julian edwards is the newest member in our team. he has visited us during the last two days and is off to great britain again where he is going to start working now as the dedicated meinl u.k. representative.

welcome julian! we are looking forward to working with you.

winter namm 2009 is now history. i have included a few images for you. check'em out and read the comments i wrote underneath every picture.

it has been an incredibly successful namm for us. i have had countless of meetings with artists, journalists, and other industry friends. the days went by so quickly and before realising it, i've been on a plane back home. i have had so much new input, way to much to go into all the details. regardless, here are a few of my personal impressions about namm which i though about the most:

1. namm is about new inspiration. it's an incredible creative place to be. just by walking around, talking to other drummers, seeing all the new products, hearing and feeling the pulse of the industry, triggers ideas in my head which carry me through the entire year inspirationally.

2. i am happy that our new soundcaster fusion cymbals were so well received by everybody. we got lots of compliments for them. thank you!

3. the quality level of young drummers is going way up! i have seen a young drummer, maybe 5 years old. he was walking around with his dad and played on the kits on display like you wouldn't believe it. this kid had technique, musicality, a deep groove, and a natural sense of time. it seemed to be the most natural thing for him.  i was shocked and so where dozens of others watching him. he was playing with the maturity of an 25 year old. the high level of young drummers these days is frightning. i missed to videotape the kid - bummer.

4. i was so much looking forward to finally getting my hands on benny greb's new dvd. however it got delayed for some more weeks due to some weird technical issues :-(

5. our booth construction must improve for next year. we have had some major unpleasant incidents during the show and also during teardown.

now we start with the plannings for the upcoming musikmesse in frankfurt in april. let's see what we come up with there :-)

greetings from anaheim, california. the weather here is awesome. when i left from germany the temperature was -20° celcius. here we got about +30° celcius with a lot of sun. it just feels great. going to namm alway is a nice break from the european winter time - for a few days only though.

two things i want to share with you:

as of today, our new cymbal line soundcaster fusion is online, including a mp3 file for every model. check them out.

this saturday at 2pm we will have our usual artist-signing at our boot at namm. participating artist are jason bittner, derek roddy, brann dailor, thomas lang, benny greb, felix pollard, barry kerch, and christoph schneider of rammstein. i hope to see some of you there.

more to come, stay tuned.

it's perfect timing: friday jan 09th at 03:30pm, all preparations for the namm show are finished and i'm getting ready to go home packing my suitcase. tomorrow morning at 09:45am my colleague udo and i are the first two of our team who will fly to los angeles for the drum industry's most relevant event, the winter namm show in los angeles. i'm really looking forward seeing many of our artists, press people, drummers and friends again exchanging the latest drumming news. it's a very inspirational time and place there for me in terms of finding out about new drumming, new artists and new ideas. i will blog from anaheim next week, so stay tuned.

my only plan was to not have a plan according to which i would have been supposed to organize my off days; after two weeks of holidays and chilling out without any deadline pressure , my batteries are now recharged. and they better be, because i will need full power next week at the NAMM show in los angeles. it is going to be very busy there and right now we are all getting ready preparing this and that for the show. i am flying to sunny california next saturday to go to the guitar-center drum offs first, and then on to anaheim where NAMM will take place. until then, there is a lot of preperation to be done. not having a plan now would certainly be the wrong strategy :-)

in the meantime, check out another great new video of our artist "vadrum" on youtube. here is the link for you.

i hope you've all had a nice start into the new year and i wish you all the best for 2009.

just to let you all, we have just uploaded a new episode of benny's video podcast. this one is titled "some fun at the shoot".

you can watch it here on this page, or on our video page.

enjoy!