[COUNTRY ENSEMBLE PERFORMING]

BILL HOLLAND: We’re on Gearwire.Com. I’m with Britton.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Hey. What’s up guys?

BILL HOLLAND: It’s been a strange and awesome day. We are completely wrong about the Moog Guitar for those of you who saw the early -- who listened to the Crosstalk episode. We’re completely wrong, and I’ll have Britton fill you in on that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. So I went to the Moog press release like the promo release for the Moog Guitar, and honestly this is probably one of my favorite new items that have been release probably in the last 10 years. This is an amazing product, and let’s not even call it a product. It’s just a really, really sweet guitar. I mean like this thing is miles beyond anything else that I’ve ever dealt with. I was really skeptical and then I actually sat down and played, and everything that they said on the web site about it like just feeling and reconnecting with, you know, the creative experience is totally true.

BILL HOLLAND: You mean it vibrates.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It does vibrate but it’s just the amount of control that you have in creating new sounds and new palettes to experiment with is completely like --

BILL HOLLAND: It’s I mean I think like in terms of technical and skill-wise, yes it is a guitar but it’s a completely different instrument than a normal guitar.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You definitely have to forget about what you know about the guitar to really get down to the nitty gritty of this instrument, and you know honestly everybody is main concern is the hefty price tag, and wording on the street is that they’ve kind of started thinking a little ahead of the line to try to get it more accessible to other users. We’re not going to go into that. It is just a rumor I heard. So, that is by far my favorite. We also got -- I also got to sit down with Mike Matthews of Electro-Harmonix, the founder of Electro-Harmonix, and we got to sit down and get really in depth about the way he started making pedals and Sovtek amps and how he ended up acquiring a tube factory. So, I mean it was just -- It’s just been an insane day of just lots of people just giving us wealth of information about what’s going on, what’s new, and also how they came to be and how they have this philosophy about making instruments for artists, so.

BILL HOLLAND: I checked out M-Audio has some new digital pianos which are pretty cool. I -- You know, I was skeptical because I was thinking like M-Audio they don’t -- You know, they’re more audio production oriented and, you know, more studio oriented so this was interesting, but I played a piano. It feels damn good, sounds damn good, a lot of them are prototypes but they’re getting very close to production.

Another thing that happened, we were using Sennheiser wireless mics to mic ourselves and the vendors and one of ours shorted out on us during the Sennheiser interview. So, the nice people at Sennheiser not only replaced our microphone, they gave us one that I think is probably double the price of what we originally paid for ours.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Wow. That’s pretty amazing.

BILL HOLLAND: Yeah. They were pretty cool about it.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That’s really, really, really cool. Really cool. Yesterday, we didn’t really touch upon it but I got to check out the new RG770 series from Ibanez, and these things are [SOUNDS LIKE] Bas Haas.

BILL HOLLAND: They look like it.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Oh man. They have everything down to the original detail of the original RG770s, and they’re in very limited run. Only 250 exist in the United States right now.

BILL HOLLAND: I checked out the Korg Nanos. Our video that they did for us is kind of they didn’t really demo it, so you’re not really going to get or see that. I did play around with them though. The mixer I like a lot. My favorite is the Korg Nano Series Pads, drum pads. Great for making beats on the fly like if you’re sitting on an airplane like, “We will be soon be...,” because we’ve both had -- They had like Reason open and I had Native Instruments and Ableton on the plane, and if I have had that, I would have loved it because if you had both of them making like I think you’re doing what your ‘80s hip hop project right now.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. I’m doing an ‘80s hip hop project right now modeled after Run DMC.

BILL HOLLAND: Of course. And so, it would be perfect for that. I don’t like the keyboard. Honestly, they modeled the keys after computer keys and they just feel flimsy to me and I’m afraid I would break them especially playing in a DJ booth. So, not so much on the keyboard but I like the mixer. I like the pads.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I definitely went -- We went over to Fender today too.

BILL HOLLAND: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Fender group. Really awesome custom models by Jackson of course. Shred guitar, you know, aficionados are going to be drooling over those but big news on the guitar from those two guys is Charvel started reintroducing mass produced guitars...

BILL HOLLAND: Really?

BRITTON WETHERALD: ...at a very, very awesome price point. So, for $999 what they were talking about, you get a killer American-made axe like on par with their custom shop line. It feels just as good, plays just as good, real Seymour Duncan humbuckers, everything is up to spec. They also have limited runs of colors along with their just straight up black finish. These are probably some of my favorite rock & roll guitars that are going to be coming out. Everybody has their little thing like Charvel or whatever because of their whole overseas thing that has happened in the ‘80s. They’re back, and they’re back in a big way, and so people look out for those guitars. And then Fender started doing their Classic Player Series to celebrate the Jazzmaster body style. Not like super crazy but there are some cool features on the double humbucker Jaguar where they actually have single-coil, two-humbucker rotary, so you can blend between single-coil tapping and rotary, and so that’s also pretty big. Everything else in NAMM was not really that exciting honestly like those things kind of made my day but everything else was kind of just it was there.

BILL HOLLAND: So, SPL also had this cool thing where it takes the signal coming from your board and you can put on your headphones but it mimics the angle of your studio monitors, so it actually feels like you’re listening to your monitors are over here versus your cans being right up against your head. Not necessarily accurate for mixing but they’ve done an excellent job of at least replicating that feel so you can do some basic mixing and tracking without hurting your ears as much but I think in the end you pretty much always want to mix down with your monitors. That’s just given. Other than that, yeah that was NAMM. I mean there wasn’t a ton of new products coming out this year but --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Not really. Especially on the guitar front, not a lot of people were introducing new things for the summer. A lot of custom shop stuff. We saw Washburn introduce a whole line. They’re really making a huge like real huge push for their custom shop, so you’re seeing that. Kirk Hammett’s released, you know, their signature series Randall Amps which are kind of cool actually. You know, they have these modular preamp designs, so other than that though nothing too crazy going on. Moog Guitar though, number one.

BILL HOLLAND: All right. I’m going to have to say Moog Guitar number one as well. Thanks for watching Gearwire.Com, and this is video blog number two from Nashville, and we’ll see you guys back in Chicago soon.