WINTER NAMM 2015

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Published on Monday, 16 February 2015 00:00

Written by Frank J. Pasquale

The Winter NAMM Show is the single largest musical instrument tradeshow in the world. Every January major manufacturers from every genre of musical instruments descend upon Anaheim California with the sole intention of displaying their latest and greatest technologies, instruments and gadgets to National Vendors with the hopes of placing orders that will stock every music store in the world with the latest  “must have” products.  As a guitar aficionado for over 30 years I have always held the NAMM show with the highest regards because this one single show is an overload to the senses for a guitar nerd like myself. There is no greater place on earth to see the greatest guitar gear.

When I started Pasquale Custom Guitars, my long term vision was to be able to get our guitars on the floor at NAMM because I am convinced that our guitars can go toe to toe in competition with any other guitars on earth.  I spent years researching woods, hardware and electronics as well as luthier construction techniques to guarantee that our guitars are the best that can possibly be made. We completed our original catalog of Signature Guitars in May of 2014 when we released our Metal Series Guitars at the Chicago Guitar Show.  Our long term plan was to eventually take our full product like to NAMM to unleash them on the world.

While we didn’t get a chance to take our full line of guitars to NAMM yet, we did get our chance to get our guitars on the floor at NAMM earlier than planned thanks to our friends at Nordstrand Pickups.

 
I have been an advocate of Nordstrand Pickups for the past few years, even though I have my own brand of custom pickups. It is rare that I would add a pickup brand to my arsenal because I worked long and hard on my custom pickup designs to make sure that they would complement our wood choices and guitars designs to be as versatile as and unique as possible. However, I made and exception in this case because the Nordstrand Vintage Humbuckers are truly amazing. They have a unique voicing that truly adds a different dimension to our guitars that no other pickup, even my own, can offer. We still use our own pickups in our guitars as well as pickups by Seymour Duncan, EMG, and any other brand of pickups that a client may want (that’s the beauty of being a truly custom shop). But we added the Nordstrand brand because we have several clients that want something unique that they cannot find in other brands and the Nordstrand Humbuckers can offer that. So rather than trying to figure out what makes their pickups so awesome I just decided to add their flavor to our mix and add their line of products to our custom line.

I have already written a blog article and a review of the Nordstrand Pickups so I won’t go into too much detail here about how great they are here. You can check it out for yourself at http://pasqualecustomguitars.com/pasquales-perspective/66-nordstrand-pickups. Carey Nordstrand is the brain child behind Nordstrand Pickups and Nordstrand Basses. His company reputation for pickups as well as for his basses has been growing year over year.  In addition to his own bass guitars has been doing OEM pickup manufacturing for Ibanez basses for years. This year he decided to have a full booth display at NAMM that would feature his bass guitars and his new bass preamps. He also decided to extend an offer to OEM manufacturers to display products that feature his pickups at the booth.

 
I got the email offer from Nordstrand Global Sales Manager, Pete Chiovarou to display some of our guitars at their booth and I was off to the races. We featured 2 of our Modern 24 guitars that were identical in woods and design but featured different Nordstrand Pickups. One guitar featured the Nordstrand NVH standard humbucker with matched single coils and the other featured the Nordstrand NVH ‘Hot’ humbucker set. 

Thus we got our chance to get our guitars on the floor at Winter NAMM and into the hands of some of the greatest players in the world. We are extremely grateful to Carey Nordstrand for his generosity in considering us for this and we are proud to feature their pickups in our guitars.
Stay Tuned for more details about the show …