First Thoughts on First Day of First NAMM

As a musician, I've known about NAMM for years, but until this year, I never had an opportunity to attend. With many, many thanks to REMO for making me their guest, I'm here in my hotel room at the Hilton in Anaheim, nursing ridiculously sore feet from a day of way more musical information, sights and sounds than I can process. For my fellow drummers curious what the industry themes, trends and offerings are this year, and for other musicians curious about the NAMM experience in general, I offer the following, somewhat stream of conciousness thoughts on what I've seen so far, along with a feed of my TwitPic photos at the end of this post.

First, some misc. kudos and credits ...

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Meeting Vic Firth

As a member of the Board of Trustees of VanderCook College of Music, as well as a drummer, I was especially proud that the college presented an honorary degree to Vic Firth July 31, 2010 during its graduate commencement. Firth was timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (and Pops) for 50 years and is the founder of the world's largest drum stick company.

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