Product Review: Steven Slate Audio VSX Headphone

One of the never-ending holy grails of recording studio equipment is a reliable, predictably transferable-to-any-sound-system, studio monitoring system.  A somewhat new product (currently on version 5.1) from Steven Slate Audio, the VSX Headphone system, claims to have solved that problem with emulations of a variety of recording studio, club, and vehicle acoustic environments, well-known and respected speaker systems, several high end car stereo systems, and a pile of typical studio headphones.  This emulation tactic comes on top of a trend that was started with IR reverb plugins, the Line6 guitar amplifier emulations, microphone emulations, and electronically tunable room acoustics.  Now, supposedly, Steven Slate Audio has solved the monitor and room acoustics problems with a pair of “custom made” headphones and plug-in software.  

 This magic grail of studio design has been around a LOOOOOONG time.  Recording studios have cycled through JBL 4311s, Yamaha NS10s, Auratone Sound Cubes, audiophile speakers, and custom studio monitors that cost more than my house in the never-ending search for a monitoring system that can produce reliable mixes, reasonably reproduced on any speaker system and room acoustics from an audiophile’s man-cave to car stereos to cheap earbuds.  That, of course, is an impossible task, but since we all know our work is going to be listened to (if we’re lucky) on great and grubby equipment we hope it will, at least, sound decent everywhere. 

Because I am cheap, I tested the entry-level VSX Essentials system, on Black Friday sale (for at least a month) at $249.  The essentials system includes the phones, the VSX software, and a list of speaker systems and acoustic environments (Steven’s Private Mix Room, Sonoma Studios, LA Club, Luxury SUV Car, 770 Headphones Model, Pod Headphones Model, and HD Linear 1 & 2).  The next level is the Platinum Edition (on Black Friday sale for $349) which includes more emulated studios, nightclubs, car systems, and headphones.  You can, also, buy some of the emulations to add to the Essentials system.  I was skeptical and, without the money-back guarantee (“This is a risk-free purchase. If your mixes aren't better in 30 days, you'll get your money back.”), I wouldn’t have bothered with the hunt for studio magic.  I have a reasonably reliable pair of studio monitors (serviceable, if not spectacular, 20-year-old Tannoy Active Reveals and similar vintage Yamaha HS5s) and I’m used to them and my moderately-treated room.  I have fond memories of larger, better-equipped studios where I’ve worked in the past and, if the VSX was capable of “putting me in” a similar room, I was ready to go there. 

And, at least for me, the VSX system turned out to be a collection of fairly predictable tactics rather than software-firmware magic: lots of phase-and-reverb-related faux-acoustic manipulations, EQ, and dynamics manipulations.  The phones are nothing special and the construction is cheap and, based on other’s comments, not particularly durable.  Without the software, I’d much rather be wearing my 22-year-old Ultrasone HFI-700 phones both for the comfort and the fidelity.  With the software, I was unimpressed with the aural difference between the speaker emulations within a particular studio (near, mid, and far-field speakers and placements).  I’ve worked in large studios and I know the differences are dramatic and that is not a word I’d use, for example, between the three systems in either the Steven’s Private Mix Room or the Sonoma Studios emulations.  I, in no way, felt that the emulations gave me the feel of being in a larger, better-equipped and professionally-treated room. 

At least for me, I quickly determined that the problem with the car emulations is that I don’t listen to my mixes in the car sitting in a dead quiet environment.  The real test is to see how the mix works when the vehicle is on the road, in traffic, and competing with the distractions of driving.  I doubt there is any reliable way to simulate that environment.  I have never been in a car that sounded anything like the “Luxury SUV Car” model that comes with the Essentials system. 

The online magazine, Headphonesty, recently published a painfully honest article titled, “New Study Reveals Why Most Audiophiles Still Fall for Snake Oil Without Realizing It.”  Mostly, there was little-to-nothing in the article that was new to me or doubtful, except a hilarious claim from Benchmark Media stating that, “audiophile cable marketing ‘doesn’t exist in the pro-audio/commercial studio world because it wouldn’t work on engineers.’”  Trust me, it works and always has.  In my opinion, the raving positive reviews of the Steven Slate VSX system are perfect examples of so-called “engineers” desperately wanting a piece of equipment to solve incredibly complicated problems.  The company has put a full-court-press on getting positive reviews from influencers and the clinging remains of pro audio magazines.  From my own past experience doing that kind of work, I suspect a lot of free headphones have been handed out to obtain many those “professional” endorsements. 

