Audio Is Dead, Long Live Texting

Tonight, I tried to have a conversation with someone on an Apple garble-machine, aka iPhone. Holy crap! What is the point in having a microphone on a device that is that grossly incapable of audio communications? The iPhone owner tried to pronounce the name of the street where I was going several times; “Sturdvant,” “Stirant,” “Sylbant,” “Sylvan,” etc. I asked him to spell it, but that attempt was so distorted that I almost suspected he was including letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. I made my best guess and was wrong, but both Google and Garmin sent me to an address that didn’t exist without even the slightest mention that they had picked a spot in the middle of an intersection where, obviously, there was no house.

Another friend just got a new iPhone last month and has still failed to figure out how that silly device can be used as a telephone. It kicks ass on the web and texting, but talking to people is just not one of its capabilities. I suggested he try using Skype on the phone, just for laughs. He did, but the problem is with both the iPhone’s shit microphone and even worse speaker; although the speaker did work better on Skype than it does through the “phone app.”

It’s easy and unfair to ridicule young people for their texting default. They’ve grown up with telephones that are incapable of being telephones and as their voices have atrophied their thumbs have become nimble. While their thumbs are far more versatile than, for example, mine, the combination of trying to type with a pair of fat digits on a crappy virtual keyboard plus those godawful “helpers” that replace “their” with “there” and “weather” with “whether” and “you’re” with “your” and the rest of the syntax errors we’re being trained to ignore, their English language skills are atrophying into grunts and groans. Just in time for Trump’s “fake news” world to take advantage of a culture of total illiterate fools.

My Momentary Folk Singer Career

In the fall of 1967, my father withdrew about $3,000 from my college savings fund and the family took a “vacation” and dumped me in Dallas, Texas. The plan was that I would be attending a fly-by-night Texas for-profit computer school. The reality was that my father thought I was wasting my life trying to be a musician and he figured I’d follow my money where ever he decided to send it. He was, of course, right; in his weird, passive-aggressive way. I had earned that money throwing newspapers between the ages of 11 and 13 and working at the Dodge City Boot Hill Front Street Replica tourist trap for two summers from age 13 to 14. I, of course, wanted to spend that money on music equipment, but my father would have none of that. Worst case, I figured I would be far enough from Kansas and my fundamentalist whackadoodle family to completely break free from them and start my own life. 

The school, as you would expect, turned out to be a fraudulent joke. The school’s “dormitory” was a 1920’s flophouse full of bums, drunks, thieves, and a dozen-or-so computer school “students.” After a week in the flophouse, a half-dozen of us started looking for a better place to live. We found a house we could rent for about the same money as the flophouse, sans flophouse food. That lasted for a month because one of our roommates ate everything that came into the house and bought nothing. When he tried to “borrow” money for the 2nd month’s rent, we scattered. Two of the guys, twin brothers (Larry and Gary)  from Lawrence, KS, found an apartment in Old East Dallas and I rented a tiny garage apartment from the same landlord. By then, more than half of the school’s students had dropped out and most of them were suing the school for fraud; among other things. One of the more experienced guys had recommended that we join the lawsuit, but my father had already been conned into giving the school a 2nd semester tuition as a payoff for my dropping out. For an accounting teacher, his math skills were consistently suspect. His capacity for critical thinking was never suspect because it was never evident. I kept going to the school, even though most of the instructors had quit and the already obsolete computer equipment had been repossessed. 

About the time I moved into the garage apartment, a friend from Kansas, Ed, who was burning time before his delayed induction into the Army date moved in with me. We had written a few dozen songs together and decided to try some of them as folk songs. There was a bar a few blocks from the apartment and coffee shops from Lakewood Heights to downtown Dallas. Best of all was the Rubaiyat, the premier Texas folk club/coffee shop of the day. Ed stayed for a couple of weeks, just long enough to help me connect to some of the folk music scene. Toward his last few days in Dallas, our act had started to attract a weird collection of “side men” to our act; percussion players, “singers,” guys blowing into bottles and South American flutes, an upright bass player or two. Some characters brought instruments they often couldn’t play at all, so they’d just bang on them. There was no money in any of it, so that act took on a name that included the words “jug band.” That is all I remember about the group name, too. Jug bands were a thing then, for a brief moment. 

Once, we accidentally ended up being one of the intro acts for a major (for the time) folk singer. It kills me that I can’t remember if it was Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, or it could have been someone I have completely forgotten. The first name stated with “T,” I was not a folk music guy at the time, although I loved Bob Dylan and covered several of his pre-electric era songs. I wouldn't have known Rush from Paxton from Buckley at the time, but I did cover Hardin's "Reason to Believe."

Ed and I showed up, but the rest of the menagerie did not, so we did a half-dozen original songs and gave up the stage to the headliner. As I walked off of the stage, whoever that T-guy was said, “You know what it’s supposed to sound like.” 

[The picture at right is just a Rubaiyat poster, not a bill that our group was on.]

I will never know if that was a compliment or sarcasm. If you know me, you would be correct in assuming I lean toward believing it was sarcasm. We were 19 and 20-year-old kids from Kansas.

A day or two later, Ed headed off to basic training. I ended up dropping out of my bogus computer school, shacking up with my wife, Robbye, diving into the Dallas hippie world (sans drugs), and almost giving up music entirely. I really wanted to be an R&B guitarist, but couldn’t cut it in that competitive environment. I loved playing guitar or bass in an R&B band, but playing solo folk music scared the crap out of me. Still does. Occasionally, I would stop in at the Rubaiyat and play with one of the other groups or do a couple original songs. One of those songs, “Dixie Lead,” was recorded at the club and got a little late night FM radio play, as a protest against one of the many grossly polluting factories in east Dallas. And that was my first experience in the big city.

Double-Edged Swords

A friend recently ended a jam session complaining, “I’m worried that musicians today don’t even know the names of the people I grew up idolizing and imitating.” (Or something close to that.) 

I responded with, “That goes both ways, with most of the folks in our generation pretending that no good music has happened since the 70’s or 80’s.” That was not received well. 

I just reviewed a book that I, mostly, disliked for the same reasons, A Craftsman’s Legacy by Eric Gorges, and you can read my opinion of that book on my Geezer with A Grudge blog. Every old generation imagines that it not only invented the wheels of society but perfected them so that every following generation can only screw up the work that went before them. It takes a special sort of arrogant blindness to believe that, but humans are really good at both arrogance and blind belief. It’s one of many things that has always convinced me that the natural state of human “civilization” is chaos. I wrapped up my review of A Craftsman’s Legacy with this: 

“Finally, I firmly believe that everything that requires skill is improved by every generation. You may be one of those addled characters who imagines that ‘good music’ stopped being made in 1960, 1970, 1980, or whenever, but you’re wrong. Likewise, most 1970’s era pro basketball players wouldn’t make the team for, even the freakin’ Clippers, today. Even Michael Jordan would have a hard time playing on a winning team today. It’s true that many people knew how to repair their cars and motorcycles in the 1950’s; because they needed to. A vehicle that lasted 25,000 miles without needing major work in 1950’s was a rarity. Today, we call any vehicle that fails before 200,000 miles a ‘lemon.’ Today, if I had to go to battle with a 15th Century sword I’d just use it on myself to get it over with efficiently. Vintage ‘skills’ are that because they are no longer state-of-the-art and, as such, are obsolete. If you think someone with a hammer and coal-fired forge can turn out a better steel tool than a modern factory, you’re only fooling yourself. If you don’t think a modern adventure touring motorcycle isn’t as well crafted as one of Gorge’s hippo-bikes, you don’t know what the word ‘craftsmanship’ means. If you think someone cobbling out plodding, non-functional ‘choppers, bobbers, and diggers’ could get a job on a modern factory motorcycle race team doing . . . anything, you are probably the ideal reader for A Craftsman’s Legacy.”

