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Well, it was quite an eventful day yesterday and here is a breakdown of what I checked out.
Winners:
Zemaitis Guitars : crazy, hand engraved electrics that were incredible to see up close and personal. The most amazing one that I saw was a S22 St/Ring which featured the entire face of the guitar in mother of pearl surrounded by a ring of abalone. Truly amazing. Although I had a little rouble understanding the rep's Asian accent, supposedly each piece of inlay is hand numbered (on the back) so that a complete, finished product looks great. I was surprised to see that the weight was not affected by these additions to the mahogany body; the guitar had a weight similar to a Les Paul. Way too highly priced for my collection, but beautiful just the same.
Best Item At the Show
T.C. Electronics G System: Some cat named Marc Cooper was demo-ing this thing and he showed me everything it is capable of doing. Since everyone was watching at Doug Wimbish and his bass acrobatics, Marc gave me a 30 minute demo. Truly an intelligent item. I won't go into too much detail but it can basically do everything you would want in helping you to create a perfect guitar sound. When asking him about adding volume pedals and such he instantly recommended Ernie Ball
Biggest Joke of the Weekend
Ibanez (Ibeenhad) guitars- Big room loaded with tons of instruments....too bad the clowns they hired did not clean the frets on the high end models being pimped. Don't get me wrong, the Artcore series were clean and pretty nice looking but the high end shredder models (there were no Satch or Via models there) were probably the filthiest guitars I have ever seen. A casual glance at the guitars showed literally hazy and crusty frets. I walked out of the room and told my buddies( a drummer and bassist) what I saw and they totally agreed when I said that was ridiculous.
Doug Wimbish I have never heard of him but he was quite entertaining with his demo. He wailed away on his base at the Trace Elliott booth but after awhile it seemed he was just using effects as tricks to get his bass to sound like a guitar. People seemed to groove on him though.
Adrian Belew- RIDICULOUS
Lisa Loeb (songwriting clinic) unfortunately I missed this one but I did manage to see here later on. I felt bad for her because the clowns at VH1 (or wherever they were from) continued to jam cameras, boom mikes, and lights in her face while she was trying to leave the event. She must have hit the elevator 'down' button like 10 times! It was disgusting. One a side note, she is very hot
Paul Green's School of Rock the "real" school that was ripped off by Jack Black for the movie, had some insane kid talent. Pretty cool idea that stresses live performance as a group. One chubby little 16 or 17 yr old girl held an impromtu shred-fest in the Peavey room on a Satriani head. Too bad that head sounded like a comb with wax paper over it.......I can't really bury that head because it could have been the cheesy Peavey guitar she was using or just the setting that someone dialed up for her.
Larry Carlton- one of the most laid back cats in the world. Totally cool and a true master of the instrument.
Marshall Room - The Mode Four stack is the largest I have ever seen. It is monstrous and although too large for any need of mine, it does sound excellent.
I did not hit the Les Paul tribute concert because there was some concern as to whether it would actually go on because of poor ticket sales.
I'm still kind of stoked so I will end with this until I remember more.