Hey! This Guy Sounds Like Me

Steve La Cerra's “Mix Blog Live: How Big Does a Kick Drum Really Need to Be?” sounded a lot like the things I’ve been saying about live music for the last several decades. "In the past year or so, I’ve witnessed several major internationally acclaimed artists get murdered by their sound person. I won't mention names because there's no need to embarrass anyone, but I find it somewhat disturbing that an engineer can take a gig but not be responsible enough to do some homework, such as listening to the act’s recordings. It's a sign of respect for the band and their fans that an engineer is aware of an act’s musical legacy, and to honor that legacy." 

From rap to country to pop, it all sucks.

Screw that. I think the acts need to be named and the sound companies ridiculed until either this shit gets fixed or people quit going out for a night of sonic punishment from these nitwits.For two decades I've been advocating that every audience member pissed off at the lousy sound quality of a show "whack a sound doofus" on the way out the door. It is still the best option.

Worshiping Tin-Lead and other Old Bits of Junk Technology

The following is a letter I sent to TapeOp Magazine regarding a silly end rant by John Baccigaluppi about how much he loves tin-lead solder and big iron audio electronic equipment. A year ago, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photography tour and I have stuck a video of that

While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure.

Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.

Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.

Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.

Peter Mayer and Live Music

Saturday night (9/14/2018), I was the sound tech at Zumbrota’s Crossings Gallery for a Peter Mayer show. I’ve been a fan of Peter’s since I first heard “Brand New Harley” at least a decade ago. I bought the CD that song was a part of and discovered other Mayer gems: “John’s Garden,” “Africa,” “Holy Now,” among many other great songs of Peter’s that I’ve discovered (for myself) since. Peter has a solid, dedicated following of fans across the country and, according to posts on his Facebook page, the world.

He earnes it. Not only does he put on a show that covers as much of his huge discography as you would hope and could expect, he puts so much of himself into the performance he has to wind himself up and, then, down again; before and after the show. The sound check is as much a ritual he uses to gear himself up for the performance as it is an opportunity to optimize the sound system.

There is an aspect of performing this kind of personal music in this kind of venue that feels like someone has stripped themself naked in front of you. An audience can sense that kind of intimacy and, if the performer is lucky and talented, the audience can feedback some of that energy and love to the performer closing the loop and creating an environment that is particularly special to music.

Describing “Good Sound”

A few days ago at a local outdoor concert, while I was suffering with the irratic, distorted, and sometimes painful mix of a local blues band a friend (a drummer) was practically luxuriating in exactly the same mix. His enjoyment came from the fact that when the rest of the group wasn’t blaring or a solo or lead vocal wasn’t totally overpowering the music, he could clearly hear the high hat. That was, in fact, true. Although most of the kit was masked by a muddy and too loud bass and the rest of the kit practically vanished when either one of the two lead guitars were soloing, the vocalist was singing, or the harmonica had either a solo or a fill, when none of those things were happening the high hat and other cymbals were audible. For a while, I was baffled by the thought that someone with a lot of musical talent and experience would zero-in on one aspect of the sound quality of the instrument he plays. After a few hours of thinking about it, I realized that the current state of live music “sound reinforcement” is so inconsistent and generally awful that anyone who really wants to enjoy live music is forced to concentrate on the few, little things that are done not-awfully.

That isn’t anythng new to me and it took me longer than it should to recognize it. As a recording engineer often working for bands and musicians rather than producers and record labels, I developed a psychoacoustics tactic that would often get me past the usual problem of volume wars between band members. Early in every song mix, I “introduced” every player at a level slightly above what I thought might be musicially ideal. If I picked a level and moment that was early and prominent enough that each player had an opportunity to focus on their part and its recorded quality each player would hang on to that impression of their place in the mix and carry it through to the end of the recording. More importantly, every time they listened to the mix hearing that moment would reinforce their feeling of presence and importance in the mix.

I’d love to say I invented this technique, but I have no idea where it came from. I do know that listening to Manfred Eicher’s Pat Metheny Group mixes taught me that “introducing” a solo player’s fills before that player’s solo arrived is a way to familiarize the audience to the music as they are listening to it. It makes something new and different feel familiar and comfortable, which is important when you are trying to fulfill Eicher’s idea that an /engineer or producer’s “role is to capture the music he likes, to present it to those who don't know it yet.” It’s an attempt to reduce the alienation listeners feel when they are exposed to new ideas and sounds. It also works, somewhat, when you are trying to convince a band or musician that your way of presenting their music to listeners has validity.

Patience, Like It or Not

In a terrific article, "My Last Project With My Dad: Building My Own Coffin," David Giffels wrote, “He was humble in that way, aware that the task was king, and he its servant. On the dusty jamb of the workshop door was a yellowed card, in the shape of a dove, printed with a Bible quote, Romans 8:25—“’if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’ This was one of the best lessons he’d taught me there, without ever saying a word.”

I’ve written before about “service to the music” being the ideal to which I believe musicians should aspire. Musicians, on average, aspire to considerably lower goals: sex, drugs, and no more than 3 chords per song. Still, I’d like to think that there is still a place for well-crafted songs, well-arranged performances, and highly skilled performers who care about their audience. I know, dream on. All of those things are hard to find in the real world, but I believe they exist. I do.

