New Monday #50

Happy Monday -

As I write this Dan and I are on a plane flying back to New York.

It has been a wild ride. We've been sitting on the Shure/Tchad Blake news for months, dying to tell you all about it, but bound by NDAs. There have been some hints dropped, and some of you figured out something was going on. A big step up for us.

The Level-Loc is getting a lot of attention, and I hope you all give it a spin and have some fun with it. Ours isn't just a drum smasher. It's really good all over the place and it's a lot of fun to use.

SO — NAMM...

NAMM is so huge, with so much stuff and people everywhere, it is hard to take it all in—it's hard to remember all that you see and all that happens there. And it's one thing to walk around NAMM, and yet another to work a booth. I spent nearly all of NAMM at our booth and I saw very little new gear, didn't get to play any guitars or get any cool swag.

But what I did get to do was talk to hundreds of people, and that's really the point of going to NAMM: to connect with friends, meet new ones, and in general celebrate the human side of the recording and musical instrument industry.

And it is absolutely a celebration.

There's no way I can give you a sense of NAMM as you might experience it. I spent most of the day on my feet behind the bar at Korneff's Plug Inn, demonstrating the Level-Loc and occasionally eating an expensive burrito. But here are some things that struck me as fun and funny, and maybe will give you a sense of what goes on at NAMM other than looking at stuff, buying $15 beers and thinking, "Is that Andrew Scheps?"

A guy who looked like Tchad Blake

We came up with the idea of a bar for our booth a few weeks ago, and plowed through designing backdrops, cocktail menus, coasters, t-shirts, found an IKEA knock-off bar unit online, and had all of this stuff shipped sight unseen to a buddy of ours, engineer and composer and all around brilliant musician Jason Soudah, who stored it all in his garage. On Tuesday, Dan and I flew into LAX, picked up a bunch of boxes from Jason, dumped everything at the Anaheim convention center, and then scrambled back to our AirBnB in Santa Ana a few miles away to launch the Shure Level-Loc.

We're awful at time management. We were making last-minute changes on the plug-in, the manual, the website, emails, until we passed out, then got up four hours later and did it some more. We managed to send an email out to all of you in which we spelled "Tchad Blake" as "Tchad Black."

Exhausted, rolled into the convention center to set up our booth around 1pm on Wednesday, with a bunch of tools, ready to put up our backdrop (3D modeled by Dan), and assemble our two bar units. But when we got to our booth, the backdrop was up, one of the bar units was fully built, and there was no one at it.

Who set up our booth? Certainly not Dan and I or anyone on our all-volunteer team.

NAMM has all sorts of rules. One of them was that if a booth isn't set up within an hour, the union workers at the Anaheim Convention Center swoop in, set it up and you get charged.

Were the mystery booth fairies union guys, and was our lateness going to cost us $1000?

Now we were concerned. We found a guy across the aisle and had a conversation that went like this:

"Hey, man. Did you see who set up our booth?"

"Yeah. It was these two guys. One had a shaved head and the other guy looked like Tchad Blake."

The shaved-headed guy was Matt Engstrom, director of Licensing for Shure, and the Tchad Blake looking guy was actually Tchad Blake.

Tchad Blake set up our booth. I said to our booth neighbor: "That actually WAS Tchad Blake. He set up our booth."

Booth neighbor stepped back, with a look on his face that seemed to say, "Who ARE these guys that Tchad Blake sets up their booth for them?"

Yes, Tchad Blake set up our booth, and he also helped take it down, and he spent hours and hours at it, usually helping people demo the Level-Loc. Kinda cool to watch people's reactions when they're working with an industry legend... "Oh my god. Tchad Blake is showing me how to compress drums..."
Tchad is that kind of guy. He's great. And if you think his mixes are good, his booth building skills are off the charts!

Selfies

Speaking of our booth, it was non-stop busy every day of the convention. Seems everyone wants to hang out at a bar. There was always a knot of people in front of it, a bunch of people on the bar stools messing with plug-ins, and new people coming in every few minutes.

Master film mixer Alan Meyerson stopped by. Lovely fella, really funny (most engineers have a great sense of humor). He and I have a mutual friend, the aforementioned Jason Soudah, who worked with Alan for a number of years at Hans Zimmer's studio in Santa Monica. Alan and I took a quick selfie to send to Jason:

Jason sent back this:

A most ridiculous picture. Jason had been up all night on a session and was just getting into bed when he snapped this.

We took a lot of pictures. They're all over our IG and FB.

The Birds of Santa Ana

Wednesday was windy, and I drove from our AirBnB to get coffee for Dan and a bunch of great friends who were helping us and staying in our AirBnB as well: Lawrence Ames from PluginFox, Justin Bennett and Alex Prieto. Lovely guys.

