Om NAMMa Shiva (Part N where N=3)

The nature of the booth traffic is visible not only in a relative dearth of exciting action demo photos on my part (I am giving them aforementioned demos, and thus otherwise occupied), but also in my relative lack of trade show mobility. There are a few exceptions.

The path from our booth area toward coffee, soda, and the “facilities” runs right but the Moog booth. I normally got to chat a bit with Bob Moog during the AES rather than NAMM, since he was always mobbed in the booth there. The AES this fall was the first time since his passing that I’d gone to a trade show and paused to realize that I’d never see him again. The Moog booth here has a digital “picture frame” with a rotating set of images taken at various points in Bob’s life, and a large poster that passers-by are invited to sign with messages of thanks and condolence (it’s going back to Moog HQ when things are over). It always seems as though there is a small group of one or three people every time I pass by. The booth is doing a brisk business, but the little corner always seems to have people standing quietly, watching the pictures or reading the large sign. It’s really quite touching.

I also finished the second installment of the Buchla 200e review in the current Sound On Sound and decided that the Buchla booth lay somewhat in a straight line to anothertoilet/soda machine vector, so I detoured with my Pepsi to check things out. Mr Buchla himself graced a minimally decorated booth.

Hardly minimal, I’d say you could only say “minimally decorated” if you’re churlish enough to not count this as decoration

I got to spend a little quality banana-plug time with the new machine, and it certainly sounds pretty cool. Loads of interesting new features, not the least of which is a Thunder finger-pad control panel. VERY nice. Time to start saving….

Anyway, back to stuff about us. One of the things I’ve never remembered to do in previous shows is to actually photograph the booth as it appears when finished early in the morning before the public arrives. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I remembered this year. Here, we see David, Tim, Darwin, and Ben conferring during the quiet of a tradeshow morning.

It doesn’t stay that way for long.

One of the interesting features of this particular NAMM was the presence in major terms of our friend Scott Wardle, who you may all know as Ms. Pinky. May steel wheels were spun, concentric wisdom was dropped, and much currency of cool was thrown down whenever La Pink was in tha house.

And ditto for that Lemur. Our booth was overrun with them, wrangled by Meg. Come to think of it, she wrangled the booth visitors, too. Keeping them in line with hours of demofortitude.

The rest of us helped out in the north end of the booth by demoing the Lemur editor during the interdemo periods. The south end of the booth was given over to places to view and marvel at our new UpMix collection of plug-ins, Octirama, our troika of plug-in collections, and that machine over there in the corner. Here’s just a sampling of the hordes of pictures I could have snapped if I hadn’t been so busy or thought to give the camera to someone who wasn’t.

Whew. What a whirl.