Guitar Historian Tom Wheeler Talks About NAMM 2012

By: Robert Cavuoto

Roaming the Anaheim Convention Center during the week of Winter NAMM is as exciting this year as it has been in the years past.  And one of the best experiences at NAMM is meeting up with some of the world’s top guitarists, a host of amazing guitar builders, along with the major company representatives for the majors like Fender, Gibson, PRS, Yamaha, Ibanez and others.

Tom Wheeler at the PRS Exhibit at NAMM 2012 with guitar builder ,Paul Reed Smith, on right - Photo: Robert Cavuoto

To pre-empt a meeting with guitar historian and past editor-in-chief of the iconic Guitar Player magazine, Tom Wheeler, I decided to see if I could hit him up for a quick phone interview. As always, Tom was insightful, enthusiastic , gracious and generous in spirit. At the tail end of the interview he suggested we get together and hang out and I’m looking forward to meeting him after the PRS Guitars press conference.

Tom Wheeler’s been coming to NAMM since the early 1970s, he’s been the editor of the best known guitar magazine in the world, has written a series of outstanding books about guitars, including his most recent, The Dream Factory: Fender Custom Shop, and has built a professional reputation as a highly respected and bonafide guitar historian.

******

Robert Cavuoto:  Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I thought it would be easier now than trying to juggle and find you on the convention floor. I thought this would be great. This conversation, basically when it gets posted, will be like we spoke on the floor.

Tom Wheeler:  Okay, great.

Robert:  Tell me a little bit about how long you’ve been going to NAMM, how you’ve seen NAMM change since the first time you’ve been to the event.

Tom:  I see NAMM from a different perspective than I used to. To answer the first part of your question, I’ve probably been to about 50 NAMM shows. I started going in the ‘70s before I went to work at Guitar Player in ’77. During the 14 years I was there at Guitar Player, I would go twice a year. In the last 20 years or so, sometimes I go twice a year. More often than not I go once a year, so I’ve been going for a long time.

My perspective has changed in the following way: at Guitar Player, as an editor-in-chief, it was really important for me to connect with manufacturers, both for editorial reasons, because we were covering so many products, but also because many of those manufacturers were advertisers. Now I mainly just hang out with friends and do some work for a couple of different companies, so I’m not under pressure to visit 50 different sites crammed into three or four days. The way NAMM has been affected, I’m not particularly qualified to talk about that because I’ve never been an exhibitor. If you talk to a guitar manufacturer, for example, someone who pays all that money to exhibit and can give you input as to whether it’s worth it or not, and how that sort of consideration has evolved over the years. You really have to get that from a manufacturer. I’m afraid on that question my perspective is limited. I wouldn’t want to speculate because I’m not a businessman. I don’t buy and sell musical instruments for a living.

Robert:  How have you seen it evolve and grow is more the question, since the ‘70s, since you were going?

Tom:  I think the biggest change has simply been two things: in raw size and then in globalization. It’s much more of an international event than it used to be and I think that is enriching in some ways, but also a very complicating factor for manufacturers who now find themselves competing with business entities from all over the world.

Robert:  You were talking about how the globalization has gone.

Tom:  And I mentioned we might have been cut off here, but just a couple of things. One thing is that so many of these manufacturers are competing more than they ever have with offshore entities, but at the same time many of them are finding some solutions in partnering with offshore entities or simply setting up their own factories in Japan, China, India, Indonesia; whatever the case may be. That gives the entire show and our industry a different flavor, a different vibe. It’s less provincial certainly than it was when I started going to NAMM shows in the ‘70s.

Robert:  What are some of the most interesting innovations that you’ve seen so far or are hearing about so far at Winter NAMM?

Tom:  There are individual items that made a big splash shortly after their appearance. The Floyd Rose tailpiece: I remember to this day a demonstration of that thing where the strings were not only lowered, but they were lowered so far that they were actually sagging and flopping against the guitar body and it came back in tune. I remember Ned Steinberger standing there in a little booth that he shared with somebody, with the first Steinberger bass, a very odd, seemingly odd instrument at the time.

But, we were all talking about it. There have been individual items, products – when I first started going to the NAMM show, people like Larry DiMarzio and Seymour Duncan had little booths, and the very idea that you would buy a pickup, replace the pickup in your Gibson or Fender, was relatively new.

So, the explosion in that field has been remarkable, but then aside from individual products, the growth of certain companies, the arrival of Paul Reed Smith, for example, taking his business from a little two-man shop in a loft in Annapolis into the company that it is today, and the impact that PRS has had on the quality of instruments in terms of setting high standards, these sorts of things have been some of the most important developments from my perspective. Again, my perspective is limited. I’m a guitar player. I write books about guitars and I’m the former editor-in-chief of a guitar magazine. Just for full disclosure, I do a lot of work for PRS. I’m not a paid employee, but I host events and press releases and that sort of thing. These are some of the things that really have struck me as part of the evolution of the scene at the NAMM show.

Robert:  This ties in nicely to my next question: have you tried out the new PRS acoustics and their new SE lineup of amps?

