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.

You Haven’t Done Nothin’

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 mine. I was entertained. In a similar conversation earlier, she had said, "Dad, I'm a music reviewer" as a statement of superior expertise. 

There are few things on the planet musicians or artists of any sort fear and despise 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. 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 20 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. 

No matter what you have done, your kids will think you have done nothing.

Backing Away from Students

Teaching humans anything is a frustrating task. Most people are infested with Dunning-Kruger Effect symptoms and are incapable of absorbing information on subjects that they have convinced themselves they are natural experts. By "most," I mean well over the average 50% of mediocrity. Unfortunately, that group are naturally inclined to be in a position where they need all of the educational help on the planet just to survive. They are ones most likely to be in a classroom and most likely to be unteachable.

I experienced a big contrast in local musicians a few weeks ago. It reminded me of why I have developed an “I don’t give a shit” attitude toward most musicians and their music; especially live. At one end has been working on a half-dozen recordings with Leonard McCracken. One of the best things about moving to Red Wing has been my friendship with Leonard. He is an incredibly generous musician/person and one of the nicest people I have ever known.

A few weeks earlier, after hearing him perform at Marie's Underground and knowing the difference between Leonard’s voice and what comes out of a microphone (SM58) with his traditional rock star technique, I carefully broached Len with the idea that eating the mic is only really useful when there is so much noise on stage that you’re just trying to get some damn vocal in the mic over the din of drums and stage bullshit. Playing solo, there is none of that competition and I suggested he could back off a few inches and let the microphone do some of the work. We talked a little about proximity effect and how that distorts the mic’s output (and emphasizes plosives and sibilance) so that the best you can hope from an already mediocre tool, the SM58, was a mediocre-to-awful signal that needed lots of assistance from EQ circuits that also introduce distortion, phase shift, and an output that barely resembled the input. Then I held my breath, realizing that I’d overstepped a few boundaries and probably pissed him off.

He ate it up and asked the kind of questions my favorite students often asked when they discovered that microphones are not a simple tool. He’s totally revised his technique and you can understand what he is saying and singing on any system. The following Friday night, I brought an EV RE18 to Marie's for Leonard to use in a gig there. Holy shit, he just sounded magical even on Beatles songs (which I usually hate) and was having a great time using a real microphone on his own system (which is pretty good). Then I went the other way. Leonard took a break and he asked a friend to do a song or two to hold his audience. The RE18 is hard for even a typical country singer to fuck up, although he gave it a shot. For the first time ever, I could hear his lyrics over a PA and discovered that I didn’t dislike his voice as much as I’d thought.

Leonard’s friend, Esther, was sitting next to me and started asking questions about microphones and technique and I explained a little, although her technique is pretty good in the first place. The country guy came back to the table and I complimented him on how good he sounded. He listened in for a bit and started contradicting me with total bullshit myths about microphones and tossed out a lot of terms he clear misunderstands (polarity patterns, frequency response, the tube mic religion, etc) and it turned pissy for a bit. Eventually, he resorted to “good microphones are too expensive,” which I thought was  hilarious coming from a fairly average guitarist who insists on an expensive guitar but even mostly considers himself a vocalist. Funny, but not even a little unusual.

Music stores make their living off of guitar players who think spending money will fix their playing, but who may never realize an acoustic guitar is, for most of us, just providing an simple accompaniment to our voices and songs and stories. Leonard regularly proves that cheap (<$300) guitars are fine. He has a fine collection of cheap Chinese and South Korean electric and acoustic guitars that our local repair guy says "are killing the sales of expensive brands because Leonard's guitars sound so good." Of course, the real story is that Leonard makes them sound good.

The other guy and I are probably not likely to be friends and I can’t say I give a fuck. I am, however,  using the experience to try to fashion this Wirebender blog piece. The experience did remind me that I am mostly done with teaching. It was plenty hard trying to teach anything technical,. controversial, or complicated to 20-somethings, but it’s almost always impossible to teach anything to people who have never studied a single adult subject, are cursed with Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and are OLD. Since Trump, my tolerance for stupid and stubborn has just shriveled to zip and my ideal retirement home looks better every day. Ignorant is a different case. I have no problem with people not knowing much about a subject. There are thousands of subjects that I know nothing about and about which would love to learn more. That is ignorance and there should be no shame in that. Stupidity is a chosen quality, though. Arrogance is even worse.

The cheap microphone argument leaves me pretty cold though. Yeah, I know your favorite rock stars lip-sync into SM58's on SNL and stage and if faking it with a cheap Shure mic is good enough for them it should be good enough for you. (About a decade ago, there was a brief period where Neumann and Sennheiser replaced the SM58's on the SNL stage and that was the ONLY period in that program's history where the music performers didn't sound awful.)

The problem is garbage-in/garbage-out. You can not "fix" the original signal; although you can remove some of the crappier parts and try to hide the deficiencies with EQ and compression. That's not a fix, that's just lipstick on a pig. Transient response, sensitivity, phase and frequency accuracy, off-axis response, and the collection of microphone characteristics that are even harder to quantify but we "know 'em when we hear 'em" are not fixable. If you've tried any of the microphone modeling programs, you (hopefully) have realized that you can not make a Neumann U87 out of an SM58 recording. Ideally, you start with either a well-known microphone of high quality or, even better, with a precision condenser microphone. You can always reduce the quality of a signal, but fixing it is beyond science or software and not even on the same planet as live music.

The question I'm asking is, if a $3,000 guitar will make your mediocre guitar playing sound better, why wouldn't a $500-1,000 microphone do the same for your voice? Trust me, it will do far more than the guitar could ever hope to do.

