anaheim, CA Jan. 22-25 by Doug Crooks
It’s that time of year again, for the North American Music Merchants (NAMM) annual Winter Convention. This is the largest music trade shows on the planet, and a time for companies in the music industry to show off what new and exciting products are available and coming out in the next several months. I’d like to take a moment to thank Innovative Percussion Inc., and in particular Carol Carpenter and Erik Johnson for the NAMM badge and support.
Yamaha
http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/marching/
It’s easy to get overwhelmed at NAMM, with the thousands of booths, multiple concert stages, and 95,000 attendees converging onto downtown Anaheim (the Convention Center where the Convention is held is literally across the street from the back of Disneyland’s California Adventure park). I checked in with Yamaha first, as the music company bypasses the Convention Center and has all of their events in a nearby hotel ballroom. Yamaha was showcasing their Custom Series marching percussion, displaying nearly two dozen beautiful custom finishes, from stained wood, to lacquered sparkles, to fades, to sparkle fades. They also showcased their other marching percussion lines and Randall May carriers.
Innovative Percussion
http://www.innovativepercussion.com
IP has spent a lot of time this year improving their tenor mallets, and have newly-tweaked editions of their older mallets (gone is the screw on the top of each mallet for a better-balanced stick). They will also be rolling out some new tenor mallets including:
– Paul Rennick TS-PR tenor mallet with an over-sized wooden bead that produces a beautiful dark & articulate sound. The butt end features a rubber sleeve for additional timbre options. The balance, sound, and feel of these mallets felt great!
– Mike McIntosh TS-MM “Mizzle” has a really good small, purple nylon tip that produces a super articulate, bright sound. It will be offered with a synthetic sleeve that produces something between a felt mallet and wooden tipped stick; it can be easily removed from the nylon bead
– FT-1B ‘traditional’ type tenor mallet that has the fulcrum notch handle with a traditional tenor mallet head, producing a full sound
These new mallets in addition to tweaks to their new tenor mallets make the tenor drummer in me excited. I particularly liked the Rennick and McIntosh models. Also new and cool from IP is the Chad Wackerman ‘Paintbrush’ brush that in addition to the medium wire brushes includes a hickory handle that sounds great playing cross-sticks, and a nylon snare tip at the end for cymbal articulation or ‘scrape’ sounds on a drum head. While designed with drum set in mind, the multi-timbre choices these brushes provide could make for some cool ideas in the marching world.
Mapex Marching Drums
http://quantummarching.com/mapex-marching-drums/
Mapex has been turning out great looking instrumentsfor the last few years. They brought several custom finish drums this year to NAMM, and also showcased some of the nice drum finishes from the 2014 Drum Corps International units who used their equipment (Boston Crusaders, Blue Knights, Blue Stars, etc.). Mapex also showcased a do-it-yourself option of re-covering marching drums with minimal stress by “On2Percussion”. These finishes looked pretty cool from a distance, and seemed to have an affordable price for the drum line who wants a new look without wanting to buy a whole new set of drums.
Remo
Remo once again showcased their many types of marching heads that we all know and love. They also showed off the many customized heads utilized by NCAA college marching bands (all four of the College Football Playoff marching bands were represented by their custom bass heads), as well as DCI and indoor percussion lines, with Undisputed National Champion The Ohio State University represented prominently!
Pearl
http://pearldrum.com/products/marching/carboncore/ffxic-snare/
Pearl had some interesting new stuff at their booth. They are seemingly going all-in with their light-up drum set line, and while that trends wasn’t displayed on their marching drums, I can’t imagine the trend is too far off. This year Pearl is touting its latest version of their FFX marching snares as the “lightest, fastest, most agile FFX ever” and I certainly won’t try to dispute the claim. Pearl changed their snare throw-off to a very compact OneTouch snare release. The design took me a little bit of time to get used to (I’m really well-versed with the older model FFX), but seems pretty cool. They had several snares with a cool striped finish that was pretty unique compared to sparkles & fades prevalent elsewhere. Pearl also showcased their Carbon Core instruments, which are made with a light weight hybrid shell of maple with an inner ply of carbon fiber that are both lightweight, boost projection, and are more expressive.
Sabian
Sabian again had their wall of cymbals on display, though they did have a very small display of various crash cymbals. Zildjian Cymbals had their usual drum set cymbals, but this year unfortunately carried zero hand crash cymbals.
Tama
While Tama is fairly new to the marching percussion world, the line is spearheaded by marching percussion DCI Hall of Famer Tom Float. The meticulous attention to detail that he shows as an instructor is apparent in the beautiful look and design of Tama marching drums. Besides their great look, I was intrigued by the tenor shell configuration of birch + bubinga. Bubinga is typically considered an exotic wood , but Tama has incorporated the wood for projection and articulation as well as a seemingly brilliant cost-savings idea; apparently Tama uses so much bubinga for their drum sets it was financially viable, if not cheaper, to use bubinga rather than maple. The nice sound is undeniable, and the look is every bit as beautiful as you’d expect from bubinga: I suspect my pictures will not do justice to the look!
Vic Firth
Vic Firth displayed their usual array for marching sticks and mallets from their CorpsMaster line. The most interesting new product from Vic Firth is the Universal Practice Tips: rubber tips that fit over traditional drum sticks of the player’s choice (i.e. the sticks you already own and love). This can create interesting colors and timbre choices in the marching world when used on conventional sticks for softer but articulate passages.
I unfortunately did not get any pictures from Dynasty, Evans, Pro Mark, or Zildjian, mainly because there wasn’t much new in the drum line world. All of those companies were at NAMM and showcasing the products you already know and love.