After a week of experimenting, I returned the Steven Slate VSX Essentials to my favorite online pro audio vendor and received a quick refund.  Almost as quickly Steven Slate disabled the VSX software from my iLok account, as if I’d want to try using the software with better headphones?  Actually, I had tried that before sending the gear back, using my Ultrasones and a pair of suspiciously similar-looking IKT noise-cancelling Bluetooth phones I’d recently purchased for non-professional use.  Not surprisingly, the VSX software and my Ultrasones was incompatible, but the IKT phones not only looked and felt like the VSX phones but the emulations worked slightly better than the SS VSX phones, with the IKT phones in noise-cancelling mode.  Go figure. 

When Music Was “Great?”

 I am solidly a 60’s, Boomer, hippy-era guy.  But I’ve been blessed with knowing young musicians my whole life and, thanks to them, I’ve been drug (usually kicking, whining, and complaining) into several generations of music and musicians.  One of the side effects of that life experience has been to doubt that there was anything earth-shakingly different about my generation of musicians and music.  To the point that, now, when I hear claims along that line, a bunch of contrary evidence springs to mind in the form of Billboard’s Hot 100 and, especially, the #1 hits over the years.  Mostly, the list of songs contaminating that top spot are embarrassing, regardless of the period. 

My list of the worst 1960’s songs to reach Billboard’s #1 on the charts:

·       1960: El Paso (Marty Robbins), Running Bear (Johnny Preston), Teen Angel (Mark Dinning), Alley Oop (Hollywood Argyles), Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini (Brian Hyland), and Mr. Custer (Larry Verne).  It’s not awful, but it’s sure not some kind of hip rock and roll evidence: Theme from a Summer Place (Percy Faith) was on the top of the charts for 9 weeks.  Elvis had three hyper-schmaltzy bits of tripe that stayed on the top of the charts for 14 painful weeks.  I was 12 in 1960 and nothing on the radio in western Kansas, other than the Everly’s Cathy’s Clown and Chubby Checker’s The Twist, interested me at all.  In 1960, pop music was aimed at a different generation, sometimes called “The Lost Generation” (for good reason).

·       1961: Wonderland by Night (Bert Kamphert), Calcutta (Lawrence Welk), Blue Moon (The Marcells), Moody River (Pat Boone), and Big Bad John (Jimmy Dean) were the absolute worst of the #1’s, but, honestly, most of that year’s pop chart was a painful musical disaster.  I, accidentally, discovered jazz in 1961, through the Columbia Record Club, and most of pop music suddenly sounded worse than boring. 

·       1962: Just a bad year for pop music in general.  You can pick the worst from that year, yourself, from Wikipedia’s list of top of the pops crap.  Elvis’ #1 was Good Luck Charm, a bit of tripe that should have cost him any claim for the King of Rock and Roll.

·       1963: The year the Beatles “arrived” in the USA (in late December) ended with The Singing Nun’s painful drivel-ish Dominique in #1.  Other than 12-year-old “Little Stevie Wonder’s” amazing Fingertips, there wasn’t much good to say about popular music that year.  Pop mush was so drenched in simple drivel, mostly instrumental, that it encouraged 14-year-old me to start playing in bands (“Even I can play that simple crap.”). Early that year, I discovered the miracle of AM radio “skip” and on rare and special nights I could tune in Chicago’s WLS and I “discovered” R&B (aka “race music”  in those dismal days) and started hearing music that “even I” couldn’t play or sing under any conditions. . 