I absolutely believe all of that and even a moderate amount of exposure to the best of today’s young musicians would force almost anyone to acknowledge that the “good old” stuff is practically unlistenable in comparison. I admit that I’m not a typical Boomer in my tastes. I didn’t like the Beatles (but I am a huge George Martin fan, he could turn sow's ears into silk purses, repeatedly) or much of the British Invasion in the 60’s and I like most of that stuff even less now. A lot of great music, from R&B to jazz, was bounced off of popular radio by “yeah, yeah, yeah” and other teenybopper bullshit between 1964 and the early 80’s and I don’t think popular music has ever recovered from the damage done. Another Boomer friend commented on the “trivial character” of current music lyrics, as if songs-about-nothing like the Beatle’s “Hey Jude” or “Long and Winding Road” or “Number 9” and pretty much every Led Zeppelin song that wasn’t stolen aren’t only trivial but annoying. At least the Stones had “Street Fightin’ Man” had a point. 

That is such a lame complaint. It’s pop music, dude; music for kids by kids. Don’t expect poetry or meaningful commentary on the state of humanity from kids. 

Just because we’re old and full of ourselves now doesn’t mean that we were solid citizens or brilliantly insightful and creative 50 years ago. I am a firm believer in Theodore Sturgeon’s “90% of everything is crap” rule. I can’t think of a period where the overwhelming majority of popular music wasn’t garbage. For example, the furthest up the US pop singles charts Jimi Hendrix ever made it was #20 with “All Along the Watchtower” in late 1968. The chart topper at that time was “Harper Valley PTA” followed by the Beatles’ lamest ever “Hey Jude.”  Hendrix had 4 successful albums, If you look at almost any moment in pop music history, you’ll be discouraged at how generally mediocre the “hits” are. It was true in 1920 and it will be true in 2020 and 2050. The tastes of the average imbecile are predictably dismal. That casts no reflection on that period’s best and brightest, who will likely be an improvement on the skills and creativity of previous generations until humans vanish from the planet.

Qulter MicroBlock 45 Guitar Amplifier

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Another brilliant product from the amazing mind of Patrick Quilter. Sticking with tubes just keep getting sillier, but the silliness just took an amazing turn to ridiculous.

Intermittents and Typical Repairs

A while back, a friend “gave” me a Mackie 12” TH-12A powered stage monitor when he was clearing out his shop of things he either didn’t want or didn’t want to spend time trying to fix. I have no reason to want a powered stage monitor, but for whatever reason I decided I wanted to take a crack at seeing if I could fix the monitor. I like Mackie gear and when it breaks unreasonably easily, I get curious. The symptom was “no power indicator or output.” Supposedly, someone renting the speaker had dropped it and it didn’t power up after that incident. My friend had already made a quick attempt at troubleshooting the speaker and confirmed the reported symptom. 

Because of the previous repair, the amp panel had already been removed from the speaker box and the wiring disconnected. My first suspicion is always “connectors and solder connections.” To remove the first likely candidate, I always check the connectors, physically, and clean the connections. A smarter person would re-connect the amp to the speakers and confirm the initial diagnosis, but I wasn’t doing this for money and I didn’t really care if the solution turned out to be overly simple. I was back in my teenage mode of just wanting to see how the product was assembled and looking at the thing out of curiosity, first, and problem-solving, second. There are advantages to being less-than-meticulous about documenting an organized repair. The first of those advantages is that I spend more effort exploring, examining, and learning than I do ticking off boxes and accounting for my time. 

A disadvantage to this process is that it is entirely possible to trip an intermittent fault back into operation and I wouldn’t know that I’d even passed over the intermittent. In my experience, at least 50% of the electronic problems I’ve been asked to troubleshoot are intermittent, which is the nature of connectors and solder connection failures. They rarely outright fail, unless there is enough current in the area of the fault to cause complete failure by burning, arcing, or in-rush current causing damage to other related components. 

What I found during my inspection was that several of the Molex connectors (see red circled connectors in the picture at right) had received enough tension from their attached wires to pull the male base up along the length of the pins; possibly removing contact from the female socket. That isn’t a problem you’d expect to see in a typical application, but Mackie had cut the speaker wires short enough that there was no strain relief possible and the weight of the wire put some strain on the connectors. One of the first things I noticed in inspecting the power amp board was that the woofer male base had slid more than half-way up the pins. Looking around the boards, I found at least two more connectors with a similar appearance. 

With that background, I disconnected, one-at-a-time, all of the Molex connectors, pressed the male header firmly against the PCB, cleaned the connectors with Caig DeoxIT, reassembled the male and female connectors, and glued the connectors to each other and the PCB with a latex adhesive. After cleaning and reattaching all of the Mackie’s connectors, I power up the speaker and found that it worked. I let the adhesive cure for a few hours and gave the amp some signal while tapping all over the amp and power supply assemble looking for intermittent operation. Not finding any evidence of intermittent operation, I “burned it in” for several hours at a variety of volume levels. With some confidence that I’d found the problem, I gave the speaker back to its owner. 

This kind of repair reminds me of the many things that were always frustrating as a repair tech. First, troubleshooting intermittent failures is miserable work. When you are "finished," at best you feel you've done everything you could to be certain you've fixed the problem(s), but you are never even close to 100% confident. Intermittent faults have a Murphy's Law mind of their own. I used to joke that about half of the problems I'd been called in to repair "fixed themselves the moment they saw a toolbox." Of course, half of that half were user error issues that often cleared themselves up before or immediately after I arrived. That kind of repair is really difficult to convince customers that my time still needed to be paid for. 

Early on in the last version of Wirebender Audio Services, I quit taking telephone calls for service work because a few customers would pretend they didn't know who called me, when the problem "fixed itself." A few of those customers learned that I never forget being stiffed and whined like spoiled children when they learned that under no circumstances would I ever do work for them again. In the case of the Mackie speaker repair, I have a couple other ideas to chase down if the intermittent operation comes back to haunt me, but since I didn't have an associated bill with the original repair I can be fairly relaxed about the whole affair. 

Being A Musician

Lots of people believe that there is something sort of magical about being a musician or being “musical.” A friend who is the poster child for all things musical once came to a local weekend jam session when he was visiting for a week. Afterwards, he said something about the folks from that group not being “musicians.” And I asked what he meant, mostly because I have always been fairly embarrassed at the fact that after playing guitar for almost sixty years I still suck. 

He said, “There are three things that you have to have to be a musician; 1) you need to know music theory and technique for your instrument, 2) you need a decent sense of rhythm, and 3) you need to listen. If you have any one of those qualities, you could be a musician. If you have all of them, you probably are a good musician. Most of the people in that room (the local jam session) couldn’t make a claim to any of those qualities.” 

And he was right. 

To be fair, some of the people in the jam session were beginners; regardless of age. However, my friend’s #3 point, listening, is something anyone who wants to be a musician should develop really early. Honestly, it should come easier than it apparently does. 

One of the many things that drove me away from live performance was the fact that it was close to impossible to put together a group of 4 or more people who would bother to listen to the output of the group. In the recording studio, you can compensate for your performers’ inability to listen to the music. You track every instrument and every voice, one-at-a-time, and you mix the outcomes into something that may resemble a “performance.” Getting human beings to act like musicians is, sometimes, as close to impossible as getting old white people to think about anything but themselves. 

