On January 21st, Dave, Riss and I went to the NAMM show in Anaheim. I have heard about the NAMM show forever, it’s the yearly trade show where all the musical equipment manufacturers have booths and show off all the new gear. This year Dave had not one, but two signature guitars coming out and he had to go sign autographs, then play a PRS Guitars all star gig later that night. I had a pretty cool gig as a professional “guy who is hanging around with Dave” which means I could go anywhere and had zero responsibility. I had heard all these horror stories that the NAMM show that it was info overload and really cheesy and stuff, but I try to go to the E3 video game trade show every year, and there is no way that NAMM could have been more overload that that, no way. I am pretty into information overload, thank you very much. Also since I am in the process of finding a new amp setup – I was stoked to look around and check out the amp makers and see if anything was for me. I was especially interested in checking out the Mesa Boogie booth.

We got to the PRS booth first and Dave spent an hour or so signing stuff there. He has a white PRS signature model coming out later this year. I took off and looked at the Mesas. They have a new one called the Stilletto that was looking promising. Met a guy named Tim at the booth and he led me around the knobs and switches. Went and checked out a really good demo of the Logic 7 Pro music recording software from Apple. I have ProTools and the Mbox, but am not in love with it, someday I might move over to Logic to see if it is any better.

Later in the day, Dave had to sign stuff at the Yamaha booth, they are putting out a white Dave model acoustic guitar. It looks bad-ass, they put his unicorn symbol on the headstock, and it has black accents. Dave seemed really kind of humbled and blown away by the fact that he had two guitars bearing his name coming out. When you are a kid and just starting to play and practicing all the time, that this is what you dream about, and this was his day.

That night, we went to a PRS event where Carlos Santana, Al Dimeola, Alter Bridge, and about 40 other guitarists played. It started at 7pm and was still going when we left, around 11pm. Dave played the Hendrix tunes “Spanish Castle Magic” and “Easy Rider”. We wanted to stay for the whole thing, but it was going til 1am, and Dave had been going all day since 9am, and wanted to bail. Hell, I was only the professional “guy who is hanging around with Dave” with zero responsibility, and I was really tired. We got in the car and went back to town, NAMM show 2005: mission accomplished.