{"id":145788,"date":"2026-01-23T04:27:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T04:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/145788\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T04:27:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T04:27:16","slug":"6-highlights-from-day-1-at-the-annual-music-show-in-anaheim-daily-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/145788\/","title":{"rendered":"6 highlights from Day 1 at the annual music show in Anaheim \u2013 Daily News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Percy Bady stood amid a throng of musicians and onlookers at a booth at the NAMM Show<\/a> at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, Jan. 22.<\/p>\n

As an R&B and gospel songwriter-producer, he\u2019s responsible for cowriting such well-known tunes as R. Kelly\u2019s \u201cI Believe I Can Fly,\u201d Yolanda Adams\u2019 \u201cStill I Rise,\u201d the modern gospel standard \u201cThere Is No Way,\u201d and BeBe and CeCe Winans\u2019 \u201cHold Up the Light,\u201d which featured Whitney Houston.<\/p>\n

When the crowd around a booth spills into the walkways at NAMM<\/a>, it\u2019s a sure sign that someone notable is there, and plenty of people had stopped to listen to Bady and a band that featured some of his longtime collaborators, including his youngest brother, Ray Bady.<\/p>\n

\"DJ<\/p>\n

DJ Jeff Adachi, known as Simply Jeff, from Santa Ana, performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Piano<\/p>\n

Piano tuner Silvana Olea, from Paru, poses poses in front of giant letters during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Percy<\/p>\n

Percy Bady performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA. Bady is a singer, songwriter and record producer.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Percy<\/p>\n

Percy Bady performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA. Bady is a singer, songwriter and record producer.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Christopher<\/p>\n

Christopher Guadarrama gets a chance to try out a fog gun during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Merritt<\/p>\n

Merritt Mendelson pulls the strings on a giant guitar to see if it made a sound during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Artist<\/p>\n

Artist Amy Voss with some of her glass sculpture guitars during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Desmond<\/p>\n

Desmond Bowe shows off Otto, a custom-built tiki tube amp, during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"William<\/p>\n

William Eaton, director of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery plays a customer guitar during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/p>\n

Marina Bello takes a selfie in front of giant letters during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The company We Are Rewind is showing retro-style cassette players and boom boxes during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"DJ<\/p>\n

DJ Devon Hype performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Rev.<\/p>\n

Rev. Alvin McKinney plays for a small group during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/p>\n

Marina Artemis Kyverniti, from Dubai, checks out a Game of Thrones-style chair made from guitars during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Visitors<\/p>\n

Visitors check out the map during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Crowded<\/p>\n

Crowded halls during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Visitors<\/p>\n

Visitors to The NAMM Show listen to show on the Martin Guitars stage at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Guitarist<\/p>\n

Guitarist David Palau performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Music<\/p>\n

Music instructors Robert Anderson tries out a bass trombone during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Yayoi<\/p>\n

Yayoi Damion reacts as she feels the bass being produced by an internal audio player while Michelle Lodwick, of Grove Thing, tells her about the device during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0Michael Weiss-Malik, CEO of Grove Thing, scribe the device as, \u201chalf sexual health and wellness and half end internal audio\u201d. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The band Ladrones performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

Show Caption<\/p>\n

1 of 21<\/p>\n

DJ Jeff Adachi, known as Simply Jeff, from Santa Ana, performs during the first day of The NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, CA.\u00a0(Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

Expand<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been coming here 25 years,\u201d Bady said at the end of his short set on Thursday. \u201cI\u2019m looking at everything that helps me do what I do as a songwriter and producer.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the thing I enjoy most is getting together with the community,\u201d he said of the friends and fellow musicians that he finds time to catch up with while at the NAMM Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ray Bady, who is 10 years younger, recalled how his brother\u2019s music had coaxed him out of the pulpit \u2013 he\u2019s a senior pastor at a large Chicago church \u2013 to back him on drums over the years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1986, I see him on \u2018The Arsenio Hall Show\u2019 with Whitney, playing \u2018Hold Up the Light,\u2019\u201d Ray Bady said. \u201cThey tried to tell him how to play the song.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhitney came in for soundcheck and said, \u2018He\u2019s the writer. Follow the writer,\u2019\u201d he continued. \u201cI knew I wanted to be a musician like him right then.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Anaheim Convention Center and adjacent hotels are packed through Saturday with musicians, instrument companies, makers of the tech and gear the music industry needs, and much more. Here are a few more moments that captured our attention as we walked the crowded exhibit halls on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Rockin\u2019 tikis<\/p>\n

Dexter Bowe stood behind a table on which half a dozen of his friends \u2013 Clarence and Larry and Otto among them \u2013 stood waiting for curious shoppers to stop and say hello.<\/p>\n

Bowe founded Dexter\u2019s Tiki Tube Amps four years in Venice.\u00a0He combines hand-carved tiki logs with amplifiers to be used with guitars, basses and other instruments, creating amps built with analog tubes glowing softly from the sides of the carvings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe start with a log,\u201d Bowe said of his creative process. \u201cWhere do I get the log? Where I find it, because there aren\u2019t a lot of tall trees in Southern California.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working in his workshop inside a century-old building in Santa Monica that was once a Ford Model T dealership, Bowe says he plans out the schematics of the amp before he makes the first cut into the log.<\/p>\n