For example, that same jam session occasionally attracts a local character who thinks of himself as being almost famous. He knows a half-dozen songs, mostly old time bluegrass/country tunes, and he plays and sings them really loud. The format in this session is generally set and designed so that everyone gets a chance to pick a song and sing it; if they want to. You can always pass on your turn, but everyone usually gets one. Unless “almost famous” shows up. He uses every pause in the action as his moment to either tell a story about himself or to start hammering away on another song. At best, the cycle goes: someone in the group picks a song, “almost famous” does a song, someone else does a song, “almost famous” does another, and so on. 

Not surprisingly, “almost famous” complained that he couldn’t hear the other players guitars over his own instrument; especially when someone took a solo on one of his tunes. His solution was to get a PA into this normal, reverberant room. The person he complained to, one of the better players in the group, suggested that he try to hammer his guitar more quietly when others were playing. His response was, “This guitar just doesn’t do quiet well. It’s really loud.” I was fortunate not to be eating or drinking anything at that moment. Otherwise, I might have sprayed the group. 

Guitars, especially acoustic guitars, are capable of substantial dynamic range. Guitar players, especially electric guitar players, are rarely able to shut up or lower their volume at all unless you put sheet music in front of them. This particular acoustic guitarist had never been in a situation where he had to listen to anyone else while he played. At almost 70-years-old with five decades of “music" performance behind him, it’s probably too late for him to learn the most basic requirement of being a musician. That is something really scary to consider.

Requests, Are We Musicians or Just Player Pianos?

One of the many things I do not miss about being a working musician is requests from the audience. For all of my life, audience members not only assume they have the right to ask performers to play "their music," but that it is the obligation of the musicians performing to accommodate individual audience member's tastes; even when the request is in no way similar to the obvious performer's style. Throw in a tip jar and now you have a fully entitled audience who believes that the performers are barely more (or maybe less) than a player piano. Hell, even player pianos have a limited number of song selections, so being a performer in those situations is existing somewhere below the status of 1800's music replication equipment. 

What's the reward for putting up with that sort of disrespect? Continued employment, I guess. Of course, at the pay rate most music provides you'd be much better off taking a 2nd job at a convenience store. 

The often neglected motivation for doing any art is self-gratification. With music performance, there are at least two ways to achieve that: 1) pleasing yourself and 2) the power associated with manipulating an audience. Most art is some kind of self-expression, but not all art is that. Advertising art is absolutely designed to manipulate consumers; the "art's" audience. Cover bands are very similar to advertising art, especially show bands that cater to corporate gigs. A good friend has occasionally mentioned how much he enjoys reading a crowd and manipulating their energy with his song selections (and the resulting small fortune he makes in tips doing that). When I read the chapter on performing in Rockonomics, I was intrigued and a little baffled by the idea that many artists feel "powerful" or "indestructible" on stage, which sometimes leads to feeling weak and fragile when they are off-stage; followed by drug abuse and death. Tom Petty's story, alone, is a terrible example of that, since Petty practically had to be carried to the edge of the state, due to his broken hip and pain, but once he stepped out on the stage he was "indestructible." Until he wasn't.

Performing has never made me feel anything but incredibly nervous. In my cover-band and original music band years, I would almost always stay on stage playing solo while the rest of the band took a break, because the odds were good that if I left the stage I'd find a reason not to go back. Some of the open mics I frequent locally "offer the opportunity" to take a second pass at the performance stage. I often avoid that. Once I've managed to struggle through a song or three, I'm ready for a drink, something to eat, and a good while to unwind.I have to believe that if I had become a performing, professional musician I would, also, have become a drunk or drug addict to calm my nerves. None of that has improved with age, either.

Where Did You Come From?

Kids in class who have an over-inflated sense of their self-awareness and experience remind me that, someday, there will be a payback and it will be a bitch.

Not that many years ago, my author-music-reviewer-daughter Holly, wrote a review of Bad Plus that included some pretty silly proclamations about the gap between her music knowledge and appreciation and mine. I was entertained. In a similar conversation earlier, she had said, "Dad, I'm a music reviewer" as a statement of superior expertise when we had a disagreement about what qualified as ‘good music” and what didn’t. There are few things on the planet musicians or artists of any sort despise and ignore more than reviewers.

Our other daughter once told me that "It is great being in a family that is so musical," in reference to her husband's family who are dedicated karaoke fans. My kids grew up in a house full of musical instruments, musicians, recording and live sound equipment, and with music of some sort happening all the time, but somehow none of that registered. With all of that background, the first time she held a cheap microphone and sang along with canned muzak in front of a crowd of drunks in a karaoke bar was her first “real musical experience.”

Holly's son is now 22 and is convinced that none of the adults in his family know squat about music. Holly has written one of the biggest selling music theory books ever, The Dummies Guide to Music Theory, and gets a buttload of free CDs in the mail every month from her history as a music reviewer. Not a credential in her son’s mind, because . . . I don’t know what. When I was paging through the weirdly disorganized music list on my car stereo, he had to ask, “Why do you have all of that crap in with your music?” I don’t even want to know what he calls “crap.” He is his mother’s son, with even sillier tastes, and my interest in educating or even talking about music with non-musicians is vanishing into nothingness.

No matter what you have done, your kids will think you have done nothing. Tony Hawk’s kids, apparently, think he is a loser. Of course, most likely the only thing Tony Hawk’s kids will be ever be known for is being Tony Hawk’s kids. So, there is that.

Why Your PA Will Never Beat Physics

Live sound goobers delude themselves into imagining that with enough of the right equipment they can overcome room acoustics.( As a baseline reminder, these are the same people who can’t deliver a decent mix in an outdoor environment where they have absolutely no excuse for their incompetence and performance failures.) This is one more place where not knowing the basic concepts of a profession creates gross amateurs who do far more damage than good in their existence. If fact, sound goobers are often far greater performance offenders than enhancers. (See Snarky Puppy, for example.) 

The problems with a typical performance venue is that the RT₆₀ time (reverberant energy from the loudest point to where the reverberant energy has degraded by 60dB) is measured in, at least, substantial portions of one second (1S). Due to room resonances, the decay is not typically a nice clean exponential curve, either. In fact, due to room modes the actual decay curve can be pretty long and lumpy. So, for a simple drum beat at 120bpm, it is likely that the constant reverberant energy in the room might be within 3-6dB of the original sound source. A highly counter-intuitive fact of reverberation is that, except for room resonance variables, reverberant energy is equal everywhere in a room. If the measured reverberant energy is 90dB_SPL at the back of the room, it will be very close to that at every microphone on the stage. If the sound system is delivering 125dB_SPL at the room’s critical distance (where the reverberant energy and direct sound energy are equal, the “noise level” (unwanted reverberant energy) will be very near 120dB_SPL everywhere in the room. 

So, keeping that fact in mind, you might realize that the sound pressure level (aka noise level) at the element of every microphone on a stage in my last example (above paragraph) will be 120dB_SPL. So, to achieve any level of isolation/discrimination/intelligibility at each microphone, at least 6dB and ideally 20dB or more of signal (direct signal) will need to be delivered to the microphone. This problem is neatly, if not particularly musically, resolved with the use of direct injection (DI) boxes. There is no acceptable fix, except for atrocious microphone technique, for vocals and instruments that require a microphone. The reason musicians use microphones like the SM57/58 and its lo-fi clones is because of that instrument’s undeserved reputation for high Max_SPL capability. There is a reason that Shure does not specify a “maxSPL” value and it is not because it is a happy marketing story. The SM57, for example, is selected for close mic’ing of loud guitar amplifiers because of the additional distortion it introduces. There are many far better choices for that job if you are not looking for the distortion contribution of the microphone. In the kind of high volume environment we’re talking about in the previous paragraph, hyper-high max_SPL specifications are a must: 140dB_SPL and above, for example. 