POSTSCRIPT: I recently watched John Mayer's "Where the Light Is" video. The effort he puts into selecting clothing, a watch, and his guitars vs the thoughtless decision to sing into a CB mic (the Shure SM58) is telling. Obviously, the recording and mix engineers put a lot of work into cleaning up the vocal mess Mayer dripped into their preamp, but his voice still sounds as muffled, sibilant, and distorted as does everyone else who improperly uses an already defective tool.

Recently, I talked a local songwriter into using my RE18, instead of his SM58 for a live recording of a performance that we recorded and will be sold as part of an artist grant project. I had to do almost nothing to the output of the RE18 to make the vocal stand clearly on top of the mix. The artist has commented several times on how great his voice sounded both during the performance and on the recording. He is now deciding on whether he will be replacing his 58 with either an RE15 or RE20, both of which has has owned for years and didn't realize were great live microphones. So, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.

Ending on A Great Note

In late 2017, I'd pretty much decided that my tech "career" in live music was about wrapped up. Then, a wonderful and generous friend (Thanks Doug!) who knew how much I enjoyed Peter Mayer's music tossed me the FOH gig at Crossings in Zumbrota last August. Doug handed it to me again this year and the odds are good that the June 22 performance at Crossings will be Peter's last Crossings show (Marie is retiring and selling the shop.). I don't have much of an opportunity to work with Peter anywhere else, so my interest in schlepping more gear is rapidly vanishing. (Although why Peter hasn't been a headliner at the Sheldon Theater in Red Wing totally escapes me. He's several times the performer and has a far bigger following than many of the acts the theater has booked in the past few years. More importantly, he has a large local group of dedicated fans who would love to see him in a Sheldon-style setting.) Hell, I'd even pay for that and Snarky Puppy pretty much put an end to my interest in seeing live music in person (From here out, I want my own volume control. I wouldn't trust a live doofus with a battery-powered megaphone.).

The Crossings stage, as you can see, is (or was) one of the rare "listening room" environments left on the planet. Working with Peter is a total throwback to a different, much better age. Peter is as disinterested in getting a perfect monitor mix as Bach or John Coltrane would have been. His total focus in a relatively long and detailed pre-show sound check is working toward a great sound for his audience. If you know me, you might guess that is right down my alley. For that goal, I'd show up, unpaid, ten hours early for a sound check.

Support Live Music and Deafness

 

Entertaining, isn't it? It used to be that "metal concert" was some sort of barometer for 

tasteless, pointless ear-damaging volume. Today, it's just live music everywhere you find it.

A hallmark of a civilized society has always been some sort of concern for the rights, health, and safety of everyone in the society. Here in the USA, we abandoned civilization in the 1980's and never looked back. Reagan and the "greed is good" characters taught a couple generations of mindless, work-slaves that the wealth of a few is a higher goal than the good of many. It has filtered down to every aspect of what remains of our culture. Music, for example; particularly, live music. There was a time, about 20 years ago, when I predicted that "Noise pollution will become the air pollution of today." I was wrong. We went backwards. Today we don't care about air pollution, global warming, economic inequality or insecurity, and noise pollution is practically celebrated.

If you bothered to look at the chart above, you'd notice that pretty much everything we're exposed to in modern life is likely to cause permanent hearing damage. Live music anywhere but in an acoustic (unamplified) environment is hazardous: all amplified live music is hazardous to your hearing health. Is that complicated? Is the risk worth whatever gratification the experience provides? Your mileage is probably different than mine. In my opinion, any live music that uses amplification of any sort better damn well sound at least as good as, and ought to be substantially better than, what I can experience on my car stereo system. Anything less than that is just pointless risk of a fragile hearing mechanism for no justification at all.

In all cases, the only safe way to "enjoy" amplified live music is with significant hearing protection firmly in place. There is absolutely no way to take children to an amplified live music performance that should not be called "criminal child abuse." Children are usually born with terrific hearing and lose it fairly quickly in our modern noise-polluted world. Exposure to the quantity and "quality" of noise a modern sound system produces is flat-out child abuse and should be criminally prosecuted. Personally, I do not understand how the venues, cities, and other adults involved in a well-known medically-unsafe practice are not regulated and prosecuted when they violate public safety, but that's the post-Reagan libertarian nuthouse we live in today.

Common Elements

Once upon a time, I was a college instructor in the “Production Department” of a music school. After the first few years of watching students pass through my classes and recording studio labs, I began to develop my “Theory of Abundance.” After watching what seemed like amazing talents pass through my classrooms, I began to suspect that there are three things of which there are a nearly-infinite supply in the universe: hydrogen, good guitar players, and beautiful young women. (Hopefully, it is equally needless to say that there are more than enough pretty young boys, too?)

Honestly, outside of physics there isn’t much value to take from the understanding that hydrogen is 75% of the mass in the universe. The over-abundance of the other two things should be really informative to a young person starting out in life: you do not want to place all of your bets on being special in a commodity market. Being special requires some rarity. Corn, sow bellies, soybeans, car tires, oil, coal, electricity, electronic components, cell phones, computers, and guitars are, mostly, commodities. That means one example of any of those things will serve the purpose as well as any other example. In a rational world, that would mean that the price of any of those things would be the same and as low as the cost of production allows.

In the case of over-produced farm products, the price is artificially held high to maintain the rural status quo. In the case of musicians and music, the price appears to be heading for the dead bottom because there are no powerful 1%’er special interests who have the money to buy off our state and federal congresscritters who could easily create the same artificially high price structure that they have built for energy, oil and coal, ethanol, cell phone providers, corn and soybeans, meat and dairy, exports, housing, and medical industries from insurance companies to Big Pharma. Don’t look for help from that direction, there just isn’t enough money in the industry to create much interest and the money that was in that business model is going away and most of it is long-gone.