It’s back to the Futura at Winter NAMM 2018

After a massive reception from its launch at Winter NAMM 2017, the Futura custom shop is back. Focusing on some of the Ormsby team’s favourite tonewoods this multiscale 6 string is made with a swamp ash body and black limba top.  A 5-piece black limba and Tasmanian blackwood bolt-on neck paired with an ebony fretboard completes the tonewood configuration of this Futura. As with all our custom shop instruments at NAMM, hand wound Ormsby pickups provide the player with a wide variety of tonal options.

Well, it's only been our second year at Winter NAMM but it was by far our busiest 4 days of big smiles, even bigger hugs, riffs and shred for days, and many new mates.

A bit less than a week out from NAMM we travelled over 18,000km from Perth, the world's most isolated capital city to Los Angeles and Anaheim. This year we once again shared our booth with ol' mate Sully from Texas, who brought some truly spectacular instruments with him again. We also brought along with us the team from The Guitar Strap Co. who are great friends of ours from Perth making waves in the custom guitar strap market; keep an eye on them!

Our display this year featured 14 handmade custom shop guitars and 12 GTR models from our first 3 runs, including the  SX GTR, TX GTR, and Hype GTR in a variety of finishes and string configurations.

One of the big hits of the show for us was the debut of the new Futura model, which features a unique split-top design that allows for some stunning  wood and alternate material combinations. We also added in our Hot-Rock and Hybrid pickups to the Futura models on display to see how folks liked our slightly hotter types of pickups. They did not disappoint! We'll bring the real hot stuff like the Master Blaster and Katana next time ;)

 Perhaps one of the most anticipated models of NAMM, we presented two custom shop Goliath headless models, one featuring a new fretboard material (we’ll talk about that soon) and an epic copper top. These two were certainly show stoppers with both the ziricote topped prototype 7 string and copper top 6 string getting regular play-throughs each day. You'd be amazed how many times we'd have to pry them outta people's hands before their partners or mates were about to leave them. Our GTR version should be underway very soon and we've saved a very special little surprise for everyone who's got one on order.

Something new we featured on two of our custom shop instruments is a material called Richlite. It's not a new product by any means but it's certainly something that's been underutilized by all but a handful of guitar companies, and you will be seeing its use by us a lot more in light of the continuing restrictions on many woods throughout the world. You can basically say goodbye to fretboard maintenance and the issues that can arise with poorly dried woods or guitars that are frequently traveling through extreme climates.

On top of using Richlite we also enjoyed utilizing some other unique materials like a full carbon-fiber top and a 24 carat goldleaf for two of our custom shop Hypemachines. Copper tops were very popular once again with 5 of our custom shop instruments featuring various patinas. Judging by the photo-taking attention they were getting from the big-guns of a certain big brand, I’d say we're doing something right and we’ll probably see them at other brands' stalls at NAMM 2018.

Winter NAMM 2017 enabled us to setup some new arrangements with dealers in Europe and Japan, new U.K. stores via our great friends and distributors at ZED Music, and you will also see Ormsby’s in a whole lot more stores throughout the USA! We’ve also begun a partnership with the great team at Premiere Guitar and Reverb that you’ll see very soon.

The whole Ormsby team (all 6 of us including our new junior assistant) would like to send our sincerest appreciations to everyone who welcomed us at NAMM and supported us in getting here. To the many great players and skilled artists who shared your talents with us, all the great industry folk and new dealers, and to all the cheeky mates who came by just to hang out for a yarn, thank you!

You can view a full album of NAMM photos here.