140dB_SPL and above sounds like an impossible sound pressure level, but if a loud voice is typical 88dBSPL at 1 foot, every halving of that distance results in a 6dB increase in sound pressure, eight half-steps would result in a 142d_BSPL at the element. Since many pop singers insist on planting their lips right on the microphone grill (even though there is typically some space between the grill and the actual element) it is not inconceivable that sound pressure levels greater than 130dB are typical. That would provide at least a 12dB signal-to-noise range for the microphone in my worst case example; assuming the microphone can function in that hostile environment. 

Signal-to-noise ratios sum exponentially, though. If you have two channels combining where each channel has a 12dB S/N ratio, combining the two channels will cost you half of your S/N ratio. If you are going for any sort of quality sound, the key will always be to drive the average sound pressure level down, not up. I suspect, if you are a typical amplified music performer you are going for something other than quality sound. What that is I can’t guess.

Real Time with the SM58

As much as I bitch about the Shure SM58, my recent experience with that blunt instrument has been as rare as possible. I really do dislike the damn things and recent familiarity bred a whole new level of contempt. 

Last night, at the Sheldon Theater’s Open Mic I had that dreaded experience for three different performances (as a vocalist and backup singer) and was reminded of how primitive that 1966-designed mic really is. 1^st, the pop filter is a joke. At distance, for example the unspecified distance used in the Shure spec shee (at left), you'd think the 58's LF response would be fairly useful for vocals. Best I can figure, that distance must be at least a foot if not a meter. Anything within a could of inches from on-axis to the 58 gets a burst of breath noise that is unlike any other microphone sold today. If you don't roll off every thing below 150Hz or even higher, plosives and breath noise will wreak any attempt at a subtle vocal. 2^nd, that infamous 3-6k bump mostly emphasizes sibilance artifacts without making any useful contribution to clarity or intelligibility. 3^rd, Shure doesn't spec "max SPL" for the 57/58 models for obvious reasons; it isn't nearly high enough for modern applications. Many vocalists are able to blow the 58 into gross overload, even without the lousy mic hyper-close technique required for their out-of-control stage monitor environment. Likewise, the 57 is famous for it's contribution to the distorted sound of loud electric guitar. 

The spec sheet's description of the 57/58 polar pattern isn't anything I have ever put much faith in, either. You'd think that the damn thing was practically flat and feedback-predictable based on that highly creative illustration (see at right). In practice, that would be anything but true.

All of those 50+-year-old "qualities" have been improved upon by everyone from Shure to AT to Sennheiser to Neumann to Audix to cheap Chinese no-name microphones costing even less than the 57 or 58. You actually have to make an effort to find a microphone that delivers worse performance today and, based on what I see on live stages, that might be the only actual work many live sound goobers do.

The one and only claim to fame the 57/58 will hold maybe forever is indestructibility. If an ability to drive nails and keep squawking is the most important thing to you, you are the consummate SM58 customer. 

POSTSCRIPT:  (8/6/2019) This past week I had a double-whammy experience with the 58 vs something better. After years of wanting to see the John Mayer live "Where the Light Is" concert, I finally managed to snag a copy. It is particularly ironic to watch Mayer agonize over which multi-thousand-dollar watch to wear between sets, swap out various overpriced vintage Strats, while his voice consistently gets slaughtered by the 58 he mindlessly sings into as if it were as well-considered an instrument as his watches or guitars. Clearly, a lot of work went into cleaning up that vocal for the final product, but there is no way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Mayer tends toward mushmouth qualities in the studio, but live all of the worst qualities of his voice are emphasized. What a missed opportunity. 

My 2nd experience was with recording a local country/pop songwriter in a live setting that, acoustically, left a lot to be desired. Lucky for me, the artist was open to my swapping out his 58 with a recently rebuilt EV RE18. My job, post-recording, was made dramatically easier than what Chad Franscoviak and Martin Pradler had to contend with on the Mayer live recording. Getting a clear, crisp sound from the live vocal took minimal processing and the rest of my job was working with the rhythm section and lead guitar. Regardless of the song style, tempo, arrangement complexity, or vocalist's technique, the vocal sat where it belongs at the front and center of the mix. The fact that the artist's technique is excellent didn't hurt, but the fact that I wasn't wrestling with garbage-in/garbage-out was equally huge.

You Haven’t Done Nothin’

Kids in class who have an over-inflated sense of their self-awareness and experience remind me that, someday, there will be a payback and it will be a bitch. Not that many years ago, my author-music-reviewer-daughter Holly, wrote a review of Bad Plus that included some pretty silly proclamations about the gap between her music knowledge and mine. I was entertained. In a similar conversation earlier, she had said, "Dad, I'm a music reviewer" as a statement of superior expertise. 

There are few things on the planet musicians or artists of any sort fear and despise more than reviewers. Our other daughter once told me that "It is great being in a family that is so musical," in reference to her husband's family who are dedicated karaoke fans. My kids grew up in a house full of musical instruments, musicians, recording and live sound equipment, and with music of some sort happening all the time, but somehow none of that registered. The first time she held a cheap microphone and sang along with canned Muzak in front of a crowd of drunks in a karaoke bar was her first real musical experience. 

Holly's son is now 20 and is convinced that none of the adults in his family know squat about music. Holly has written one of the biggest selling music theory books ever, The Dummies Guide to Music Theory, and gets a buttload of free CDs in the mail every month from her history as a music reviewer. 

No matter what you have done, your kids will think you have done nothing.

Backing Away from Students

Teaching humans anything is a frustrating task. Most people are infested with Dunning-Kruger Effect symptoms and are incapable of absorbing information on subjects that they have convinced themselves they are natural experts. By "most," I mean well over the average 50% of mediocrity. Unfortunately, that group are naturally inclined to be in a position where they need all of the educational help on the planet just to survive. They are ones most likely to be in a classroom and most likely to be unteachable.

I experienced a big contrast in local musicians a few weeks ago. It reminded me of why I have developed an “I don’t give a shit” attitude toward most musicians and their music; especially live. At one end has been working on a half-dozen recordings with Leonard McCracken. One of the best things about moving to Red Wing has been my friendship with Leonard. He is an incredibly generous musician/person and one of the nicest people I have ever known.

A few weeks earlier, after hearing him perform at Marie's Underground and knowing the difference between Leonard’s voice and what comes out of a microphone (SM58) with his traditional rock star technique, I carefully broached Len with the idea that eating the mic is only really useful when there is so much noise on stage that you’re just trying to get some damn vocal in the mic over the din of drums and stage bullshit. Playing solo, there is none of that competition and I suggested he could back off a few inches and let the microphone do some of the work. We talked a little about proximity effect and how that distorts the mic’s output (and emphasizes plosives and sibilance) so that the best you can hope from an already mediocre tool, the SM58, was a mediocre-to-awful signal that needed lots of assistance from EQ circuits that also introduce distortion, phase shift, and an output that barely resembled the input. Then I held my breath, realizing that I’d overstepped a few boundaries and probably pissed him off.

He ate it up and asked the kind of questions my favorite students often asked when they discovered that microphones are not a simple tool. He’s totally revised his technique and you can understand what he is saying and singing on any system. The following Friday night, I brought an EV RE18 to Marie's for Leonard to use in a gig there. Holy shit, he just sounded magical even on Beatles songs (which I usually hate) and was having a great time using a real microphone on his own system (which is pretty good). Then I went the other way. Leonard took a break and he asked a friend to do a song or two to hold his audience. The RE18 is hard for even a typical country singer to fuck up, although he gave it a shot. For the first time ever, I could hear his lyrics over a PA and discovered that I didn’t dislike his voice as much as I’d thought.

