Capturing Content When it Counts

My first year attending The NAMM Show I was too swept up in exploring the floor to think about recording content. I left with a couple short clips of me test driving some of the new gear in the DJ market for the dealership I work for, Astro AVL in Glendale, California. Days later, after the glow was gone and memories started to blur, I was left wishing I had put some thought into taking more strategic content. Whether it’s to showcase your own skills or share brand-new products with your customer base back home, there are plenty of reasons to produce social media content at The NAMM Show. Understanding how to best set yourself up for success with the production end of things can be a bit tricky if you don’t already have a set process to navigate noisy environments. If you’re new to the creator mix just know that you’ll need more than your iPhone to achieve a quality result. For that reason, I’m outlining my experiences, struggles, strategies and tools for recording content at The NAMM Show.

As a dealer looking to create content at The NAMM Show, I’ll start by telling you this: When you set up your vendor appointments, preemptively notify them that you’re looking to record content. If you just show up and hit “record” you’ll find yourself waiting to get a close-up with the gear and may feel rushed. If you already have a general sales meeting in place, just be aware that you should tack on an extra 20 minutes to the meeting length to accommodate shifting the conversation from annual sales figures to camera-facing focus and orienting their energy to this new objective. That way, your vendor rep can be mentally prepared to put their best foot forward on cam, giving you a better end-result. You’ll also have greater success securing a product rep’s uninterrupted attention. Recognize that these brands want to capitalize on any exposure available to further promote their brand. Social media is king, and you can only sing your own song so much.

PLANNING OUR GEAR SETUP
My second year making content at NAMM, our crew was strapped with a battery-operated line mixer (think old school — clunky and loaded with size D Duracells), a couple handheld-wired Shure microphones, a TASCAM field recorder and a Go Pro. Setting up shop at each booth sounded simple in theory, but between testing the audio feed, troubleshooting small hiccups, swapping batteries and making sure the shot was framed right, we burned precious time during our long series of stops. It all felt rather rudimentary. The mixer was in my cameraman’s backpack and with XLR cables running across the floor to our mics it was sometimes like a game of double-dutch with passerby attendees. It’s also worth pointing out that Go Pros aren’t designed to give you a quick visual reference of what you’re capturing, they’re point and shoot. In retrospect, they weren’t the best choice, but these days, that’s a non-factor thanks to the notable camera quality on smartphones.

We all know the chatter, drums banging and guitar strumming contributes to a constant roar on the showfloor. The bashing of cymbals or a variety of other high tonality instruments pierce the air, and you’re bound to hear bouts of booming music as presentations and demos take place, drowning your content out mid-conversation. That’s the nature of recording at NAMM and where omnidirectional microphones are a nightmare, soaking up every environmental auditory disturbance it can. So, be sure to go with a cardioid pattern on your mics to help isolate the source of your feed to (hopefully) just you and your co-host or interviewee.

New product videos from NAMM are the epitome of time-sensitive material. Being first to the finish line is what gets exponential clicks and views. After all the hustle and bustle of that NAMM weekend we reconvened the following Monday at our home base, Astro AVL. That’s when our true downfall presented itself. Syncing the audio to video became a post-show nightmare. We had easily 12-plus hours of video footage and a dogpile of audio recordings. Lining up the audio cues to the video should have been a simple step done in chunks to be cut up later, but we found the audio was intermittently falling out of sync with the video without rhyme, reason or resolution. We were assuming we could produce a quick turn around of finished content. Instead, we were bogged down by cutting and syncing everything manually, requiring us to review every moment of each clip for lip sync discrepancies. By the end of it, many of the videos went unfinished and unpublished because we became busy with the usual influx of office duties and simply lost the motivation. We failed to take advantage of the window available for the content to be fresh and incite engagement.

LIVESTREAM TRIAL & ERROR
Dismayed yet unswayed by these setbacks we returned to The NAMM Show the next year with a plan to totally elevate the process and end-product. The premise was bold: A full day of livestreaming the showroom floor using a 360-degree camera, giving our followers the opportunity to tap into the experience with immersion, realism and in real-time. My cameraman was tasked with carrying a collapsed tripod (with the camera mounted on top) high above our heads as we moved between booths for the entirety of the day. We posted our booth meeting times on Instagram well in advance so our audience knew when to tune in for a particular brand or product they were interested in. We sent out social media reminders that morning and provided updates on our whereabouts as we started our day with vigor.

