We spent six days at Olympia last month, manning the Making Music stand at the British Music Fair. You must have heard - it even got a mention on East Enders.

Tuesday to Thursday were trade days, when the exhibitors convince owners of music shops to stock up on their new models. We strolled around taking notes, eating horrid, expensive sandwiches, and drinking nasty gassy beer.

The trade days are our chance to try the gear, and collate all the stuff for our technical report (see news pages). It's also an opportunity for some of the better known players to browse without being hassled too much. Budgie from The Banshees came down to check out the Simmons SDX and the Making Music T-shirt, and Nigel Glockler dropped by to tell us he'd left Saxon.

This year's show was spread out over two of the Olympia halls, which gave extra room, and larger stands, but not very many more of them. This surprised some visitors who had expected to see more equipment considering the extra acreage. A few manufacturers took advantage of the extra space to provide better stands, like Ensoniq's, which was a giant synthesiser. FCN's was our Stand Of The Show for its loads and loads of gear but still airy feel. Custom Sound's amp and Tokai display was photogenic while Premier Drums' stand also looked pretty handsome.

The first two public days weren't as busy as we expected: 6000 on Friday, 8000 on Saturday, but the 400 million on Sunday (all right, 12,000) turned Olympia into a vision of Dante's Inferno - hot as hell, and twice as crowded. Anyway, it was wild and crazy time on our stand, giving away issues, selling stuff, and generally dispensing wisdom and solace to all and sundry. As usual the Making Music useful-piece-of-paper show guide made lots of friends.

Demo of the Fair by all accounts was the Yamaha WX7 wind synth - a whole orchestra in one man's mouth. Simmons' famous drummers, including Chester Thompson and Billy Cobham, did the business. The Guitar Guru did his thing for us on Saturday. IQ played for FCN. The Roland stand shows were packed out, and Premier pulled some interesting percussionists. Kawai's rotating stand had good gear on it but the music was a bit testcard bland, and Casio didn't do their new MIDI guitars justice, we were told.

As usual there were crowds of brochure hunters, loading up on Roland and Akai bags and stuffing them with Korg posters and leaflets of all sorts. We won the T-shirt Of The Show award (well we thought so) and sold all 500 of them, and many libraries of our recording book. Other notable fashion accoutrements were the orange Paiste cardboard hat, the Fender enamel badge, and anyone's free balloon. Intellectual renegades were seen inhaling the helium from the balloons and speaking in squeaky voices.