Leonard’s friend, Esther, was sitting next to me and started asking questions about microphones and technique and I explained a little, although her technique is pretty good in the first place. The country guy came back to the table and I complimented him on how good he sounded. He listened in for a bit and started contradicting me with total bullshit myths about microphones and tossed out a lot of terms he clear misunderstands (polarity patterns, frequency response, the tube mic religion, etc) and it turned pissy for a bit. Eventually, he resorted to “good microphones are too expensive,” which I thought was  hilarious coming from a fairly average guitarist who insists on an expensive guitar but even mostly considers himself a vocalist. Funny, but not even a little unusual.

Music stores make their living off of guitar players who think spending money will fix their playing, but who may never realize an acoustic guitar is, for most of us, just providing an simple accompaniment to our voices and songs and stories. Leonard regularly proves that cheap (<$300) guitars are fine. He has a fine collection of cheap Chinese and South Korean electric and acoustic guitars that our local repair guy says "are killing the sales of expensive brands because Leonard's guitars sound so good." Of course, the real story is that Leonard makes them sound good.

The other guy and I are probably not likely to be friends and I can’t say I give a fuck. I am, however,  using the experience to try to fashion this Wirebender blog piece. The experience did remind me that I am mostly done with teaching. It was plenty hard trying to teach anything technical,. controversial, or complicated to 20-somethings, but it’s almost always impossible to teach anything to people who have never studied a single adult subject, are cursed with Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and are OLD. Since Trump, my tolerance for stupid and stubborn has just shriveled to zip and my ideal retirement home looks better every day. Ignorant is a different case. I have no problem with people not knowing much about a subject. There are thousands of subjects that I know nothing about and about which would love to learn more. That is ignorance and there should be no shame in that. Stupidity is a chosen quality, though. Arrogance is even worse.

The cheap microphone argument leaves me pretty cold though. Yeah, I know your favorite rock stars lip-sync into SM58's on SNL and stage and if faking it with a cheap Shure mic is good enough for them it should be good enough for you. (About a decade ago, there was a brief period where Neumann and Sennheiser replaced the SM58's on the SNL stage and that was the ONLY period in that program's history where the music performers didn't sound awful.)

The problem is garbage-in/garbage-out. You can not "fix" the original signal; although you can remove some of the crappier parts and try to hide the deficiencies with EQ and compression. That's not a fix, that's just lipstick on a pig. Transient response, sensitivity, phase and frequency accuracy, off-axis response, and the collection of microphone characteristics that are even harder to quantify but we "know 'em when we hear 'em" are not fixable. If you've tried any of the microphone modeling programs, you (hopefully) have realized that you can not make a Neumann U87 out of an SM58 recording. Ideally, you start with either a well-known microphone of high quality or, even better, with a precision condenser microphone. You can always reduce the quality of a signal, but fixing it is beyond science or software and not even on the same planet as live music.

The question I'm asking is, if a $3,000 guitar will make your mediocre guitar playing sound better, why wouldn't a $500-1,000 microphone do the same for your voice? Trust me, it will do far more than the guitar could ever hope to do.

POSTSCRIPT: I recently watched John Mayer's "Where the Light Is" video. The effort he puts into selecting clothing, a watch, and his guitars vs the thoughtless decision to sing into a CB mic (the Shure SM58) is telling. Obviously, the recording and mix engineers put a lot of work into cleaning up the vocal mess Mayer dripped into their preamp, but his voice still sounds as muffled, sibilant, and distorted as does everyone else who improperly uses an already defective tool.

Recently, I talked a local songwriter into using my RE18, instead of his SM58 for a live recording of a performance that we recorded and will be sold as part of an artist grant project. I had to do almost nothing to the output of the RE18 to make the vocal stand clearly on top of the mix. The artist has commented several times on how great his voice sounded both during the performance and on the recording. He is now deciding on whether he will be replacing his 58 with either an RE15 or RE20, both of which has has owned for years and didn't realize were great live microphones. So, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.

Ending on A Great Note

In late 2017, I'd pretty much decided that my tech "career" in live music was about wrapped up. Then, a wonderful and generous friend (Thanks Doug!) who knew how much I enjoyed Peter Mayer's music tossed me the FOH gig at Crossings in Zumbrota last August. Doug handed it to me again this year and the odds are good that the June 22 performance at Crossings will be Peter's last Crossings show (Marie is retiring and selling the shop.). I don't have much of an opportunity to work with Peter anywhere else, so my interest in schlepping more gear is rapidly vanishing. (Although why Peter hasn't been a headliner at the Sheldon Theater in Red Wing totally escapes me. He's several times the performer and has a far bigger following than many of the acts the theater has booked in the past few years. More importantly, he has a large local group of dedicated fans who would love to see him in a Sheldon-style setting.) Hell, I'd even pay for that and Snarky Puppy pretty much put an end to my interest in seeing live music in person (From here out, I want my own volume control. I wouldn't trust a live doofus with a battery-powered megaphone.).

The Crossings stage, as you can see, is (or was) one of the rare "listening room" environments left on the planet. Working with Peter is a total throwback to a different, much better age. Peter is as disinterested in getting a perfect monitor mix as Bach or John Coltrane would have been. His total focus in a relatively long and detailed pre-show sound check is working toward a great sound for his audience. If you know me, you might guess that is right down my alley. For that goal, I'd show up, unpaid, ten hours early for a sound check.

Support Live Music and Deafness

 

Entertaining, isn't it? It used to be that "metal concert" was some sort of barometer for 

tasteless, pointless ear-damaging volume. Today, it's just live music everywhere you find it.

A hallmark of a civilized society has always been some sort of concern for the rights, health, and safety of everyone in the society. Here in the USA, we abandoned civilization in the 1980's and never looked back. Reagan and the "greed is good" characters taught a couple generations of mindless, work-slaves that the wealth of a few is a higher goal than the good of many. It has filtered down to every aspect of what remains of our culture. Music, for example; particularly, live music. There was a time, about 20 years ago, when I predicted that "Noise pollution will become the air pollution of today." I was wrong. We went backwards. Today we don't care about air pollution, global warming, economic inequality or insecurity, and noise pollution is practically celebrated.

If you bothered to look at the chart above, you'd notice that pretty much everything we're exposed to in modern life is likely to cause permanent hearing damage. Live music anywhere but in an acoustic (unamplified) environment is hazardous: all amplified live music is hazardous to your hearing health. Is that complicated? Is the risk worth whatever gratification the experience provides? Your mileage is probably different than mine. In my opinion, any live music that uses amplification of any sort better damn well sound at least as good as, and ought to be substantially better than, what I can experience on my car stereo system. Anything less than that is just pointless risk of a fragile hearing mechanism for no justification at all.

In all cases, the only safe way to "enjoy" amplified live music is with significant hearing protection firmly in place. There is absolutely no way to take children to an amplified live music performance that should not be called "criminal child abuse." Children are usually born with terrific hearing and lose it fairly quickly in our modern noise-polluted world. Exposure to the quantity and "quality" of noise a modern sound system produces is flat-out child abuse and should be criminally prosecuted. Personally, I do not understand how the venues, cities, and other adults involved in a well-known medically-unsafe practice are not regulated and prosecuted when they violate public safety, but that's the post-Reagan libertarian nuthouse we live in today.

Common Elements

Once upon a time, I was a college instructor in the “Production Department” of a music school. After the first few years of watching students pass through my classes and recording studio labs, I began to develop my “Theory of Abundance.” After watching what seemed like amazing talents pass through my classrooms, I began to suspect that there are three things of which there are a nearly-infinite supply in the universe: hydrogen, good guitar players, and beautiful young women. (Hopefully, it is equally needless to say that there are more than enough pretty young boys, too?)