Cool Snarky Puppy Stuff

In case I haven't made this clear, Snarky Puppy is my current favorite recording act. Someday, I hope to see them live and I really hope to make them my favorite live act. These are just a few of my favorite performances from this amazing band. At the least, listen to these pieces with decent headphones. SP goes to incredible lengths to produce high fidelity recordings. They deserve the respect of a decent reproduction system, at the least.

Did We Exist?

Several years ago, just before I retired, I took a quick pass through McNally SmithCollege of Music, to document some of the acoustic treatments my tenure there created. That is documented here, somewhere, I’m pretty sure. Yesterday, I visited the remains of the school to look at the items that will be auctioned off this week. The evidence of my existence and participation in that facility are vanishing quickly.

Bullshit Arguments

A TapeOp Magazine opinion piece recently presented the dumbest anti-ABX argument I’ve heard to date; and I’ve heard a lot of really stupid arguments against ABX comparisons. Allen Farmelo's article title pretty much says it all, “The Problem with A-B'ing and Why Neil Young is Right about Sound Quality.” Because I’m a nice guy and it’s early in the morning, I’m not going to spend any time whacking away at the fact that there are so many old, deaf, mediocre rockers who imagine they possess golden ears. Neil Young, probably the single most prolific creator of awful sounding records in human history, is close to the last guy on the planet who should be promoting high resolution audio. Nuts, I went there anyway. So much for being a nice quy. 

However, the bullshit argument here is, “. . . we hear people talk about how one can't make out the difference between a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV file (assumedly a difference similar to the one Neil Young feels is worth fighting for).  Admittedly a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV are relatively close enough in resolution that many people will not be able to pick them out in an A-B test.

“But, we don't live with music like that.  If your'e [sic] anything like me, you listen to a lot of music in a lot of styles and - over the course of, say, a month - perhaps you've absorbed well over a hundred listening hours across many different albums on a few different playback systems.”

It gets better.

To “prove” his point, he uses what he imagines to be an analogy, “For example, when I started living with my partner I introduced her to what I call ‘good coffee.’  At first she kind of shrugged it off as my snobbery at work, and she couldn't really taste the difference.  But then, after months of drinking the good stuff, she found herself to be a bit of a coffee snob, too.  She could taste the difference because she had, simply, spent time with the good stuff.  The coffee revealed itself to her, slowly and subtly.  Her palate developed.  And the thing about good coffee is that it holds more detail, nuance and, therefore, interest.

“But it takes a while to become aware of that depth and complexity.  Had she done a flip-flip-flip A-B and made her choice to only drink the cheaper stuff because, ‘you know, they're basically the same,’ she'd have missed an opportunity to develop her palate.”

Farmelo is avoiding the simple test that would at least prove his coffee snob argument; now that she has developed “her palate” can she tell the difference when she does a “flip-flip-flip A-B?” If she can’t, you’re still full of shit. Likewise, way back in 2004 the Boston Audio Society performed a simple, repeatable ABX test of ancient 44.1kHz/16-bit technology and a 96kHz/24-bit source and, so far, no high-res audio equipment or recording professional or company has found a way to prove this test was incomplete or inaccurate. Humans love their delusions. One of the most inane arguments I’ve heard from an “audio professional” was the statement “I know what I know and I hear what I hear.” Totally incomplete. Doofus should have said, “I know what I think and I know what I think I hear.” It’s a useless statement, but accurate. 

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t take the fruitcakes and goofballs who call themselves “audio engineers” seriously, but this terror of reality and the limitations of their own hearing is high on the list. No, I don’t take sanitation engineers seriously either; they are just old fashioned, hard-working garbage men (or women).

Going Downhill

Fortunately, I didn't have to listen to this nightmarish "sound system," but just looking at it was pretty depressing. This tiny faux-array JBL “full-range” speakers perched above and well behind apartment-sized subwoofers immedately made me want to ask, “When did Bose buy JBL?” From time alignment to diffraction and sound pressure field distortion problems, nothing about this mess would be able to reinforce anything resembling music. It isn’t even easy to move, unless the tiny speakers pack inside the subwoofer boxes. If there is any value system here, it must be “gain before feedback” because sound quality clearly is no consideration.

You Can't Go Home Again

In late-March, a friend from Detroit visited the Cities and we got together at the downtown St. Paul Keys Restaurant for breakfast Saturday morning. I can't remember the last time I was in downtown St. Paul and didn't run into someone I know, but that Saturday was a time when that happened (or didn't happen). I couldn't help look around the restaurant for familiar faces. From 2001 on, I ate a lot of meals in that place with a lot of friends and it was eye-opening to realize that they were all scattered to the winds because of the McNally Smith College debacle. St. Paul isn't the same place it was a few years ago. As a result of that hole in our visit, we decided to walk over to the former home of the school. He sent me a few of the pictures he took and those pictures inspired this essay.

