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.