Honestly, outside of physics there isn’t much value to take from the understanding that hydrogen is 75% of the mass in the universe. The over-abundance of the other two things should be really informative to a young person starting out in life: you do not want to place all of your bets on being special in a commodity market. Being special requires some rarity. Corn, sow bellies, soybeans, car tires, oil, coal, electricity, electronic components, cell phones, computers, and guitars are, mostly, commodities. That means one example of any of those things will serve the purpose as well as any other example. In a rational world, that would mean that the price of any of those things would be the same and as low as the cost of production allows.

In the case of over-produced farm products, the price is artificially held high to maintain the rural status quo. In the case of musicians and music, the price appears to be heading for the dead bottom because there are no powerful 1%’er special interests who have the money to buy off our state and federal congresscritters who could easily create the same artificially high price structure that they have built for energy, oil and coal, ethanol, cell phone providers, corn and soybeans, meat and dairy, exports, housing, and medical industries from insurance companies to Big Pharma. Don’t look for help from that direction, there just isn’t enough money in the industry to create much interest and the money that was in that business model is going away and most of it is long-gone.

Great Interview with A Great Guitarist

"Great" doesn't even come close to describing Larry's talent.


One of the amazing moments in my life was getting to talk, briefly, with Larry after a performance at the Costa Mesa WAVE smooth jazz concert sometime between '89 and '91.

I was doing some testing, backstage, on new QSC products and subb'ing for the Sound Image monitor tech (Dave Shadoan, the owner of the company at the time).  During David Benoit's set, there was an FOH problem and Dave asked me to watch the monitor board while he went to the FOH desk. There wasn't much to do, since Benoit's set was about over, so I just re-familiarized myself with the board and flipped through the stage mixes to see what Dave had setup for each player. Benoit's set ended and Dave still wasn't back and one of his guys and I started setting up for the next set, with me on the board, mostly, and the other guy positioning equipment and telling me what each aux needed for the next band. I was pretty overwhelmed with the complexity of it all, since I was used to a 36-channel, 8-aux version of the board and this was a lot more of everything than I'd ever used. We got it done barely before the band hit the stage and I didn't even look up to see who it was. I had my hand poised over the aux bus solo buttons, waiting to ratchet though the stage mixes correcting whatever the musicians wanted fixed during the first song. I heard someone say something like, "This is my first time on a stage since I got shot . . . "and I looked up to see Larry Carlton talking into a mic I had a little control over. The song, "Smiles and Smiles to Go" was the opening tune and I was back to work getting nods and directions from the band until Dave came back and took over about 3/4 of the way through the first song. I went back to work monitoring our amplifiers' performance.

When Larry's set finished, we all went into another frenzy of setup berserk-ness and about the time the next band started its set, I saw Larry exiting the dressing room trailer and head down the backstage area toward the parking lot. I sort of hate most things about being a fan and all things fanatical, but it struck me that I would only get one chance in this life to tell Mr. Carlton how much his music had meant to me. I usually become totally tongue-tied and lose about 100 IQ points in those situations, but I managed to run up behind him and say something like, "Mr. Carlton, I have loved your playing on the Crusaders records since #1 and especially Southern Comfort and Those Southern Nights." He turned around, looking slightly fearful, saw a dumbass yokel wearing a QSC jacket with tools, test equipment, and cables dangling from his belt, a tool bag, and wrapped around his (my) neck and relaxed. We had a really nice 5-10 minute conversation about that music and his love for jazz and I managed not to be a bigger Kansas hick than usual through most of it.

I have been lucky to meet and talk to a few of the people who kept me coming back to music for almost 60 years and meeting Larry Carlton is close to the top of those experiences.

What You Sound Like Is Immaterial

In 1966 Eric Clapton recorded with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and music has steadily gone downhill ever since. In the book, The Birth of Loud, the author talks about how Clapton’s insistence on playing his Vox amp at full tilt during the session is what drove zillions of half-witted guitarists to “want his sound” and buy Les Paul guitars. Wrong. The recording tech’s ability to blend the guitar and sonic mess Clapton created into a coherent recording is what misled a generation of wannabe guitar heroes into breaking their backs with overweight Les Paul guitars and driving themselves deaf trying to “get that sound” in the real world. 

That Blues Breakers sound was the result of a coherent group of musicians playing together to create a piece of work that was a musical composition; even though that composition was artificial as hell. Every sucker who ever attended the sonic disasters that all Clapton concerts were from then on (with the possible exception of the Unplugged MTV concert) would confirm that Clapton no more resembled the musician on that recording than I resemble Lebron James. As for the Blues Breaker recording, I’m sure Clapton’s guitar mess bled into every mic in the room, but through a variety of Gus Dudgeon's clever acoustic and mixing tricks Mayall and the Blues Breakers got a decent recording in spite of Clapton’s ego. That’s my take, anyway. After making that record, Eric threw one of his trademark tantrums and moved on, leaving rock history with a mangled story to argue over. Several years of awful Cream concerts marketed by three brilliantly engineered and produced Tom Dowd records (including two miracle live records that almost made the group sound competent in concert) created a couple of generations of tone-deaf, functionally deaf, brain-dead guitar wannabe-heroes. Even someone as clueless as Ginger Baker could figure it out, “The incredible volume was one of the things that destroyed the band. Playing loud had nothing to do with music.”

For the next 50-some years, guitar players have been messing around with guitars, pickups, amplifiers, and techniques trying to create some sort of sound that either identifies them as individuals or covers them in the reflective glory of copying someone else fairly well. Been there, done that. What an audience is looking for is not a single instrument's "tone," but a well-constructed, balanced and interesting performance from a group (even if the "group" is an acoustic musician and his/her voice) and a song worth remembering. Except in a few instances, nobody would cross the street to hear the average guitarist fumble with their instrument, but most of us would dedicate some of our precious vanishing time to hear a great song.

In the end, Eric’s tone was about as important to the song as was the “tone” of every other instrument in the recording; especially the dubbed-in horn section. The song, the arrangement, and the mix are what make this tune worth listening to and that is the message that appears to be getting further lost in the weeds as time goes on. Pop “music” has become more of a visual performance “art” than a musical performance and audiences reflect that weirdness. “Musicians” spend more time on their dance steps and posing than their instruments or arrangements. At the club level, musicians are being taught to perform as a random bunch of individuals with self-interest overwhelming anything resembling music. Even jazz musicians in clubs as tiny as coffee shops “need” amplification because they are incapable of listening to each other and too egotistical to imagine that someone else might be the most important thing in a particular tune. And music dies a painful, sad death at the hands of electronics.

Holding A Grudge or Just Paying Attention?

After the Snarky Puppy misadventure, my wife (Elvy) and I had a couple of long conversations about concerts we’ve seen and loved or hated and the end results. Turns out, my Geezer with A Grudge habits apply to music, too. I have never been punished by an artist twice and we have made a habit of seeing the people who exceed my expectations at every opportunity. The last bit has slowed up considerably now that I am no longer in the business and live some distance from where most of the action happens. Because of the expense and hassle, I probably won’t be seeing many artists twice from here out.