·       1964: Musically, it wouldn’t be unfair to say the 60’s began in 1964.  The Beatles topped the chart six times with some of the absolute worst songs (for example, Love Me Do) for 18 dismal weeks, but Lorne Greene (from “Bonanza”) lowered the taste bar dramatically with Ringo.  I’m going to blame the sales for that awful noise on “The Lost Generation,” but it stained us all. James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) crawled to #3 after two months, smothered under garbage like Leader of the Pack, Mr. Lonely, and Ringo.

·       1965: No question, pop music took a turn for the better in 1965 with the Rolling Stones arriving on the charts and something resembling Rock and Roll finally making a consistent breakthrough in record sales.  Still, Petula Clark’s Downtown held the #1 spot for two weeks, Sonny and Cher atonally whined I Got You Babe in #1 for three weeks, and Herman’s Hermits Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter and Freddie and the Dreamers I'm Telling You Now made it clear that the “British Invasion” wouldn’t be painless. Papa’s Brand New Bag made it all the way to #8 that year. 

·       1966: This is the year that I always point to when I’m ridiculing “the old music is best” claim.  My posterchild for pure pop crap is ? and the Mysterians’ 96 Tears,  a two-chord piece of crap that stuck on the charts for 15 freakin’ weeks and at #1 for two weeks!  Both the song and the even-worse-album went gold that year. It's a Man's Man's Man's World  crept up to #8, idling under throw-away garbage like Winchester Cathedral, Last Train to Clarksville, and I’m A Believer.

·       1967: Coulda been a contender.  Jimi Hendrix 1^st single, Hey Joe/Stone Free, almost crept into Billboard’s Hot 100 list and James Brown’s Cold Sweat made it to #8, while the Monkees’ I’m A Believer, Kind of a Drag (Buckinghams), Incense and Peppermints (Strawberry Alarm Clock), and (ironically) Something Stupid (Nancy and Frank Sinatra) peaked the Billboard chart.  Network television’s made-up rock band, the Monkees, held the top of the charts for 10 awful weeks.

·       1968: Another of my favorite crapband hits stuck at #1 for a whole week: Green Tambourine {The Lemon Pipers). Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower made it to #20, his only top-40 single, although the Electric Ladyland LP was the #1 album for a bit.  Love is Blue (Paul Mauriat), This Guy's in Love with You {Herb Alpert}, and Harper Valley PTA {Jeannie C. Riley} were all pretty solid examples of the awful trip that we foisted on the world as “good music.” 

·       1969: The last year the 60s had to redeem its reputation for coolness and Tommy James and the Shondells’ crushed that hope with Crimson and Clover with as strong assist from Tommy Roe’s Dizzy (along with a really stupid video), the incredibly schmaltzy Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet (Henry Mancini), despicable one-hit-wonder bits of tripe with In the Year 2525 (Zager and Evans), Sugar, Sugar (The Archies), and Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye (Steam).  A Vegas-bound 33-year-old Elvis dumped his last #1, Suspicious Minds, on a tasteless public. 

And that wraps up the worst of the 1960’s #1 Greatest Dumpster Dive.  There were a lot of even more awful songs that lingered in the Top 10 through that period and some really fantastic music that never scratched the surface of Billboard’s Hot 100.  SF author Ted Sturgeon once said “90% of everything is crap” and I have always thought he was an optimist.  That goes for things that are the most popular at the time, too. 

When I was 11 years old, RCA issued an Elvis record titled “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t be Wrong.”  It would be hard to make a dumber, more easily disproved claim than that.  The ten songs on that gold record are about as forgettable as any pop music on my worst of the #1’s list.  To this western Kansas kid, at the time, everything about that record came to prove one of my favorite irrational arguments: the ad populum fallacy, “a claim that, if many people believe something to be true, then it must be true.”  History has proved that, so consistently, to be a fallacy that the opposite claim is likely closer to the truth. 

I Hate Practice (but I can’t hate the results)

I’m in an online music group that started at the very beginning of COVID in early 2020 and has continued to meet one to three times a week (depending on weather and medical/social conditions) since.  The group consists of three wonderful musicians— Stu Anderson, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett— . . . and me.  For the most part, this group is my musical dream and has been ever since I saw Cleavon Little in the 1985 movie, “The Gig.”  We have zero ambitions for our group, nicknamed “Downstream Consequences” (DC), other than an excuse to get together and play music and hangout together for an hour or so.

