This is pretty hilarious, in retrospect. February 15, 2013 was officially declared "Jack McNally Day" by the St. Paul and Minneapolis mayors. Back then, City Pages was declaring McNally Smith College of Music to be "one of the country's premier music schools" and hyping Jack's schmaltzy recording as " twelve-song slice of Americana meets contemporary country that would fit comfortably in between George Strait and Jeff Bridges."
See for yourself:
Mayor (at the time) Chris Coleman is all tangled up in this interview, which he'd probably love to see disappear if his run for the state's governor gets any traction. "[Mayor Coleman] will be playing at the release show... So I've been
giving the guy lessons for five or six years, and I thought he would
kind of peter off, because he's a busy guy, but no! He comes in for his
lessons week after week, and he's practiced! I don't know where he finds
the time." He's probably not playing or practicing so much these days, since it's a lot of work to cover your tracks in today's well-documented on-line world.
The ending repartee is pretty hilarious, in light of the last few months:
February 15 has just been proclaimed Jack McNally Day. So now you've got your own holiday. How does that make you feel?
What? Are you serious?
Um... yes. Mayor Coleman and Mayor Rybak both declared February 15 Jack McNally Day.
You're not serious. You're pulling my leg. This is a cruel joke. ....No sir. Would you like me to forward you the press release?
Yes! [Laughs] I'll be darned. I'm speechless. What do you say to that? Holy smokes.
There are more than a few interesting MSCM interviews from those years, including this bit of braggadocio from Doug: "Orchestrating Growth." A big part of the drama the owners generated about the school's closing was the big drop in income in the last years. which is contradicted by Doug's statement, "And today accredited private college McNally Smith serves about 600
students from across the globe, offering 100 faculty members, bachelor’s
degrees in 11 subjects and master’s degrees in five. The school’s $3.5
million in 2001 revenues grew to nearly $19 million in 2013, marking 18
percent growth each of those years." Enough to buy a music composition "cabin" on a lake in Maine, at least.
There is a fair amount of hand-wringing about “Gibson Guitar, maker of the Les Paul, facing bankruptcy after 116 years in business.” “According to the Nashville Post, Gibson’s chief financial officer, Bill Lawrence, left after six months on the job and just as $375 million in senior secured notes mature and $145 million in bank loans become due, if they aren’t refinanced by July. The departure of Lawrence was seen as a bad sign for a company trying to re-organize.”
Sounds dramatic and terrible, right?
Gibson Brands, Inc. is nothing like an American guitar manufacturer, owning a collection of music instrument labels such as Epiphone, Kramer, Maestro, Steinberger, Tobias, Kalamazoo, Dobro, Slingerland, Valley Arts, Baldwin, Chickering, Hamilton, and Wurlitzer. Most of those instruments are made overseas, the majority in China including a good bit of the Gibson product line. Gibson’s big business is consumer electronics and the label either owns or distributes Onkyo and Pioneer, the Philips consumer electronics product line, TEAC/TASCAM, Cerwin Vega, Stanton, KRK Systems, and Cakewalk’s music software through it’s “Gibson Innovations” label. Orville Gibson’s instrument-making business has nothing to do with the mess that Gibson Brands has turned into.
This isn’t a new thing, either. Way back In 1944, another corporate conglomerate, Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI), bought the original guitar-making company. In 1969 CMI was absorbed by one more conglomerate, Panama-based Ecuadorian Company Limited (E.C.L.) which relabeled itself to the more American-sounding Norlin Corporation. After nearly bellying-up during the 80’s recession, some of Norlin’s rich kid-execs bought Gibson and that’s brain-dead trust behind the privately-held corporation that is currently driving the label into the ground; mismanaged by CEO Henry Juszkiewicz and corporate president David H. Berryman. Gibson’s guitar fates have been on the edge of collapse multiple times since the 80’s, so the current panic is just one of a long series. Look for some Chinese conglomerate to be the next owner of the classic “American label.” It’s just part of the plan to “make American great again.”
For some reason, this picture is getting a lot of play in the media as the possible collapse of another once-great American label is being discussed. The picture is from the press conference for the Gibson Custom Southern Rock tribute 1959 Les Paul at the Gibson Guitar Factory on 2014. The geezers pictured are Dickey Betts, Charlie Daniels, Gary Rossington, Rickey Medlocke and Jimmy Hall. I think the youngest guy on that stage might be the real Santa Claus. Gibson’s problem clearly has little-to-nothing to do with the general decline in the guitar business, but this picture is a pretty good indicator of the core problem. Guitar is an aging instrument and at the high end that Gibson wants to occupy there is no shortage of higher quality competition and a shriveling quantity of old guys with that kind of money to spend.
