Getting packed for next week's Winter NAMM show. The JazzMando Research Assistants will be donning lab coats and cameras to bring you the latest in gear relevant to the mandolin world. We're especially looking forward to hooking up with our friend Gordon Roberts and his "partners in crime" at Century Strings and Draleon Guitars. Giving us a teasing sneak preview, he reports "we will have the first prototype of the Ultra mandolin for you to try (if it gets finished on time). This is a completely new project that I am working on with John Littler of Headway Pickups in the UK. It's a live performance mandolin designed to be plugged in to an amp or PA and still sound like a real acoustic instrument. We will ultimately have guitars, fiddles, mandos, octave mandos, zouks, cellos and basses in the line and they will blow any other electronically enhanced acoustic instrument on the market right out of the water. We have the best new jazz/acoustic amp on the market to show you also."

Yikes, we can hardly wait.

In addition we'll hook up again with the usual suspects, our friends at Weber Mandolins, and Collings. Maybe a few licks at the Gibson booth on the new Goldrush, and a hands-on spin with Peter Mix's ground-breaking New Millennium Acoustic Design carbon fibre mandolins. We always try to sneak in some after hours jamming with Michael Lewis and the amazing craftsmen of the Luthiers Consortium for an off-site display of some of the finest handmade mandolins and guitars on the planet. (All in the interest of science, of course...) You haven't lived until you've seen a $2,000 custom engraved gold tailpiece.

Packing the toothbrush; California, here we come...

Posted by Ted at January 10, 2007 10:19 PM