NAMM 2011 Review

[RacerX]

FYI btw, Schecter has moved some of their product line manufacturing to China. (how much of the imports - I don't know)
Many models and sites do not show or indicate the country of manufacture when selling these models.

By US law, all products must show country of origin somewhere on the product.

[charvelguy]

physically, yes, as represented in a picture on a website, it appears not binding.

[roodyrocker]

I liked the Jackson stuff of course. There were also a couple interesting Les Pauls at the Gibson booth. The Alex Lifeson sig model as well as the Lou Pallo models. The Lifeson has a piezo pickup, Graphtech Floyd Rose, and coil taps! EBMM had some nice quality guitars, I'm mainly interested in the Petrucci which kicks butt.
Schecter, Dean, BC Rich, PRS, while I checked them out they just don't seem to be as exciting as the others above to me. They also lack the quality of the others except for PRS which does have good quality. Spent a lot of time looking at various amps too. Ironically, I think the coolest thing at NAMM 2011 wasn't guitar/amp related. Rather, it was Neil Peart's drum set from the current Rush tour Time Machine. It was on display at the DW booth. Very impressive!

[charvelguy]

Yeah, the drum area was very impressive. Roland had a bunch of cool products but many of the booths that really had some really cool innovative products were rather Ma & Pa operations. I really dug a lil booth called Gig-FX pedals.
http://www.gig-fx.com/