For example, I’ve seen Pat Metheny almost a dozen times at a dozen different venues and never once felt betrayed, abused, or let down by his band’s performances. After that many shows, I am still willing to go a long distance to see him again. A small part of my motivation for moving to L.A. in the 80’s was to see the Crusaders in their native element; especially since that was the only way to see them by that late period in their careers. I saw them as the headlines for the 1983 Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Forum, at our local club (The Golden Bear) in Huntington Beach, and at a couple of outdoor shows in the South Beach area. Every show was knocked out and amazingly close to their recordings, quality-wise. Same for Jeff Beck; who I have seen 3 times and 4 if you count a 1960’s Yardbirds concert in a Denver bar. Jeff is often loud, but always musical and the sound quality has been close to state-of-the-art every time I’ve seen him play. Elvy isn’t as much of a jazz fan as me, so many of the above shows were my experience alone. On the other hand, we’ve been to more than a few pop music concerts because of her interests; Queen, for example.

An example of the other spectrum would be Robert Randolph and the Family Band. I bought 2003's Unclassified and 2006's Colorblind the moment they arrived. I used to intro my auditorium lecture classes with Squeeze or Ain’t Nothing Wrong with That. Like Snarky Puppy, I missed my first opportunity bto see RR when the band was at First Ave because I was working a gig, out of town, that evening. Then I saw Robert and his band at the Minnesota State Fair. The sound was terrible and, being an outdoor concert in a facility where I’ve heard some terrific shows, all of the blame landed on the band (and the FOH nitwit). I tried that show twice and the 2nd time was worse than the 1st. I haven’t paid a moment of attention to Robert Randolph since; nor bought any of the band’s newer music. I still think they are a good recording act, but as a live band they suck and I wouldn’t cross the street to see them for free.

To be clear, what I’m expecting in a live concert is at least the sound quality of a decent car stereo (sans hip-hop sub-woofer mess); at the dead minimum. There is no point in spending tens of thousands of dollars on a sound system that is worse than a car stereo; and that is not a high bar. A better goal would be to match the fidelity of a good home entertainment system. Still not a stretch, but an improvement over a car stereo. Excuses from FOH goobers for room acoustics, audience behavior, and the band’s stage excesses don’t mean a thing to me. The band and the FOH engineer are totally responsible for and in control of the concert sound quality. If, as is the usual case, they don’t care one result is either do I.

Even 20-50 years later, I can remember many of the concert moments that blew me away; some as if it were a recent experience. What I remember about the lousy sounding concerts I’ve experienced is “I’ll never do that again.” That, literally, is all I remember of non-musical experiences. That would be my Geezer reflex: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” I had thought about doing a chart of a few of my concert experiences, but it would be a lot of one-time experiences and my HTML charting capabilities suck. Put it simply, there are far more “artists” who I have seen once and wouldn’t cross the street to see again. Too many musicians are more concerned with their egos than with their music. This is not a new thing, but a long-established tradition; especially with jazz and pop musicians.

The conversation Elvy and I had about our 50+ years of going to concerts together was a little surprising. She was even more adamant in her “I’ll never do that again” response. We did remember many of the same great shows close to exactly the same. For both of us, the memory of the sonically disappointing-to-awful shows was limited and a little irritating. We’re not rich and wasting money is something we’ve tried to avoid for all of our adult lives.

A Musician in Charge of Suffering with the Audience

My disappointing experience in May at a Snarky Puppy concert in St. Paul somehow reminded me of someone I heard about back in the 80’s. A friend worked, for a short time, for a medical device company in the L.A. Valley. That company was one of the few US corporations that screwed up so badly that it was pretty obvious that someone would end up going to jail. Don’t worry your pretty little conservative head, nobody who was really to blame was punished. My friend met a well-dressed, middle-aged white man at a company party who introduced himself as “the vice-president in charge of going to jail.” And, eventually, he did. Still, you can keep your little skull in place; he went to Lompoc back when the Santa Barbara facility was the show place for Club Fed. 2 years later, he was out with a big cash and stock option bonus for taking the fall and none of the real villain spent a moment in jail, court, or even a little inconvenienced. No real corporate criminals were harmed pretending that USA laws "apply to everyone."

All of this brings me to my current best solution for crappy live music sound systems: a musician in charge of suffering with the audience (MICOSWTA). 40 years ago, on the sound company side of Wirebender Audio, we discovered that nobody in pop music cared what the FOH system sounded like. (Maybe not “nobody,” but close enough for statistical purposes: 99.9999999 . . . %.) As long as the stage monitors fed the egos of the performing “talent,” the audience could drop dead as long as they bought tickets before they croaked. Today, that level of excess has multiplied to the point of total indifference and independence. In-ear monitoring systems not only allow musicians to receive exactly the mix they want but provide 25-35dB of isolation from the hostile acoustic environment their suckers/audiences suffer.

The solution to that problem, which was strongly suggested to me by Michael League’s obvious oblivious take on the job his FOH nitwit was doing at the Snarky Puppy concert, is to make someone in the band (ideally a band leader) suffer exactly the mix the audience hears. By that I mean, either that person either stands near the mains with no other source of audio or, best of all, put a microphone a dozen feet in front of the mains and that all the band’s sacrificial victim gets to hear; either through a traditional floor monitor or in-ears. I mean exactly what the audience at that point receives; including he sound pressure. If the band is deafening the audience with 120+dBSPL, that’s what MICOSWTA gets.

I suspect that not only would live music improve drastically and quickly, but many FOH nincompoops would be unemployed forever. At MSCM, we used to talk about "getting fired moments," often when a recording tech screwed up the headphone mix and caused permanent hearing damage to a client. Likewise, making the band leader live with the potential hearing loss his audience experiences would be nothing but positive.

Snarky Puppy in St. Paul

A couple of years ago, my ”yet to see” list was down to one artist and one group: Van Morrison and Snarky Puppy. There is, literally, no other live pop music act that I’m interested in suffering for. I have seen every group I’ve wanted to see and most of them have been sonically and musically grossly disappointing. Overwhelmingly, attending a live music performance is mostly about as fun for me as being one of Dick Cheney’s captured “armed combatants.” Venues and performers alike are careless with my hearing and their sound quality. From the performances on their live recordings, I had high hopes that seeing Snarky Puppy on 5/25/2019 at the St Paul Palace Theater might be an exception to what has become a hard-and-fast rule. When the tickets went on sale, in late January, I drove 100 miles round-trip to get a pair. Through the last few months of age-related medical problems and way too many doctors’ appointments and tests, I clung to the hope that I would see something like the kind of performances Snarky Puppy puts on its DVDs. I was wrong. I knew the odds were against me, since "quality" and "live sound" rarely coexist, but I had unrealistically high hopes based on Snarky Puppy's "live" recorded existing music catalog.

It’s hard to know who to fault for the generally awful sound of this terrifically talented band in what should have been pretty easy-to-manage venue. The Palace Theater (or Snarky Puppy’s road company) does have an array system, which more often than not seems to be an identifying marker for lousy sounding shows. Unfortunately, the sound system also includes subwoofers; hardware and technology that almost no live sound doofuses know how to use half-competently. I didn’t bother to get close enough to the FOH sound doofus to look at the console, but it was (obviously) digital and I suspect it was either Avid or DiGiCo. I figured if I got close enough to evaluate the mixer I’d be tempted to strangle or knife the moron. Seriously. There were many moments in Saturday night’s concert where I considered the risk of terminating that useless human wastebasket vs. the few months or years I might have left on my odometer spent incarcerated. He was that incompetent and destructive. I have to suspect he has never listened to a Snarky Puppy CD or heard an actual non-distorted musical instrument. He is too young to have grown up listening to AM radio, but just right for the iTunes 128kBPS MP3 experience.

From the start, it was obvious that the subwoofer component of the system overwhelmed his “talent” level. The first clue to what was to come arrived quickly as the intro act—a vocalist, keyboard, sax, bass, and drums—was as grossly distorted, poorly balanced and mixed, and unintelligible as the usual First Avenue sound disaster. The bass and kick drum merged into an atonal train rumble and the bottom end of the keyboard (anything under 200Hz) was added to the constant drone of the overloaded and poorly managed sub-channel. My wife, Elvy, kept looking at me, wondering, “Is this really the band you wanted to see?” It wasn't, but the band I came to see would prove to be an even bigger disappointment. 

