The NAMM Show, A Piano That Reached Across the World, and a Band I Still Play
A January work trip to the NAMM Show, running an IoT kiosk that let people play pianos remotely across the globe, standing by in case it broke, and wandering the loudest trade floor on earth. It's where I discovered a band I still listen to today.
One of the last trips I took before the world locked down. I flew to Southern California for work, the NAMM Show, to babysit a piano that could talk to the internet, and I came home with a band stuck in my head that I still haven’t stopped playing.
What we were actually there for
At the time I was working for a consulting company called Very Possible (which later became Very Technology), and I’d been on an IoT piano project. The product was genuinely cool: a big touchscreen kiosk where someone could connect to and play pianos remotely, anywhere across the world, the instrument and the player in completely different places, bridged over the internet. Our job at NAMM, the National Association of Music Merchants show, the enormous industry-only trade expo at the Anaheim Convention Center (the 2020 edition ran January 16-19, a record-setting one with something like 115,000 people), was to get the kiosk set up to demo that capability, and then mostly to be there on standby in case anything went wrong. I flew in through Salt Lake City on the way out.
Honestly? Nothing went wrong. We got the kiosk set up, confirmed the remote-play was working end to end, and that was that, no fire drills, no war stories. The company put us up in a nice hotel close to Disneyland, and I’ll admit I almost talked myself into sneaking over to the park. But it was only about two days, and once the demo was solid the real reward was getting to just explore the floor, both the day before the show opened and the day it opened.
The loudest place on earth
The flip side of standby duty is that when nothing’s breaking, you get to wander, and NAMM is a wonderland for that. We saw every single kind of drum, every kind of guitar, every kind of cymbal, pianos of all sorts, racks of digital synths and switches. If it makes a sound, it was on that floor, usually being demoed at full volume by someone extremely good at playing it. Just an overwhelming, joyful wall of music gear as far as you could walk.
The band I tripped over
Here’s the thing I actually carried home. NAMM had live performances going all over the floor, and somewhere in all that noise I found a band I fell completely in love with, the music, the genre, the whole vibe, and I still listen to today. I’ve always remembered it as “Something About Today,” featuring a guitarist I think of as David Feily.
A little detective work suggests how memory shuffled the names: the band is almost certainly New Sound Underground, an all-instrumental funk/soul/fusion group, and “Something About Today” is actually the title of one of their songs, which my brain promoted to the band’s name. The guitarist is most likely David Feily, a working guitarist who does the NAMM demo circuit.
Either way, it clicked instantly and never let go. That’s the one, the band I’ve been playing all these years.
The takeaway
It was a quick, easy, work-shaped few days, set up the kiosk, stand by, soak in the loudest room in America. But it handed me two things that stuck: proof that a piano could live on the internet and be played from the other side of the planet, and a band I’d still be listening to years later. Not bad for a trade show. And there’s a quiet poignancy to it now, a carefree January in a packed convention hall, just weeks before packed halls became unthinkable.