Because each log is unique, each carving is different. He has to work on the internal design of where to put wires and circuit boards and transformers inside the log, which typically range from 1 to 3 feet tall and sell for $18,000 to $30,000, Bowe said.<\/p>\n

The amplifier tubes are then fixed into holes in the logs, and finally, Bowe bestows upon each an individual name: Earl, Isaac, Francis and so on.<\/p>\n

Guitar schooling<\/p>\n

It was supposed to be a boat, Bart Applewhite said of the three boxcars of Nicaraguan rosewood scraps that launched the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in Phoenix in the \u201960s.<\/p>\n

A lumber pilot named John Roberts had salvaged the castoff pieces of rosewood while working in the Central American country, thinking he would build a boat with it.<\/p>\n

Instead, he ended up learning to make a guitar with it and created a luthiery school. He gave himself the nickname Juan Roberto, because he said all of the great guitar makers were Spanish.<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago, William Eaton took over as director and helped grow the school into the only fully accredited luthier trade school in the United States, which allows to get federal loans and grants to help pay the $13,000 tuition, about $2,000 for supplies to build an electric and acoustic guitar, and another $2,000 or so for luthier tools.<\/p>\n

Applegate, the assistant director of the school, said he, Eaton and others affiliated with the school have often come to NAMM, but this year is the first time the school has exhibited guitars by its students and alums, many of whom have gone onto jobs at prestigious guitar companies, including big ones such as Fender and Gibson and smaller one such as Paul Reed Smith and Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

Students come from all over the United States and overseas, especially Japan, Applegate said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe like to say we have students from every continent except for Antarctica,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Retro rewind<\/p>\n

The small bedazzled box is beautiful as an object alone. The fact that it\u2019s a modern-day portable cassette player, and a collaboration with the new wave band Duran Duran? Well, that makes it even prettier, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Olivier Depoilly, sales director and partner in the Paris-based company We Are Rewind, showed onlookers around the French company\u2019s booth on Thursday, explaining how the cassette tape\u2019s rising popularity spurred We Are Rewind to create tools for tape listening.<\/p>\n

Sales have grown rapidly as young music lovers have adopted the cassette and its portable players for Gen Z, he said. A basic player sells for about $159, Depoilly said. Collaborations with other brands, such as the Duran Duran player or the partnership with the Elvis Presley estate, go for about $199.<\/p>\n

Why cassettes? Depoilly said he\u2019d asked a few young Namm-goers about their appeal earlier that day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said we like it because it\u2019s cool, it\u2019s vintage,\u201d he said. Cassette tapes are also less expensive than vinyl records, they told him.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they also like having something to keep with you,\u201d Depoilly said of the ability to carry a portable music player when you\u2019re on the go.<\/p>\n

More recently, We Are Rewind produced the Blaster, a stylish reimagining of the boombox. Partly, that\u2019s because cassettes remain a smaller niche in the market, and the Blaster can also stream music as a Bluetooth stereo speaker. But the $579 Blaster also will play your cassettes like the originals did in the past, Depoilly said.<\/p>\n

Guitars of glass<\/p>\n

Sixteen years ago, when Amy Voss decided to leave her career in radio and television, she found her niche as an unusual kind of artist, making glass guitars as objects of art.<\/p>\n

The Dallas artist stood at her small table inside the exhibition hall on Thursday, next to three of her creations \u2013 two that paid tribute to the late Prince and David Bowie, and an electric designed for purely aesthetic reasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really love glass, and I love the idea of using a guitar as a canvas,\u201d Voss said of what drew her to the work.<\/p>\n

She takes actual guitars and then cuts sheets of glass of many colors to create a mosaic of glass, which she then adheres to the sides and tops of the instruments. Crushed glass is used to add a different texture. Silver-colored gold-leaf paint seals the edges.<\/p>\n

Voss said she\u2019s made about 300 so far, often working on commissions from guitar lovers. The pieces sell for an average of $2,500, she said.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019re sturdy, too, Voss adds. She\u2019d recently heard from the owner of a Bruce Springsteen-themed guitar, which depicted an image from the cover of the album \u201cBorn in the USA.\u201d The owner\u2019s home in Pacific Palisades burned during the Palisades Fire in January 2025.<\/p>\n

The only thing that survived? The glass guitar, which cleaned of soot and smoke stains, once again hangs on the man\u2019s wall, she said, flipping through photos on her phone that he\u2019d sent her recently.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a \u2026 what?<\/p>\n

There was a steady buzz around the Groove Thing booth at NAMM on Thursday afternoon. People stopped to see what inventor-CEO Michael Weiss-Malik\u2019s neon green products were, and then typically reacted with wide eyes and laughter.<\/p>\n

They are, Weiss-Malik explained, internal audio devices, what he referred to as the first-ever crossover between the world of \u201chigh-end audio and the sexual health and wellness industries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without saying too much about how it works, we can report that a Bluetooth speaker relays the music to headphones, which carry the vocals and melodies, while an attachment serves as a kind of subwoofer.<\/p>\n

We held the kinda-sorta subwoofer to our chest \u2013 not the recommended target area \u2013 and can report it truly packs an audio punch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Percy Bady stood amid a throng of musicians and onlookers at a booth at the NAMM Show at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,330,6998,420],"class_list":["post-145788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-music","tag-music-concerts","tag-things-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}