Music Makers in Search of the Perfect Pitch : Convention: Anaheim is site for annual gathering. Every instrument and related toy imaginable is for sale.

Can heaven and hell coexist in the same spot? You bet. Imagine being a baseball fan and waking up on a beautiful spring morning, already seated in the best seat in the stands with a cool beer in your hands as a game is about to begin. And then you realize the Angels are your home team.

Or consider being a musician wandering through several huge convention halls, surrounded by every musical instrument and related toy imaginable. Then consider it’s impossible to actually hear any of these instruments when you play them, because you’re equally surrounded by hundreds of other persons playing instruments--screaming guitars, earthquake-rumbling synths, blaring trumpets, lumbering drums, poor little ukes and every other conceivable music maker--all heedless of each other and the airport din they’re creating. It may well be the most unmusical sound in the world.

It is a sound distinctive to the National Assn. of Music Merchants International Music Market, taking its annual place at the Anaheim Convention Center this past Friday through today. More than 800 vendors representing the gamut of music-related products and services are hawking their wares to a projected clientele of 40,000 music retailers and sundry hangers-on. Though the event is closed to the public, scores of non-dealers always seem to find their way in, lured by the latest equipment and the artists and celebrities who always turn out for the event.

One such artist attending on Friday was British acoustic guitar wizard Martin Simpson, owner of a finely attuned ear to which the NAMM cacophony sounded “totally horrific. It’s absolutely ghastly . I’ve seen a few things here that have really interested me, things that look like fine ideas. But I really do have to shut myself off after a while, otherwise I’d lose my mind. My brain is very close to soup now.”

Somewhere in this musicians’ heavenly inferno, there may be found portents of how things are going here on Earth. If the welfare of the musical industry is any accurate indicator, the ‘90s might just turn out OK. The event featured 87 more dealers than last year, and the mood at companies big and small was upbeat.

In recent years, sales of band instruments have had to weather the greater popularity of electronic instruments and the cutbacks in school music programs, and dealers don’t seem to mind at all that the incoming President is a sax-playing music fan. The Rico company was offering an Inaugural Reed Sampler of sax reeds. (The new prez, by the way, uses only a medium-soft reed, leading one to hope that his domestic policy is stronger than his embouchure.)

Horn-maker Selmer’s booth featured a glass-encased tenor sax with a sign proclaiming it a “Duplicate of the Official Presidential Saxophone presented to President-elect Bill Clinton by the Selmer Co. January 1993.”

Asked about what changes the Clinton presidency might bring, Selmer’s Stan Garber said, “I’m very much excited about it. A lot of schools have been cutting music out of their programs. Now with a new President with a new agenda, he may say, ‘No. Music is a fundamental part of every child’s education, just like reading, writing and arithmetic,’ and he may work very hard toward keeping that in the school.”

Garber said it also doesn’t hurt, prestige-wise, that Clinton chooses to honk on a Selmer.

Some firms, such as Fender and Randall, have moved their production out of Orange County in recent years. Costa Mesa’s QSC Audio, maker of industry-respected sound equipment, instead recently moved to a larger building and expanded its line. Company founder Pat Quilter said he thinks the economy is on the rebound.

“We’ve already been focused for years on building a truly competitive manufacturing capability, because we believe that’s what your well-being is dependent on. You can’t have all your lawyers and McDonald’s and service sector jobs without having a strong manufacturing base here. We’ve had a 30% a year growth rate, supported by our export sales. I’m optimistic about the ‘90s. I think with a new administration that doesn’t have its head in the sand, we’re going to do well,” Quilter said.

Economic prospects aside, the spirit of the NAMM show seems to have shifted. There weren’t as many garishly grand displays as in past years, though import guitar makers Ibanez and Washburn did embellish their booths with a Zeppelin and a mock-stone castle, respectively. There were fewer scantily clad women hawking wares, and only one person in a gorilla suit handing out bananas to promote Gorilla brand amps.