For the first time since I turned in my last course grades in 2013, I returned to the scene of the McNally Smith College crimes. Not long after I retired, my wife and I took a winter-long camper trip west. When we came back, we got serious about downsizing our possessions, bought a house in Red Wing, sold our Little Canada house, and started our new life in small town Minnesota. Other than by staying in touch with former students through Facebook and a few of the school's instructors and administrative employees, I didn't think much about the school or its fortunes until in late December of 2017 when I received a flurry of emails from friends still working at the school; the school's owners suddenly decided to close the school a week before Christmas break.

There are people who claim they had no idea the school was in trouble when it suddenly closed the doors. I'm not among that group. There were multiple times during the 13 years I worked at MSCM when it was apparent the school's management was dysfunctional, uncommitted, and disconnected. In fact, pretty much every time I came in contact with either Jack McNally or Doug Smith it was obvious that they were incredibly lucky to have been owners of something like a music "college" rather than desperately poor marginal musicians trying to make a living teaching guitar in a music store closet. Unless you’ve ever met a “job creator,” you could be fooled into believing that all sorts of positive attributes contributed to their success. In most cases, the successful entrepreneurs I’ve known were just incredibly lucky and their real work behind their success had nothing to do with the owners’ involvement; or lack of.

All of the school's success was due to people McNally and Smith hired more out of accident than management brilliance. Somehow a few competent and committed people who found their way into positions of authority and management; mostly because Jack and Doug were busy admiring themselves in the mirror. Michael McKern, for example was exclusively responsible for the complicated and timely move from the Minneapolis Musictech facility to the abandoned St. Paul Science Museum building in 2001. Occasionally, Michael would shepherd Jack and Doug through the construction project, showing them where the money was being spent and describing what the school would look like when the contractors were finished (just in time for the beginning of the 2002 spring semester). The two "owners" were about as involved in that process as a pair of squirrels watching a house being constructed across the street from the forest where they lived.

I was in a few committees that included either Jack or Doug during the years I worked for MSCM. I was always amazed at how decoupled they seemed from what was going on in the facility they later decided to rename after themselves. One of my favorite fables about MSCM is pretty much the story about the school's name found on Wikipedia, "Formerly known as Musictech College, McNally Smith College took its new name in honor of its two founders, Jack McNally and Doug Smith, on its 20th anniversary celebrated in 2005." That is a pretty funny take on the fact that the accrediting organizations (to use that term loosely) strongly advised the school to lose the "tech" aspect from the original school name, MusicTech. The goofballs from National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) met with the accreditation committee members and told us that they had a problem with "tech" being associated with higher education. I wondered if they had the same problem with MIT, the three Cal Tech variations, Georgia Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology,

Florida Tech, Texas Tech, Virginia Polytech, etc? It was a rhetorical question, since I doubt any of those schools would bother with a low-life group of wannabe academics like the NASM characters. Nobody even tried to answer that question, though. In the end, the naming committee recommended a collection of music-related possibilities with the suggestion that "anything but McNally Smith College" would be a not-awful possibility. The "in honor" part of Musictech College being renamed to “McNally Smith College of Music” was purely inspired and demanded by Jack and Doug. I suppose, otherwise how would anyone know they had anything to do with the school?

In a Star Tribune article about the closing, Jack McNally was quoted as having sent an email "asking faculty and staff to 'consider finishing the term and issue grades as usual to avoid these horrific consequences for our students, even if it is without pay, simply for the sake of our students.'” That might be the first thing I ever heard of that Jack did "for the sake of our students." However, since all of the effort and cost of providing that service would be coming from faculty and administration personnel who would not be paid for the work, it's tough to cut Jack even a little slack. One of the last things the remaining administration folks did was on display on one of the school's doors: a "transfer fair." That must have been sobering, disappointing, and a slap in the face for everyone involved. It has been a well-known fact for most of the school's life that few credits were transferable to any real college. Often, no credits were transferable and sometimes no credential was allowed for a MSCM degree when a student decided to try to continue his or her education with one of the more traditional and substantial higher education facilities.

I admit I felt sad and disappointed when I saw the state of the school and when I took these pictures. A lot of effort and commitment went into creating the facilities inside this building and even though much of that work was done 16 years ago, it could have gone on being useful and valuable for a lot more years. Everything ends, but this particular institution ended in the most despicable way possible.

From the beginning of the semester in August 2017, there is no chance (other than gross incompetence) that the administration and ownership did not know precisely the day, or week at the worst, the school would run out of cash, based on the registration and tuition available. IYou’d think at least some regulatory agency would be taking note. In a decent world, you’d think the employees of the school would be owed a formal explanation and apology along with substantial severance pay for the interruption to their careers, the economic strain the sudden closure and unpaid work the owners expected from them, and their inconvenience and displacement.

Yeah, I admit it. I’m pissed off. I left a lot of friends at MSCM when I retired in 2013. I expected the school to slowly wind down and, eventually, either close or be absorbed by a competitor or just someone who either wanted the facility for a school or someone who wanted the real estate. At no point during the years that I knew them did I expect much from either Jack McNally or Doug Smith or Harry Chalmiers, but I expected more than this. If this turns out to be a ruthless cashout of the real estate and assets, I will not be surprised.