After a pointlessly extended intermission break between acts, Snarky Puppy came on stage. Michael League mumbled some incoherent stuff about the band and, I think, the band crew, as an introduction and the mix went downhill from there. Even reinforcing simple speech was beyond the capabilities of the FOH moron. There was never a moment where anything in the mix improved, but it did get much louder and more distorted as the night went on.

From everything I thought I knew about Snarky Puppy, I did not imagine I would need hearing protection during one of their concerts. By the 3^rd tune, I was cutting pieces of my clothing to stuff into my ears. If that was Nic Hard on the board, he has passed his prime (if he had one) and is well into needing hearing aids and another less complicated and largely unskilled profession. Hard gets credit for Culcha Vulcha, one of the Grammy-nominated SP records and the only one of their CDs I've sent back to Amazon due to what I thought was a defect (intermittent gross distortion) and I now suspect was "intended." My local library's copy of Culcha Vulcha has the same distortion, so I've moved from suspicious to sad confidence. I think League even threatened that the FOH nitwit would be mixing their next CD, which is no kind of good news. 

The sound was so out of control that we were even often abused by the high-pitched squeal of microphone feedback that the FOH doofus usually made worse before he “solved” it. He clearly never heard a sound system that was loud or distorted enough for his tastes. The sub-channel flat-out rattled, it was so overloaded. I would estimate that the overall sound system regularly produced 20-30% distortion at 125-130dBSPL and often pegged at solid clipping well over 30-50%. Close to the end of the show, League mentioned that the audience could buy downloaded copies of the show we saw. I could almost be convinced to spend that money since the live show was one of the least musical experiences I have ever had in a concert venue. On a perverse and unlikely level, I would kind of like to know what I missed.

The 9 pieces of Snarky Puppy were introduced as "band leaders in their own right," which was sadly reflected in the performances, too. Instead of a coherent group intent on blending their talents into the kind of rhythmic orchestrations we hear on the early Snarky Puppy recordings, Saturday night's performance was more like the usual 90% of jazz, which is a loose collection of individuals demonstrating their technical prowess at the expense of anything resembling "music." Unlike their best recordings where "solos" often are enhancements of the theme, most of the night's solos were exactly that; solos. Sadly, most of those excursions reminded me of the mindless and boring 60's and 70's guitar hero days or what my studio partner used to call jazz; "meandering saxophones." Weirdly, in 2021, Puppy released a double-CD set of their 2019 "Live at the Royal Albert Hall" performance that sounds absolutely nothing like an actual live Snarky Puppy show, based on my experience. If this record was an attempt to build their audience, I suspect it won't work with the victims who have heard an actual Snarky Puppy show.

Elvy, an experienced visual artist, called the light show “painful.” She spent a lot of the show with her eyes closed to avoid looking at the stage. For some weird reason, a good bit of the white spots were randomly aimed into the audience, creating a blinding effect similar to the deafening effect of the awful audio mix. So, pretty much every aspect of the show that the Snarky Puppy crew touched was a fucked-up mess. I'd love to report that the band overcame this deficit with tremendous performances, but from where we sat and stood it was almost impossible to make out any detail of the music. So, much of the evening seemed like a repetitive hip-hop loop of kick drum, snare, and gurgling subwoofer distortion. Rather than a jazz band, the best SP managed that night was something more akin to 1980's Studio 54 electronica "dance music." Perfect music for a near-overdose of coke, PCP, or ecstasy. The light show was probably aimed at those customers.

As a general principle, I’m against capital punishment. However, I would regularly make an exception for FOH doofuses who ruin otherwise excellent shows. At the least, I think morons like the Snarky Puppy FOH doofus should have been smacked on the back of his empty head by each of the 3200 sold-out show victims. The beauty of either beating to death or shooting FOH morons is that, if no one volunteered to do that job because of the risk no one would be inconvenienced. Many of the best shows I have ever heard were completely managed by the band from the stage. All of the worst shows had a “professional” mangling the mix from FOH. Two constant factors in the sound quality of the shows I have seen has been the FOH tech and the band. The sound system is inconsequential. The equipment is NEVER the problem and the people using said equipment are ALWAYS responsible for the sound quality of a show. You can find examples of that fact in many of the show reviews on this website and some of my rants about live music in general.

The Palace’s “acoustic treatments” are pretty hilarious, at best. Typical of First Avenue penny-pinching mismanagement habits, there are some tiny and pointless 1” thick strips of “acoustic foam” dangling from the balcony overhang and, maybe, some absorption materials behind the side curtains on the first floor. Otherwise, it’s a big oval-shaped 1900’s theater sans chairs with absorptive padding, a concrete floor, bare walls with residual bits of 1900’s fresco and artwork clinging to the walls, and a 21^st Century high-volume, low fidelity array sound system poorly placed and aimed. In other words, 1^st Ave spent as little as possible to bring this venue to life and expects to get a big return on the investment since the audience “taste” for actual music is declining exponentially in the current MP3-earbud-cellphone-industrial-noise climate.

Due to my wife's mobility problems, we were kindly given ADA seats right behind the FOH console. Our purchased seats were fairly high in the balcony and the Palace has limited elevator capabilities, so that was a really generous act by one of the facility's managers. We were there early, because of her limitations, which gave me the opportunity to move around a lot early in the show. I listened to the opening act at several points in the balcony and, before and during SP's set, on the floor (mostly in the 10-20' just in front of the house console). It wasn't any better than our seats at any of those spots, but most of the areas were considerably worse: closer was painfully louder and further away was incoherently more distorted and muddier. The balcony is a giant bass resonator, which only exacerbated the low frequency problems I've described above.

Speaking of the crowd, when did drill-Sargent level yelling throughout a concert become normal? On the floor level and all around the bar, most of the “audience” were more involved in max-volume yapping at each other than the music. On the floor, the crowd noise was at least as irritating as the sound system. I do believe the excessive volume of the sound system is partly to blame, since there was no effort at reproducing dynamics, fidelity, or even decent bandwidth in the sound system, it is clear that the band wasn’t particularly concerned with the audience's musical experience. That being the case, I guess a concert is an expensive way for people to come together for a really loud conversation about the usual drivel people talk about in bars. I generally avoid live music in bars for this reason and from here out I'll be avoiding indoor live music in general. I do not need the hear about the boring lives of wealthy 20-to-40-somethings at screaming volume.

I can’t decide if I would be relieved or disappointed to learn that the sound system was not the Palace’s house system. The upside might be that it could still be possible to see a show there that didn’t suck. The downside would be that Snarky Puppy and Michael League have lost their edge and concern for their fans’ experience. For me, it’s kind of the end of the trail, regardless. Live music has become such a painful experience, physically and sonically, that I generally avoid any indoor concerts out of self-protection. My anticipation and disappointment in this show was pretty obvious. On the way home, Elvy kept asking “Are you ok?” The next morning, she even cried in sympathy, knowing better than anyone how much I had looked forward to this concert. Since were were there early, I bought a copy of SP's Immigrance CD and a shirt before the show started. I have yet to open the wrapper of the CD and the shirt ended up in the rag bag this morning. I do not need a reminder of that evening. If I had waited to the end, I wouldn't have wasted that money.

Over the years, I have seen a handful of amazing live music performances. I’m OK with that, disappointed that part of my life is over, but I have some great memories. Snarky Puppy will not be among those, though.