Tom:  I’ve heard the SE amps at Experience PRS and I have to say they are very impressive. I own a PRS acoustic guitar and I’m absolutely in love with it. It’s not a dreadnought sound. It’s not an OM. It’s its own thing and it manages to be both very robust and very sweet at the same time. I will just sit here and strum this thing and just strum a single chord and just listen to that chord roll around and reverberate inside the body. It’s a wonderful sound. It capos very nicely and it just has an angelic, sweet tone to it. I’m very impressed by the PRS acoustic guitars. I really think the best days to come with respect to the amps are in the future and right around the corner. I think Doug Sewell is absolutely brilliant and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Robert:  Going back to a little bit about some of the innovations that you’ve seen, this NAMM really strikes me as the app innovation, where everything is on the iPad. You get apps amp sounds. You get apps for pedal. Digitech has this wonderful pedal board that you put your iPad into and you can program all these different types of pedals. It seems revolutionary in that respect, something that as a young guy, I used to carry around 10 pedals screwed down to a board. Now it’s all electronic. I’d like to get your take on what you see of that innovation from the physical to the app world.

Tom:  I’ve seen the ads for that particular iPad-oriented pedal board system. I’m very interested to see how that actually works. It’s on my list. It’s a demo that I want to see at NAMM. I think there are a couple of interesting things going on. On the one hand, as you say, all sorts of things are being digitized and I think people used to divide themselves into camps, sort of analog versus digital, but I see it coming together in all sorts of things.

Wheeler's Award Winning Book: The Dream Factory: Fender Custom Shop

For example, I might like the sound of my old Echoplex, if I had an old Echoplex, which I don’t. I wish I did. I might not be interested in any of the hundred pedals out there that are attempting to emulate the sound of an old Echoplex. On the other hand, it’s pretty impractical to haul that thing around. They’re twitchy. They’re fragile. A pedal that gives me 90 percent of that is pretty great. I don’t see people quite so divided into camps as we were maybe five years ago or so, simply because the sound of those amp modules and effects pedals and multi-effects is getting better.

The things that I am excited about are the things that help me play better; not just tonal tweaks. You can’t beat a great guitar through a great amp and for a lot of players, a little slapback or a tremolo that you stomp on once or twice a night, the nice warm distortion that you get with your volume control on your guitar or maybe an old Tube Screamer, whatever. For plenty of players, that’s plenty. But for everybody, an iPad app that allows you to take any music and slow it down however much you want to slow it down without changing the pitch just makes me salivate. Like, wow, maybe I can finally start learning those Charlie Christian solos that I discovered late in life, or go back to those first couple of Allan Holdsworth albums. That is the other big advance that digital technologies have brought to us. It’s not just about sounds. There are all sorts of new tools for playing better as well.

Robert:  Our  publisher, Rick Landers, told me how much he’s enjoyed your book, The Dream Factory: Fender Custom Shop.

Tom:  Great! I appreciate that very much.

Robert:  How does the Fender Custom Shop lineup look this year for NAMM?

Tom:  I haven’t been there yet. We’ll have to see. I have not asked them what they have in mind. I prefer to simply go and have my mind blown. That’s one thing: you’ve got my cell number. Feel free to track me down. After a day or two at the show, I will have seen it by then and I would be happy to supplement your interview with some comments on that. Fender has really pulled out all the stops. I have to give lots of credit to Larry Thomas for piloting that company through very, very difficult economic times. I recently visited their new Visitor’s Center at the factory in Corona. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet or covered it.

Robert:  No.

Tom:  You really must cover it. You would have great fun and it’s really sort of everything you might imagine a display that celebrates Fender’s history would entail and a whole lot more. It’s very imaginatively designed. It’s big. It’s a lot of fun and I think it might be a real destination for guitar players and their families. They’ve done a wonderful job and I mention all that simply by way of saying I also expect their NAMM displays to continue their spectacular presentations. I remember one Custom Shop display a couple of years ago which I mention. All those Fender Custom Shop guys are way into cars and motorcycles and hot rods and dragsters and that whole sort of ‘50s hot rod, Southern California vibe, because Fender was so closely associated with that. They recreated an auto junkyard. I don’t know if you saw it. Did you see that?

Robert:  Yeah, I was there for that one. It was amazing.

Tom:  So you know what I’m talking about. The detail – I don’t know how many thousands of dollars it takes to pull something like that together. They didn’t have to do that. They could put the guitars on the wall, on guitar hangers and say, “Boy, these are really nice guitars,” and they are really nice guitars. But, I think Fender is also all about fun and vibe, and it’s just great fun to see what they’re gonna do next. It’s gonna be one of my first stops.

Robert:  Great. I will be at the PRS event Friday at 1:00 so I will look for you and maybe get a couple of  shots.

Tom:  Sure, and we’re going to schedule the two back-to-back, the two PRS events. One’s at 1:00 and I think the other one’s at 2:00. From the 1:00 event I’m gonna be racing downstairs to corral all these artists and see if we can get that second one started relatively on time. It’s after even number two that I’m going to take a deep breath. I know it’s gonna be crazy between that number one and two. But after event number two, come find me and I’ll be ready to hang out.

******