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.

Is There Still A Jack McNally Day?

This is pretty hilarious, in retrospect. February 15, 2013 was officially declared "Jack McNally Day" by the St. Paul and Minneapolis mayors. Back then, City Pages was declaring McNally Smith College of Music to be "one of the country's premier music schools" and hyping Jack's schmaltzy recording as " twelve-song slice of Americana meets contemporary country that would fit comfortably in between George Strait and Jeff Bridges." See for yourself:


Mayor (at the time) Chris Coleman is all tangled up in this interview, which he'd probably love to see disappear if his run for the state's governor gets any traction. "[Mayor Coleman] will be playing at the release show... So I've been giving the guy lessons for five or six years, and I thought he would kind of peter off, because he's a busy guy, but no! He comes in for his lessons week after week, and he's practiced! I don't know where he finds the time." He's probably not playing or practicing so much these days, since it's a lot of work to cover your tracks in today's well-documented on-line world.

The ending repartee is pretty hilarious, in light of the last few months:

February 15 has just been proclaimed Jack McNally Day. So now you've got your own holiday. How does that make you feel?
What? Are you serious?

Um... yes. Mayor Coleman and Mayor Rybak both declared February 15 Jack McNally Day.
You're not serious. You're pulling my leg. This is a cruel joke.

....No sir. Would you like me to forward you the press release?
Yes! [Laughs] I'll be darned. I'm speechless. What do you say to that? Holy smokes.

There are more than a few interesting MSCM interviews from those years, including this bit of braggadocio from  Doug: "Orchestrating Growth." A big part of the drama the owners generated about the school's closing was the big drop in income in the last years. which is contradicted by Doug's statement, "And today accredited private college McNally Smith serves about 600 students from across the globe, offering 100 faculty members, bachelor’s degrees in 11 subjects and master’s degrees in five. The school’s $3.5 million in 2001 revenues grew to nearly $19 million in 2013, marking 18 percent growth each of those years." Enough to buy a music composition "cabin" on a lake in Maine, at least.

Beards and Banjos

Nothing in Minnesota confuses and frustrates me more than The Current 89.3, our so-called local Public Radio pop music station. This week, as part of their never-ending fund drive, The Current is doing an incredibly irritating and enlightening run on its listeners’ “893 Essential Artists.” As a habit, l usually avoid this kind of demented shit because it is a constant reminder of how incredibly lame the average human being is. A quick look at #335 (Dwight Yoakam) and #337 (Neil Diamond) and the actual talent that fell far below these hillbillies and pop pablum peddlers explains the whole “Beards and Banjos” Millenial fuck fest. The incredibly lame Monkeys are at #338 and grocery store magazine rack icon Lyle Lovett is at #342! While the Faces are #359 and . . . aw, forget it. Humans are not worth saving. Bring on that planet killer asteroid.

Seriously. If Minnesota music dweebs are this lame, imagine how incredibly awful the degraded species is in the southeast!

Getting My Geek Vitamins

I’m obviously vitamin-starved. At the last Fair Trade Book Store open mic, I blew off my usual mediocre acoustic guitar piece and brought my MacBook Pro to demonstrate a vintage musical piece to the small group of musicians and musical kids. My wife warned me to “keep it short,” so I wouldn’t bore anyone (meaning her). I did my best to make it brief, but mostly what I pointed out to myself was how much I miss having a few friends to talk about recording, recording technology, and music.

For a few years, working at Musictech (then McNally Smith College of Music) was a full emersion geek-out experience. Every day, I was close to instructors and students who not only loved music but who were fascinated with the physics, electronics, acoustics, and psycho-acoustics that is core to the production of modern music in any of its forms. The geek factor slowly vanished from the school as many of the tech-intensive instructors left and were replaced by people whose claim to fame was Pro Tools expertise. I guess there is a geekiness associated with being really good with function and quick-keys, but it’s not something I care much about. You can polish turds until they shine, but they are still just little bits of crap. Without some knowledge of how the physical equipment works (microphones, preamps and signal chain, acoustics, signal processing, and human hearing), knowing how to cut up performances into well-aligned bits just isn’t very interesting.

So I retired and moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, where we made new friends, found more things to do than we have time to do them, and picked up some new hobbies (like guitar building and cabinet-making). It turns out that I miss some of what I lost.

25 years ago, I quit my last full-time music industry job and found work in medical devices. Admittedly, too much of my motivation was money. Eventually, it turned into lots of money. While the money was good, one of the first things I noticed about the people I worked with was “this is not my culture.” While there were a few outdoor recreation types in Engineering, most everyone in medical devices and medicine was focused on making money, getting promotions, and acquiring stuff. I could easily go for months without hearing anyone hum atonally to themselves, let alone sing or play a musical instrument. I felt a little like a Stranger in A Strange Land. Or a lot.

I guess I have to do something about that. It turns out that not working with musicians and technical people is more of a deprivation than I expected. Go figure.