TUNING UP
Gear Fest Gastronomy: Feast Your Eyes BY SHAWN HAMMOND
As I write this, I’m look- ing out the window of a
transatlantic flight to Frankfurt,
Germany. Yes, gear editor
Charles Saufley and I are headed to the annual Musikmesse
trade show—possibly the biggest gear show in the world.
We make quite a few trips like
this each year—treks to feast
our eyes and ears on the latest
guitars, amps, effects, and other
gizmos being unveiled by companies from around the globe.
We do it so we can update you
in virtual real time with our
Facebook posts from the floor,
as well as the photo galleries
that soon follow them at
premierguitar.com.
As with any massive feast,
there’s always a tantalizing array
of stuff at Musikmesse that we’d
love to spend hours and hours
with—if only we didn’t have to
move on to the next exhibitor’s
booth to bust out our trusty
Shure SM57 and shoot a demo
video for you to watch at your
leisure on our You Tube channel
or our website. Like you, we’re
always on the lookout for new
tone toys to put to use in our
own musical endeavors, so these
trips are kind of a catch-22:
We’re stoked to get to see and
hear all this new stuff—often
the solder fumes have hardly
dissipated before the new con-
traption is blaring through the
exhibition halls—but our pace
on the showroom floor is so
fast that we have to bid adieu
to these new sirens of sound
mere minutes after hearing their
enchanting calls. Our only sol-
ace is the hope that we’ll soon
get the gear in for a review. (If
you go back and check dates
you’ll find that, more often
than not, we’re reviewing the
cool new gear from NAMM
and Musikmesse shows before
anyone else, too.)
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exotic desserts. And sometimes
we’re forcing down food that’s
either hardly fit to eat or com-
pletely alien to our culinary sen-
sibilities (for the record, I am
one of the adventurous staffers).
Next issue, we’ll be show-
ing you the highlights of the
Musikmesse 2012 gear feast.
In the meantime, I’ve included
pictures of some of our more
interesting meals from gear
trips of yore. As you take a
look, you may very well see
food that turns your stomach—
whether it’s because of the
huge thumb hole in my other-
wise run-of-the-mill Summer
NAMM 2011 pork sandwich
or the exotic meats from our
Winter NAMM 2011 trip to
the Korean barbecue.
One thing you can count on
though, is that the PG staff is
incredibly diverse, so we’ll cover
anything and everything at
the Musikmesse smorgasbord:
Some of us drool over the stuff
that’s more familiar looking or
sounding, while others dig the
whacked-out stuff. And a lot
of the time we’re all knocked
out when we try something we
thought we weren’t into, only to
find out we really dig it—just
like with those slimy blobs of
meat from the Korean barbecue.
Until next time!
1. Luthier Jens Ritter (left) and PG gear editor Charles Saufley enjoy a variety of authentic Italian pizzas during our
post-Musikmesse trip to visit Ritter’s factory in Deidesheim, Germany, last year. 2. One night during Winter NAMM
2011, some of the PG staff went to a Korean barbecue joint and enjoyed baby squid and the tongue, stomach, and
heart of a cow, among other things. 3. I began my Summer NAMM 2011 trip by visiting the airport café and ordering a
pulled-pork sandwich that arrived bearing the indelible handprint of its maker. 4. With this year’s Musikmesse trip, the
fun began before I’d even left town. My spinach-tomato-and-mushroom omelet from the local diner came out looking
like a formaldehyde-soaked internal organ. Cutting into it brought a gush of high-school biology-class memories.
Shawn Hammond
shawn@premierguitar.com