What was there in place of that, according to several longtime NAMM observers, was craftsmanship and pride .

Orange County musician/retailer/repairman Steve Soest remarked, “Unlike three years ago, it seems like a lot of the dealers are people with a statement to make, really doing distinctive, useful, quality things instead of just slapping a name on cheap Korean knock-offs of someone else’s ideas. That’s really encouraging to see.”

The guitar market remains the dominant force at the NAMM show, and it is there that the greatest changes have occurred. The American guitar industry was sent reeling in the late ‘70s by the influx of cheaper, and very often better-quality, instruments from Japan. There was even speculation for a time that the two American guitar giants Fender and Gibson would fold. In the past several years, though, Fender has rebounded remarkably under new ownership and Gibson has recently come on strong as well.

“We’re all forced to get better by the level of competition here,” said Sterling Ball of Music Man guitars, which are played by the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards and Albert Lee. “I think it’s been smaller companies like us and several others who are forcing things to get better by making such high-quality stuff. That’s the only reason I got into this. I grew up in music stores and it was really frustrating for a few years. It seemed like instruments weren’t being made for musicians to play.

“There are more players now in the companies. That’s a real difference from the old days, say when CBS owned Fender (in its lowly regarded years from the late ‘60s to early ‘80s), when their head of production was a guy they’d brought over from Waste King. This guy who’d made garbage disposals came in to tell them how to make guitars. Now there are more actual musicians involved.”

Fender largely reasserted itself by reissuing its now legendary guitars and amps of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and Gibson is following a similar tack. Orange County collector Mac Yasuda has one of the largest and finest guitar collections in the world, including many vintage Gibsons, and he generally doesn’t have much use for new guitars. Asked what he thought of Gibson’s new efforts, he pointed to the “sold” signs on several of Gibson’s ornate Custom Shop instruments and said, “I just bought all those. They seem to be doing pretty well.”

Among the more impressive instruments Gibson debuted were reissues of its Tal Farlow arch-top guitar and the small-bodied L-series, essentially a reproduction of the 1930s model used by blues master Robert Johnson. Celebrity endorsers supporting Gibson products this year ranged from reclusive jazz great Farlow to the cutting-edge bands Life, Sex and Death and My Sister’s Machine.

While some manufacturers are finding glory in old-time craftsmanship, perhaps the most impressive product at the NAMM show was Roland’s GR-1 guitar synthesizer.

While guitar synths have been around since the ‘70s, they have generally been glitch-plagued novelty items. The GR-1, though, is a whale of an expressive, user-chummy musical tool, and has recently earned the approval of Texas guitar god Eric Johnson. It has a pickup that can mount on the user’s preferred guitar, even an acoustic, and can transform the sound of the guitar into that of a grand piano, pan pipes, a trombone, drums, organs and nearly 200 other sounds.

On the GR-1’s honking tenor sax setting, it not only sounds almost exactly like the real thing, but when you hit the string harder, it growls more. Beyond opening the guitar up to new sounds, it also allows for more control and expressiveness than one typically hears out of synths. The GR-1 with pickup lists for less than $1,500, which isn’t bad considering the orchestra of sound it has.

Electronics giant Sony showed off a variety of recording gear, including a $999 five-ounce DAT micro-recorder that will digitally record 90 minutes of music on a tape the size of half a matchbook.

Not all the products were high-tech or the domain of corporate giants. The Big-Heart Slide Co. of Placentia introduced a patented product for playing slide guitar, a glass or aluminum slide with a heart-shaped cross section designed to offer players a number of slide surfaces in one product for under $10.

Asked why he and partner Shelly Lutgen had embarked on a new business in these recessionary times, Luther Tatum of Fullerton said that the recession actually played a part in their decision. “My partner Shelly and I always made our living doing designs for exhibits. Business has been so slow lately we figured we had to come up with our own product to do the designs for. So we started in on it, introduced it here today, and people really seem to like it.”