Because I like the “work,” I have been recording some of our sessions and putting the music into an archive that is just for us.  Mostly, just for me: because nobody else ever listens to it after I’ve played the “finished” work for the group after we’ve wrapped up work on a song.  That might sound a bit disrespectful, but it has actually been incredibly liberating because for most of my life I’ve recorded, mixed, and even produced music for other people with the intent of making them happy with the outcome.  With DC’s songs, I just have to make myself happy.

Back in mid-2022, Stu (who has a fair classical background) was dissatisfied with the music we’d been playing.  So, we took on a couple of songs more in his familiar territory: “Rondeau” and one of my personal favorites “Sentimental Walk.”  If you follow the links, you’ll find that we didn’t exactly play them as classical songs: there is improvisation and a rhythm section.  But (and this is not a small thing) I had to relearn how to read music and practice doing that for several weeks while we worked out these two songs. 

[You know how to make a guitar player shut up and stop playing?  Put sheet music in front of him.]

I am the poster child for that joke.  I played trumpet in school from 5^th grade until early in my junior year of high school, but when it became obvious to me that I would never be Dizzy Gillespie and I discovered that I could fake it a lot easier on electric guitar and bass.  And I hadn’t made much of an effort to read sheet music since . . . until February, 2022 when we started working on “Rondeau.”  Reading music is, in no way, like riding a bicycle.  Not much of it came back easily and, after we wrapped up “Sentimental Walk” I didn’t keep at it and it’s gone again.  Which brings us to the point of this essay, I am fiercely disinclined to exercise, practice, study, or do much of anything that doesn’t come easily.  I suspect that isn’t unusual.

When I mentioned this trait to an old friend, he reminded me that, when I lived in California in the 80s, I lifted weights, walked and ran, played outdoor racquetball, swam in the ocean, bicycled daily, and had a pretty regular yoga practice.  “Exercise,” he claimed.  Some of those things—playing in the ocean and racquetball—I’d argue are play, not exercise.  Bicycling was exercise, but mostly cheap transportation in California’s year-around spring and summer weather.  But the things that are clearly exercise were done for a purpose: I swam because I was a scuba Divemaster and I needed to have basic water-skills.  The other stuff had a direct purpose, too.  Every Sunday for 9 years, I played beach basketball on several fairly competitive SoCal courts.  I have none of the physical gifts of a basketball player: I’m 5’9”, I can’t run fast, jump at all, I have mediocre reflexes and no court sense, and, at best, I was a fair outside shooter.  What I could do was “take a punch.”  Meaning, I could muscle my way into the paint and shove competitors out of their comfort zone, which usually required getting hit by elbows, shoulders, and body-slams.  In 1992, I moved to Colorado and within a couple of years my entire exercise routine collapsed and it took me a while to figure out why that happened.  I didn’t need it anymore.  I’d quit playing basketball.  When I didn’t need to be strong to shove 20-year-old, 6’5” guys away from the goal, I didn’t need to be strong at all.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve tried a bunch of exercise routines, just for the sake of exercise, and none of the have stuck with me: walking outside or one a treadmill every day, swimming 5-times-a-week, weight lifting or exercise machines, even some of the sports I used to play.  Without a purpose, other than “staying fit” or losing weight, I quickly lose interest. 

And so it goes with relearning how to “read music.”  Without an end goal, it’s just exercise.  I know!  “It’s good for you” to exercise your body and brain.  My response to that is “for what purpose?”  I have never been a knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge sort of person.  As an electronics technician and engineer, physics theory of electron flow, atomic structure, and the chemistry and metallurgy of tubes, semiconductors, and basic components was never useful to me and, so, I blew through that part of my engineering education with no intention of remembering or understanding any of it.  A few years ago, I took a college chemistry class, on-line, and found myself blowing off all of those same things until I realized that was the whole damn reason for trying to understand chemistry!  Sadly, I did nothing with it and what I learned has vanished into the haze of my stubborn, thick, tired, old brain. 