Like most of the too-big-to-fail corporate giants in the world, Gibson has a mismanagement problem. The only cure for that has always been bankruptcy, corporate breakup, and a huge refocus by the surviving bits. Don’t get too carried away with calling this a music business problem. This is symptomatic of a far larger American management incompetence problem and rather than addressing that problem the country seems to be doubling-down on the whole idea of putting the dumbest motherfucker at the top and feeding him cake and steaks until he blows up. America’s current business executive model appears to be a bigger-than-life Monty Python skit.
When I worked in medical devices, I was regularly struck by the fact that my previous employer, QSC Audio Products, was more concerned with reliability and quality control than either of the two pacemaker/ICD manufacturers" for whom I worked for 10 years after I’d left QSC. I wasn’t shy about expressing that opinion to the people in charge of caring about those two qualities, either. I made that statement to VP’s of Regulatory and Legal and R&D and reliability assurance. I said those words to middle managers, engineers, other reliability engineers and managers, and on occasion to doctors. You’d think that would have terrified, irritated, embarrassed, or pissed-off someone in the grossly over-priced, self-absorbed, and mindlessly corrupt medical industry; but you’d be wrong and disappointed. I don’t think anyone to whom I made that claim even bothered to take it seriously enough to consider the insult and outrage I intended. Usually, the statement just got a laugh. It was, however, a fact and an outrage.
This past evening I repaired an electric bass amp that’s been lying around in my shop for several years. The positive impression I had of the amp’s manufacturer from the availability of service information on their products vanished when I opened the case and saw the probable cause of the amp’s failure before I’d applied a single piece of troubleshooting test equipment: lots of failed solder connections and terrible mechanical design that put almost ever electronic component in either incredible mechanical stress or at the far end of a diving board that would toss the components until they broke or flew off of the circuit board. When I did use some test equipment I discovered the amp’s output and driver transistors were fried on the negative side of the AB1 output and the bias and driver transistors were fried on the positive side. Probably all of that damage was likely caused by the heatsink vibrating all of the output transistor leads free from the circuit board.
At QSC, we used an assortment of moderately sophisticated and primitive vibration, shock, and thermal tests that sometimes demonstrated what was mechanically weak in a design in a few minutes. There were very few components that didn’t receive a stress-relief bend (or two). Components with substantial mass received two different securing methods (screws and glue, glue and silicone rubber, or strap and glue). We tested-in over-voltage and power safety margins; sometimes with batch testing and sometimes with individual transistor tests. We had controls that tracked component lots so, if problems arose in production or in use, we knew where those components ended up: product and location. When our customers sent in their postage-paid warranty registration information, we even knew which customers had the products with the problem components. There was a lot of thought, expense, and care that went into making our power amplifiers (all we made back then) the toughest the industry had ever seen. (This really sounds like a commercial, doesn’t it? It isn’t, since I don’t know anything about QSC products produced since about 1993. The last generation of QSC amps I worked on was the EX stuff.)
This bass amp that I just repaired was closer to medical device equipment than QSC’s best stuff from the 1980’s . About half of the weight of the circuit board was supported by the leads of 8 power transistors. The leads were cut straight, which guaranteed that the weak link in that chain would break under vibration conditions. The weak link would always be the solder connections, especially because the circuit board pads were all too small to provide a strong connection. The design abused the strength of several other components and demonstrated a scary lack of mechanical design skills.
I fixed a few of the design’s problems in the repair, but the worst faults are simply too built-in to the design to resolve in a reasonable amount of time. So, it’s back-to-life, but for how long? Some things really aren’t worth repairing let alone improving. The experience reminded me of how lucky I was to have worked for a company that was focused on providing value to its customers and doing the job as well as possible under the constraints of economics and customer expectations. That was a rare opportunity.
When I first moved to the Twin Cities, there was a music school called "Music Tech College," mostly known as "Music Tech." I quickly met a few musicians around town, mostly my age or a little younger, and they all complained about what they called "Music Tech bands." It took a bit, but I learned that meant "kids who can read music, play every style from classical to jazz to hard rock and everything between, and who put together bands and shows that make everyone else look amateurish." Music Tech bands really did piss off a lot of the old guard because they raised the bar so high for club jobs.
The instructors in this video are the people who created that monster and made it into something so special that schools around the country copied that model. When Music Tech's owners, jack McNally and Doug Smith, decided to remake the school in their own image, into a traditional music college with liberal arts requirements, "higher education" rules and curriculum, and renamed it after themselves (McNally Smith College of Music) the eye came off of the ball, the mission turned into a marketing slogan, and the value to students rapidly diminished. This video is a great reminder of what that school was once all about.
Over the dozen years I taught audio engineering at Musictech College and McNally Smith College of Music, I accumulated a lot of material that might be useful to all sorts of budding audio techs and musicians. This site will include comments and questions about professional audio standards, practices, and equipment. I will add occasional product reviews with as many objective and irrational opinions as possible.