Got to a coffee place in downtown Santa Ana, popped out of the car to be greeted by the screams and cries of thousands of birds. Thousands. So loud as to be practically deafening. They were all over the trees and screaming like a scene out of The Birds. As I walked, they flew from tree-to-tree, as if following me. Here's a moment of it.

Lost in the Garage

The Anaheim Convention Center is huge - 1.8 million square feet (our booth was 100 square feet) and has thousands of parking spots. I'm a moron and also the designated driver on this trip.

Why put a forgetful moron in the position of designated driver? I think because it's funny and occasionally exciting, like when I made a u-turn from the far lane to get into the convention center.

On Friday, I parked our rental SUV — a freekin' land yacht with absolute ass visibility, and I felt fairly positive I parked it on level 43B. I took a picture of the sign but blurred the picture. Oh well. Can't be too hard to find a huge white carboat that's equipped with a dongle on the key that repeatedly beeps the horn and flashes the lights from a fairly far distance, right?

Ever heard of an acoustic phenomena called, "Critical Distance?" There is a point at which a reflected sound — the reflected sound of say, a car horn continuously beeping - is the same volume as the direct sound coming out of the bigass white SUV, and you can't localize the sound. You lose any sense of left to right. You have no idea where it is. Even if the lights are flashing.

So I'm pressing this button, the horn is honking, we're all exhausted, walking around this gigantic mostly empty garage with loud car horn sounds coming from seemingly everywhere. We walk this way, because it sounds like the car is over here until the acoustics change and it sounds like it's over there, so we walk that way and then suddenly it sounds behind us, and then we walk there and it seems to be a floor up, and then two floors down. Everyone has to pee. Eventually, we found it on level 41B. In my defense, I only had one digit wrong, and we all needed the exercise after standing all day.

Everyone pretended to be pissed, but secretly they had a good time and they let me drive the rest of the trip. And we all survived. Justin was especially delighted with the experience.

Rick Beato Likes My Sweater

I bought a pale green cardigan off some website that was probably just a front for Temu. It looked nice enough online; in person it's a little junky. The button holes look like finger holes more than an intentional orifice. My kids hate it. My son first saw me in it and said, "You look like a poor Dutch child." Weirdly specific.

Our booth "costume," so we looked like bartenders, was button-down shirts, suspenders and sleeve garters. In hindsight we looked more like bricklayers from the early 1900s. Dan wore his outfit the whole time.

I gradually morphed mine from looking like a bricklayer to a poor Dutch child. By the last day I was 100% poor Dutch child.

And on the last day, Rick Beato showed up, brought to our booth by a wonderful keyboardist, Kim Bullard. Kim deserves a New Monday just about Kim, and maybe that is in the future.

It was my first time meeting Rick. And he is EXACTLY like he is on his YouTube channel. Actually, everyone I met at NAMM, that you see in videos on YT or on Mix With the Masters — Tom Lord-Alge, Andrew Scheps, Alan Myerson, Stuart White, JJ Blair, Tchad — all of them are exactly who they appear to be. And they're all nice, really funny, charming and... just simply studio guys.

Rick Beato, though, has this other thing going on. It is hard to describe, and you see it in his interviews. He listens so well, and so closely, that... it's like he's 100% there for you. It doesn't matter who you are. If he's talking to you, you have all of his attention. And he also has this child-like enthusiasm — I've written about this before — when you talk to him it's like you're telling a toddler about Santa Claus. It's like he's going to explode.

We chatted about the Level-Loc, and a lot about how wonderful Shure is as a company (wrote about that last week here), Rick was all smiles and barely contained explosion.

But he's busy, NAMM is big, and as he and Kim left to wander deeper into the bowels of all the booths and gear, he suddenly turned and said, "I like your sweater."

I can't wait to tell my kids this story! I'm a little poor Dutch boy no longer!

It just occurred to me that if this was Japan, I would perhaps have to send Rick Beato my sweater? Isn't that a rule of etiquette in Japan? If someone compliments something you have to give it as a gift?

I Shure like that Level-Loc!

NAMM Shoutouts

Aside from Lawrence, Justin and Alex, who helped out both building Korneff's Plug Inn, manning it, and tearing it down, thanks and props to the wonderful Chaz Root and his wife, JJ. Chaz was tremendous: demo'ing plug-ins, talking to people, bringing by friends — thank you Chaz and JJ.

And shout out and thanks to all of you guys who stopped by and were so nice and enthusiastic. And thank you for all the wonderful feedback I got about this little New Monday project that I started almost a year ago. Truly, I never thought this newsletter thinger would mean anything to people, but evidently it does. Thank you for making that clear to me.

This was a long one! Thanks for reading it.

Warm regards,
Luke