Currently, Downstream Consequences is working on a song that is somewhat difficult to sing, mostly because the lyrical delivery is necessarily a very syncopated rhythm.  Geoff Emerick would have dismissed me as a “useless hack,”  but he had the same opinion of George Harrison and a similar deluded self-importance toward George Martin.  Generally, I sing a verse the way it feels to me at the moment, which is a fault in a professional studio musician.  My days as a wannabe musician ended in the late 70s when I started a recording studio and discovered that every guitar player who came into my room was better than I’d ever hope to be.  And I quit playing, entirely, until we were stranded in Elephant Butte, New Mexico in 2013-14 while I troubleshot godawful Volkswagen Eurovan electronics.  For five months, I had nothing to do but work on the Eurovan, search the internet for advice on working on the Eurovan, hunt for Eurovan parts, beat myself up for buying a Eurovan riding my dirt bike on the sands of Elephant Butte Lake, and play one of the most awful guitars ever foisted on a sucker public.  Five months of that and I came home slightly less embarrassed by my marginal musical ability. 

But this current musical selection plays to all of my weaknesses: including needing practice.  Yeah, I know it’s good for me.  Practice and learning new things fends off a collection of aging mental diseases, including laziness.  But I still hate practice, exercise, and learning things for the sake of learning things.  It’s who I am. 

#1: An Old Fart’s Musical Memories

While the country burns and Trump and Republicans are ripping up the Constitution to use as fragile, single-ply toilet paper, I’m distracting myself with musical moments from my long history.

This memory was inspired by a friend describing his experience in the audience at the Sheldon Theater with the Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel band in Red Wing, MN this past Thursday.  Back in the mid-70s, I was struggling to keep my little family afloat, living in Central City, Nebraska, working 90-100 hours/week at something under $5/hour, installing and servicing electronic scale systems, and playing in a couple of cover bands in my “spare time.”  A recent high school dropout, Mike Gallusha, worked for me, mostly doing unskilled shop jobs and occasionally travelling with me on field service trips, and playing drums in a couple of the cover bands I fronted.  He was largely responsible for one of the first moments in my adult life where a young person drug me (kicking and whining) into another generation of pop music. 

In the mid-70s, all I knew about the Allman Brothers was the “At Fillmore East” double-album and I was only half-a-fan of that recording.  By “half,” I mean the instrumental half.  Neither Greg Allman or Dickey Betts’ vocals did anything for me.  So, when I transferred the two records to reel-to-reel tape, I edited out all of the vocals and turned “Fillmore East” into an instrumental-only album. 

Mike, on the other hand, was a true fan.  Early in his life, Mike took some drum lessons from Peter Erskine and, as I remember, Mike was in occasional communication with Peter that gave him an early heads-up when someone special was coming to Nebraska.  However it happened, Mike knew Allman Brothers tickets would be on sale at the Omaha Civic Auditorium before the concert was announced. And I would be passing through Omaha that day on my way to a service call in western Iowa.  He asked me to grab a couple of tickets to the concert, for himself and his wife, on my way through the city.  As I remember, again, the tickets were around $8/each, in the middle of the 1^st balcony, about 70 degrees from stage right, and I bought 4 tickets; so my wife and I could go, too.  That sounds cheap, but it took me almost a full work day to earn $32 back then. 

 

The concert was on January 16, 1976, at the Omaha Civic Auditorium, which was a pretty decent venue, when the stage was properly oriented, which would cost the performers about ¼ of the room’s capacity by putting the stage at one side of the basketball/hockey court instead of at one end.  I, once again, had work in Iowa that day and ended up back in Omaha about an hour before the concert began.  The tickets had been advertised for less than a day on the local FM rock station, KOMA, and the concert was sold out before the ticket booth closed that day (long before the days of online concert tickets or even the cursed and dreaded Ticketmaster).  So, I was lucky to be there at the right time. 

