Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Bend Over and Take Your Apple Like A Man

A few nights ago, I was playing music at an outdoor party with friends and when one of the players wanted to see the scrolling music app I was using on my tablet,Guitar Chords and Tabs (an Android app, which is also available on the web at https://www.chords-and-tabs.net/). He was excited, at first, that so many songs had already been worked out just for the taking, but when I told him it cost $5 “for life,” he started arguing “Why not $10, or $10 a year?  How can the guy make any money only charging $5?” 

This is a person who (I think) would probably describe himself as somewhere between liberal and socialist in his politics, but he has a giant fault line in his expectations: he owns an iPhone.  As an Apple product user, he has been conditioned to be ripped off every few moments when Apple “updates” some piddly aspect of their mediocre products and requires the Faithful to march down to the Apple Store or T-Mobile or where ever they take their Apple cornholing and spend ten times what the competition asks for a better, more flexible, and at least as secure product.  (Cell phones are notoriously insecure computers.)

I, of course, made it worse by demonstrating all of the free-to-$10 apps I use on my $80 Samsung phone and my $70 Hi10 (10”) XPro Android tablet. His marketing- tutored mind seemed to go into overload and he started to download Ultimate Guitar, a $90/year app that runs on Android and Apple.  I probably broke something else in his head when I told him that I get Ultimate Guitar for free because I submit 6-10 song “interpretations” to the app every year.  Years of Apple-conditioning has taught him “there is no reasonably priced lunch” and he couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that someone working on a program in their spare time would settle for “only” making a few hundred thousand dollars on a very popular app that only costs $5 per customer.

I haven’t always despised Apple. Back in the early 80s the Apple II was sometimes the only small business computer that made sense.  Even up to the moment the Mac arrived, Apple was a reasonably customer-friendly and responsive company.  When Jobs squeezed Wozniak out of Apple in ‘83, the company started rolling downhill fast and by the time Jobs was back and in full control, the company tried to monetize every breath their sucker/customers took.  By the ‘87 an Apple keyboard, never a particularly impressive piece of equipment, cost $150 when even a decent name-brand PC keyboard from Logitech sold for about $50.  Software, hardware, and service were all sold at a premium and Apple’s customers loved the abuse.  Like the Trump cult, the more ruthlessly and rudely Apple treats its victims the more they lavish fealty to the rotten-cored company.

People are weird.

I got a big taste of those expectations on one of the Facebook groups when a few young Logic users practically came unglued on another musician for using an “obsolete Mac Pro running an unsupported OS and several generations ancient version of Logic.” Their “logic” was, “1) You can’t make good music on old software and 2) not running state-of-the-art software and hardware is ‘cheating the Apple developers.’”

When I taught music production classes I’d constantly remind my students that people made great records on every “crappy” old version of DAW software in existence. Supposedly, The Beach Boys (sans Brian Wilson) " Summer in Paradise” was one of the first albums recorded on Sound Tools, which later grew up and became Pro Tools.  That’s not saying much for Sound Tools, since that was a really awful Beach Boy’s album (covering songs from Sly Stone to The Drifters).  It has been a long time since a crappy sounding record was in any way the fault of the technology.  And that #2 argument is disgusting.  Software developers are the last people who would be rewarded (if ever) in a braindead, greedy, top-heavy corporation like Apple.  If you bought the software, it’s yours not theirs.  You owe them nothing, unless you stole it.  Even then, you could probably make a convincing argument that once it’s on your computer, it’s yours. 😉

 

Monday, April 7, 2025

If I’m Going to Suck, I’d Rather Suck Quietly

Earlier this week, Mrs. Day and I went to an odd kind of open mic and live performance event at a local venue.  A friend was playing with a 3-person pickup group and he’d invited us to hear him play.  The venue is an old (1899) theater that has been converted to a really nice restaurant, music venue, and events center.  The place has a nice stage with intelligent acoustic treatment and all of the seating is close to the stage with a capacity of about 300 people. 

As we entered the facility, a solo vocalist was accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and it was loud enough that I put in hearing protection as we entered the main room.  I suspect she might have had a reasonably decent voice, but the combination of poor microphone selection (the usual SM58), shrill EQ, possibly a harsh pole-mounted sound system, and about 15dBSPL too much volume for the venue just made her sound irritating.  As we entered the room it didn’t take long to ignore the performer and carry on a conversation with our friends who were already there.  We stayed for our friend’s act, which was pleasant and enjoyable but the sound system didn’t contribute anything positive to the experience.  The three acts that followed returned to the painful and ignorable quality of the first act. 

A not insignificant part of what motivated me to leave California and my job at QSC was the fact that it was obvious that our products were not enhancing music, just making it painfully louder.  As an electronics engineer, I’d kind of hoped that working in professional audio might be, at least, a benign contribution to society and, at best, a positive contribution to music.  Like my later medical device experience, it was pretty obvious by 1991 that making music louder has no upside.  Louder is just louder, it isn’t better, more musical, more dynamic, or even more intelligible.  More often than not, louder is outright harmful; causing hearing damage across the demographic board and wasting energy pointlessly. 

As a performer or a live sound tech, controlling volume has always been at the top of my list of important tasks.  99% of the time, when I go on to an open mic stage, I ask to have both the monitor and mains turned down.  I’m likely the last of a generation from when sound systems didn’t exist in small venues.  When I was a kid, I cobbled together enough money to take the train from west Kansas to Kansas City to see several of my jazz heroes on the famous 18th and Vine District.  I lucked into seeing Dave Brubeck’s quartet, Stan Getz, and several national and regional jazz groups in small clubs and theaters before I was snagged by the cops for being underage and escorted to the railroad station and sent back to Dodge.  There wasn’t an amplifier to be seen at any of those places, except for a couple of small Fender guitar amps.  Since then, I have been lucky enough to see enough low volume concerts and performances, across several genres of music, to know how small the contribution volume is to music.  And I have yet to see a high volume concert that was worth attending, termination with what was once one of my favorite bands putting the nail in the coffin of my fandom with one of the worst sounding FOH “mixes” possible. 

At the other end of that experience was a 1967 concert at the Dallas State Fair Music Hall Theater with Sam and Dave as the headliners, Otis Redding as the middle act, and (I think) Arthur Conley as the opener.  The “PA system” was a Shure Vocalmaster with a couple Vocalmaster columns and a total of 100 watts of moderate distortion power to drive it all.  The only thing in the pa was the vocals and the large horn band simply “mixed themselves” by listening to each other on stage.  The band was loud enough for the 3,400 capacity audience who were far from quiet or stuck to their seats.  I have yet to hear or see a better show. 

I have proven this, repeatedly, with the systems I’ve run over the years: if the music is good, people will shut up and listen.  If you suck, you can’t get loud enough to not suck.  When an audience has no good reason to listen to you, they won’t, no matter how loud you make your noise.  If you are doing something that draws their interest, you will be heard. 

Wirebender Audio Rants

Over the dozen years I taught audio engineering at Musictech College and McNally Smith College of Music, I accumulated a lot of material that might be useful to all sorts of budding audio techs and musicians. This site will include comments and questions about professional audio standards, practices, and equipment. I will add occasional product reviews with as many objective and irrational opinions as possible.