My Slantmaster 50 Story

Back in the early 2000s, I was happily working as a college instructor for a music school in St. Paul. I was the school’s Student AES Club faculty advisor and I was having the time of my life working with brilliant, inspiring, energetic young people who were fascinated with all things audio. Back in my early-QSC Audio days, I’d built a pretty cool ABX tester and, later (after I’d left California and the pro audio business), QSC decided to build a much more sophisticated ABX tester and use it to promote the company’s products. That didn’t work out well and the ABX testers were recalled from the company’s sales force and, I’d been told, crushed to bury the evidence that someone at QSC once thought professional audio people gave a crap about audio fidelity and honest listening tests. I’d been that same dumbasss a decade earlier, so they had my sympathy. Because I’m lazy and that wheel had already been built, I’d bothered Pat Quilter often to see if he could find an unwanted ABX test box that hadn’t died in the garbage compactor.

So, in late 2008 when Pat sent me an email warning me that there was a package coming my way, I thought I knew what would be in it. When it arrived, it seemed almost Amazon-oversized for what I thought would be a 1 rack-space piece. The box was also a lot lighter than I’d expected. I cracked the tape at the top of the box and saw the beige tolex, the leather handle, and the black dust cover and I was confused. I knew Pat was retiring from QSC Audio, so I assumed he’d built a model amp as a memento. When I pulled the amp from the box and saw the Celestion Century 12” I suspected it was more than an empty box demo. I plugged it in, turned it on, and (like everyone I’ve ever show the amp to) said, “Wow!” There is a cool, brief light show from the backlit front panel as the amp powers up that blows everyone away. I spent the rest of the day playing with the amp, which was more guitar playing than I’d done in the past 20-some years.

I brought it to school the next day to show it off to students, employees and instructors, and anyone who was interested. We used it several times in recording sessions over the next couple of weeks. One to-be-unnamed guitar instructor tried to buy it from me, tried to get me to have Pat build one for him, and coveted it so blatantly that I started storing it in the secured record lab area so that it wouldn’t disappear. Over the next year, I used the Slantmaster dozens of times with all sorts of guitars and guitarists and it was universally loved by everyone who heard it. It is kind of sad to admit that the amp has never been used outside of McNally Smith College or my home studio. It has never seen a live gig other than the MSCM’s auditorium stage a couple of times by players who I trusted not to abuse it.

This is what the Quilter Labs website has to say about the Slantmaster 50, “Built to celebrate QSC’s 40th anniversary, the Slantmaster 50 used a linear amplifier to deliver 50 ‘hot watts’ to a simply awesome Celestion ‘Century’ neodymium speaker.

“This was the precursor to Quilter Labs foundation.

“Only one hundred were made and featured a spring reverb! These are very limited, so if you have one you are lucky!”

I have one (#72 of 100) and I am well aware of the fact that I am lucky to do so. I have meant to write something about this amazing gift for nearly 15 years, but a conversation about the Slantmaster in the Facebook “Quilter Musical Equipment Owners Group” about the Slantmaster moved me to finally do the work.

The day I started work at QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa in early 1983 was the day Pat took his first vacation in a decade. Pat and his mother had booked a tour of Europe on the Orient Express and he’d entrusted me with overseeing the initial production of the first Series One amp, the 1400, without a single unit having yet passed through production. There were . . . problems, but the QSC team of that day pulled together and by Monday afternoon we were cranking out 1400s at a pretty decent pace. The Series One and Three amps were the breakthrough products that put QSC on the pro equipment map and for the next 9 years I was a product engineer, test engineer, manufacturing engineer, manufacturing engineering manager, and tech services manager: 5 different jobs, with a couple that lapped-over each other a bit, in 9 years. Pat and I became friends, partially because I was the interface between his working hours (noon to whenever in the evening) and everyone else and me (7AM to 5-or-whenever-PM). We shared an interest in audio electronics, psychoacoustics, music, guitars and guitar amplifiers, electric vehicles, science fiction and fantasy, literature, and the people we worked with. I quit QSC and left California, after giving notice almost 3 years earlier that I would be leaving when I graduated from Cal State Long Beach, because I could never see myself breaking even economically in southern California and for personal reasons. Pat and I have continued to communicate through email for the past 30 years. I keep his Xmas letters in the same envelope as the letter that came with the Slantmaster.

It’s A Smaller World Than I Imagined

I am working on finishing up, as it is, our basement office after my friend/contractor Dan Jacobson installed an egress window last weekend. That mostly means, so far, me puzzling together the ceiling tile mess the previous owner/nitwit/contractor made when he chopped up the ceiling to install the forced-air HVAC system the repossessing bank hired him to install. (“Wells Fargo, the dumbest bank on the planet.”) Because I don’t know what I’m doing with most of this job, that means a lot of trips to Menards and Ace for materials and, occasional, tools.

Since I’m spending more than the usual amount of time driving, I’m listening to my random playlist of music that I have stored on USB sticks in the pickup or CRV. I probably don’t have more variety on my playlist than most people, but I do have recordings from a lot of unusual artists. Not only do I have music from well-known artists from the 1930s to today, but I have lots of music that I have been personally associated with either as a musician and/or a recording technician since the mid-1970s. If I’d have known I was going to live this long, I’d have hung on to the stuff I recorded with the Tracers and other kid-bands in the 60s, especially my original songs. Sadly, all of that stuff accidentally ended up in a dump somewhere in Omaha when we moved from that city to L.A. in 1983. Still, I have almost 100 hours of music on my USB stick that I can almost guarantee nobody else in the world is playing at any given moment.

Yesterday after a hardware and grocery store run, the playlist landed on Scott Jarrett’s “Uneventful Lives” and, like everything on “The Gift of Thirst,” it’s a song I know pretty well and like a lot (I like everything on that album.). So, I ended up carrying on with the tune when I went into Aldi’s to buy the “software” for dinner last night. I listen to a lot of music that I usually assume nobody but me knows: stuff I’ve/we’ve written or recorded, music friends have recorded, records that I’ve owned for 30-50 years that was either regional or passed through the popular void unnoticed. Some days, it’s kind of a matter of pride to me that all of this great music is probably only being listened to by me at that particular moment. I mean in the whole world of 8 billion babbling nitwits I’m almost guaranteed to be the only person on the planet listening to a particular song at that moment: 1 in 8 billion, 1/8,000,000,000 or 0.0000000125% of the population are listening to what I’m listening to. I know that isn’t true for Scott’s first record, “Without Rhyme or Reason,” but, like a lot of great music, the two records he made in Hudson, WI didn’t get anywhere near the recognition and appreciation they deserved.

So with “Uneventful Lives” in my head as I left the truck, I walked into Aldi’s singing the random bits of chorus and verses (as usual, I can’t remember any lyrics accurately). About half-way into my shopping trip I was walking toward a woman about my age, pushing a cart in the opposite direction in the same isle. About that time I got to the end of a verse, “So we’ll pirouette away, as the band begins to play. And we’ll drink a toast to husbands and to wives.” And as I passed her she sang, in excellent harmony, “And the sweetness of our uneventful lives.”

Because I am incredibly slow-of-wit, I kept walking and singing to myself, but a big part of me was open-mouth stunned. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. A smarter, quicker guy would have turned around, introduced himself, and asked “Where do you know that song from?” or something equally witty. I did not. In fact, it didn’t occur to me that I should do that until I was loading groceries into the truck. By then, I probably couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup of two people, even if one wasn’t an older woman. So, we’ll likely never know who she is. But . . . damn! It is either one amazingly small world, or Scott’s music landed a lot more places than I knew.