The day of the concert, scalpers were roaming the area in front of the auditorium waving tickets at the unfortunate fans who hadn’t been lucky enough to know about the show before it was sold out.  Scalped prices started at nearly $100 early that afternoon and started climbing rapidly shortly before Mike, his wife, and Ms Day showed up a few minutes before the doors opened. 

I mentioned to Mike that, if we sold our tickets, we could buy every record the band ever recorded, go out to dinner that night anywhere in town, and still have a week’s salary in hand when we got home.  Mike took his pair of tickets and started walking to the door, saying, “You can sell yours, if you want.”  A bit confused, because Mike made a LOT less money than me, I followed him through the turnstile and handed over what felt like a lost fortune to the gate keeper. 

The opening act was a godawful southern rock disaster aptly named “Grinderswitch.”   There were lots of cowboy hats waving in the air, hog calls and more “yeehaws” than I ever hoped to experience again, and, outside of a Trump rally, the lowest IQ crowd I have ever seen, let alone experienced.  Their set seemed interminable and it was awful.  I felt like I had made the dumbest financial decision of my life to that point (I would prove that to be wrong, several times, in the future.) Finally, the yokel noise stopped and Grinderswitch staggered off of the stage.  I was ready to leave.

We didn’t have any place to go and the Allman’s crew repurposed the stage quickly and the lights went down as the band found their places via Marshall amp pilot lights and roadie assistance.  The opening chords of “High Falls” filtered through the background noise of the crowd. The band was touring to support their new album, “Win, Lose, or Draw” and “High Falls” was the only instrumental on that great, under-rated album (still my favorite of all Allman Brothers records).  The cowboy hats disappeared, the audience quickly quieted down, the “yeehaws” and hog callers seemed to dissolve when the 3-piece rhythm section and Lamar Williams’ started playing.  I swear, in less than a minute, the crowd IQ jumped at least 30 points, from sub-human to college graduates and Miles Davis fans.  From that moment on, the night was absolutely magical. 

I have searched the internet for a picture of the mid-70s Allman’s touring sound system with no luck.  It was a variation of the Dead’s Wall of Sound with a wall of front-loaded speakers behind the band and two large arcs of speakers at both corners of the front of the stage.  There was a Front of House mixer toward the back of the floor level of the audience, dead center, and another pair of FOH boards on the 1^st balcony level, about 45^o off of center, probably controlling the two smaller stacks of speakers at the stage corners.  I had never experienced a sound like that night at the Civic Center and I wandered around the auditorium to see if there were any dead or lo-fi spots.  That show was the inspiration for the equipment and live music sound systems my partner and I would build for our company, Wirebender Audio Systems, and how I would run sound for over the next 40 years.  I read somewhere that the band paid $18,000 per show for the sound system and their performance fee was $36,000 per night. 

The Allman Brothers Band didn’t keep up that high standard for long. Less than 5 years later, my company would provide some of the backline and the stage monitor system for an Allman Brothers Band show in Lincoln, NE.  By then, Greg was solidly into his dope addict routine and it was Dickey Bett’s band.  That was a totally uninspiring show and a disappointment in every respect, other than having the pleasure of standing a few feet from Butch Trucks throughout the show, one of the best drummers who ever walked the planet.  Still, that 1976 show changed my life for the better and I am lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. 

Reading Biographies

Be careful of whom you idolize, you may become them.

A recently retired friend, who had a lifetime of serious academic and theological study, has resolved to “catch up” on popular culture by binge reading the biographies and autobiographies of a host of 50s-70s rock stars.  I have been the unwitting and, mostly, unwilling recipient of many of his books after he’s finished them.  First, I try to avoid books made from paper.  I am old, but not so old that I feel the need to “smell the pages” or any of that nonsense.  I don’t have a manual typewriter, adding machines, cassette tapes or floppy disks, a VHS or Betamax player or tapes, but my wife does still keep phone books.  I do have a “home phone,” but it’s a VOIP (OOMA) system and it is way cheaper than a cell phone and OOMA’s software does a wonderful job of screening out the scammers who want to sell me overpriced life insurance, windows, a cemetery plot or cremation plan, and security updates for my Windows computers.  I do read a lot of books, but I mostly read “books” on a pair of eReaders (a KOBO and a Kindle).  The Kindle is for library books I will get around to, eventually, since as long as it isn’t connected to the internet (in “Airplane Mode”) I can keep library books “checked out” indefinitely.  Second, after reading a loaned copy of Keith Richard’s “Life,” I have been trying to scrub those stories and images out of my skull with a metal scouring pad for almost a year.  Likewise for The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who's John Entwistle and Phil Collin’s Not Dead Yet: The Memoir. 