This ended up being another “man plans, God laughs” moment. Unbeknownst to us at the time, chasing the ability to livestream from the showfloor was a fool’s errand. It started smooth, seemingly stable, but the network simply became too congested or unavailable entirely. Our feed was lagging beyond a passable standard and dropping out with frequency. So much of our attention was on moving around we weren’t aware of the effects of the poor connection until text messages crept in from viewers. We decided to hit pause on our schedule to spend a bit of time testing, troubleshooting and exploring alternate solutions. By mid-day, we abandoned this 360 livestream strategy entirely, falling back to recording simple, straight-forward interviews like the prior years.

The calendar rolled over and the next NAMM show came about. Again, we reformulated our methodology. We opted for a more modern technological solution that would minimize setup headaches and post-production pandemonium. That solution was the Shure MV88 digital condenser microphone. We plugged it into my iPhone that was tucked away in my pocket with a 10-foot long lightning cable that we bought just for the occasion. A bit comical, yes, but I’m okay with being unconventional in pursuit of streamlined results. Being that I didn’t want to deal with multiple microphones again, I had to share the Shure mic with co-hosts during conversations, but that seemed like a small trade off for a stress free experience. We still had to sync the audio to video later but it was a much more pain-free process this time.

WHAT TECH TO USE
To go full throttle with content creation at The 2025 NAMM Show, I would equip myself with a few apt tools that have emerged within the last year. First, would be the Shure MoveMic, a battery-operated wireless lavalier microphone that records straight to my phone. With 24 hours of recording capability, you never need to stop to swap a battery again, and there’s no more cables to untangle. The MoveMic Two comes with two lavs, so interviews are a breeze.

Next, I’d suggest packing a Mackie MobileMix. The MobileMix is an in-the-field friendly, eight-channel line mixer and can be powered by a USB power pack. This would help tackle more involved recording situations when dealing with multiple sources or live streaming. And lastly, as a coup de grace, I’d probably scheme to set up a Starlink in the open atrium by the beer cart with a mesh router placed inside to give me access to a dedicated high-speed internet connection as I move around. That might require a bit of experimentation and coordination, but the payoff would be worth it.

OTHER ASPECTS TO CONSIDER
There are some other considerations to mention, such as evaluating your on-camera co-hosts. Not all product specialists are great when it comes time to “lights, camera, action” — and they have the insight, but communicating with brevity and effectual animation is an art that doesn’t come naturally to all. Get a feel for your interview candidates ahead of time so you can be prepared to contribute additional energy to compensate.

Be cognizant of your responsibility to drive the conversation forward and to stay on topics that you know will be of most relevance and interest to your viewers. You want to ask the questions that your audience would likely want addressed. You can do that by conceptualizing the application of the product in real life scenarios where the caveats of potential constraints emerge. If there is a shortcoming in design you’ve now exposed it and created a legitimate consumer talking point. If the manufacturer has already integrated the solution, they will communicate that and now you’ve helped them sell it. Having some candid, quick witted humor in the mix also helps keep things light. After all, this is the entertainment industry.

Another factor to not lose sight of is impromptu content. Try not to be so strategic that you forget about the power of spontaneity. A couple NAMM shows ago I found myself in a hotel suite, meeting with JMAZ Lighting executives. When they expressed interest in planning a collaboration of content around their new products, I decided to give them a taste. I stood up, handed off my phone, picked up their battery-operated moving head and recorded a quick clip as I manhandled it freely like a beach ball, while a dozen people watched silently from across the room. It took less than a minute to record and it was uploaded to social platforms in just a couple more. It provided instant validation to their team that presenting products and brand awareness are things the Astro AVL team is dialed in on. And that was done with just an iPhone, no extra hardware. I didn’t lose sight of an opportunity just because I wasn’t carrying a full rig.

The NAMM Show funnels a wealth of information to dealers and end-users alike. That sentiment resonates and ripples, evident from the buzz that starts to circulate in the weeks prior. People are naturally keen to see what new feats of innovation are set to come their way. By distributing content and contributing to the modern broadcast channels, we’re commemorating and celebrating these MI product achievements, granting recognition of their introductions to the market. In a similar capacity as content-creators, we improve the landscape by discovering inefficiencies in product design and sharing them with the public. Those findings become peer reviewed in comments and reposts, vetted in public opinion by likes. We’re signaling to the community that we’re engaged and participate in the MI ecosystem. We do so by putting our energy into educating others and by giving the world our unique thoughts, opinions and insights in order so they may better manifest their own. And in parallel to that philosophy, my personal hope is that someone reading this column was able to garner some wisdom or inspiration from the anecdotes shared here.

To those of you out there who are taking the time to develop and share meaningful, useful or otherwise entertaining content, thank you for playing your part. I’ll willingly confess that before I touch a product manual, I’m much more likely to go to YouTube for guidance because of the probability that some other like-minded individual out there has been generous enough with their time to share their experiences. This allows me to expedite my own learning curve. And I’m fairly sure that’s a well we all drink from. MI