[Admission: I did enjoy This Wheel's on Fire, Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, and even bought a copy for my KOBO reader.  I’d believe Levon over anything Robbie Robertson said about any subject, including guitar playing.  Having heard as much as I could stand of Robbie Robertson’s solo work, it’s obvious that his “creative” output was on the business side of The Band.  There isn’t a single Band song that wouldn’t be improved by the deletion of Robertson’s predictable guitar solos.]

I was not much of a scholar during my early semi-adult years and I don’t have any drive to “catch up” on what I missed.  Mostly, I’m happy to have avoided most of the bear traps society set for my generation of skeptics and creative people.  I avoided drugs, mostly thanks to the examples set by friends and artists I knew who didn’t.  I lucked into a career that supported my family and our hobbies and habits for almost 60 years and left Ms. Day and I with a decent retirement and a modest home in a small Minnesota town.  We’re debt-free and our kids have been self-supporting, functional adults for more than 30 years.  On the other side of that, I have lost friends and family to drugs and alcohol, suicide, poor choices and just being in the wrong place at the wrong time that resulted in their lives being wreaked by the highest incarceration rate among developed countries and a “justice system” that only “works” for the rich, powerful, and white.  I was on the technical support sidelines for a lot of musical careers and a lot more failed attempts at that brass ring.  For a lot of years, I was a lot more interested in the gear in recording studios than the people on either side of the glass.  Still am, in many ways, but I don’t believe in the “magic” behind pretty much anything claimed by anyone pretending to possess “golden ears.”  Engineering and technology have come a long ways since the supposed “golden years” of recording and music and old gear mostly leaves me cold, unless you’re willing to pay me my old $225/hour rate to repair it. 

I have also been blessed to know a few brilliant people really well.  I was lucky enough just to have been in the room when other brilliant people were talking, creating music, inventing, teaching, or just being their incredibly nice selves.  In my life, I have found that the best people are “best” in every way that matters.  That experience beats reading the edited version of lives, usually mostly written by either ghost writers or fans.  I found that doing a lot of stuff, often wildly unrelated, accidentally brought me into contact with people I never imagined getting to meet.  George Massenburg, for example, was a keynote speaker at a Students’ Audio Engineering Society conference in St. Louis and I was a faculty AES advisor.  During an instructors’ dinner, George and I hit it off a bit and I hope to remember those conversations until I die.  Thanks to Mr. Massenburg, I have multitrack copies of a couple dozen classic rock recordings for which he was an engineering participant and I have learned a lot just from playing with re-mixing those recordings.  While I was in California in the 80s, I met several dozen almost-famous musicians, a few famous-only-to-musicians musicians, and a couple of “stars” that most people might recognize.  Some were assholes, some were incredibly humble and decent (talkin’ about you, Larry Carlton and George), and most were no more special than the players, technicians, and engineers I worked with in every other area of my life and work.  Luck has as much to say in success as talent and being lucky enough to be born rich makes pretty much everything a whole lot easier. 

I especially appreciate listening to music I had some part in creating.  I rarely listen to any radio, outside of NPR for news and interviews, but when I’m in my car I listen to a 256G USB stick full of my favorite music and a fair bit of that is music I’ve had some part in recording; either as a player or a recording tech.  I often get a perverted kick out of knowing that, out of 8B people on the planet, I’m likely the only person listening to that song at that moment.  There aren’t many of those people who I don’t admire on several levels.  Nobody will ever write their biographies and, if they have written autobiographies, few will read them, but they are every bit as “special” as whoever is at the top of the charts today and I appreciate their talents, their generosity and courage, and their music. 

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. 😉