AI Versus Me

Artificial Intelligence is somewhere in practically every media, entertainment, and conversation today.  I went on record, a long time ago, saying that “I’m not worried about AI, but LI [Low Intelligence] is gonna kill us all” and I still believe that.  That said, so far, AI’s “contribution” to anything more sophisticated than a Google search algorithm has been dismal-to-dangerously stupid (LI, even). 

When it comes to music, though, especially popular music the bar is so low that I suspect AI will be quite successful at creating pleasant background noises.  Yes, that’s where the bar is set for most of pop music.  While I am no longer involved in any part of the professional audio industry, I still get the industry rags: mostly Mix Magazine and Tape Op Magazine with a few other freebies showing up intermittently.  If nothing else, those magazines tip me off on what is supposedly new and cool, while they flail helplessly at their primary purpose, selling me new equipment and software.  I have too much of both already. For the most part, most of the new music discussed in the industry magazines leaves me sub-zero cold.  For that matter, that is true for most old pop music.  I’m a firm believer in 1950’s SF author Ted Sturgeon’s rule, “90% of everything is crap” and I still think Ted was an optimist.

For example, this month’s Mix Magazine does a several page, detailed description of the creation of Lily Allen’s new record, “West End Girl.”  (If you’re interested, you can read the article by following this link.)  According to the article, a lot of creativity and work went into the recording, but it sounds suspiciously repetitious and the production is not unlike, or superior to, work I’ve heard from dozens of regional pop artists done in their home studios.  [You can decide for yourself without investment listening to this YouTube link.]  The song, “Ruminating,” is a good example and is about the most AI-sounding thing I have ever heard.  If it shows up in the soundtrack of “Matrix 101: Doing Everything the Same Way All Over Again” I want it noted that I said it first here. 

On the AI end, Producer/YouTube dude Rick Beato, who absolutely hates AI, in a show about an AI artist, Sienna Rose, does a pretty good job of showing how little space there is between an AI “artist” and some human, but very similar and equally derivative, pop artists.   That wasn’t his intention, but it was a pretty solid side-effect.  The problem with Rick’s argument is that there is a long history of pop music that is soul-less, repetitive, imitative, and boring and much of the worst of that ilk have been hits.  Not only is the music blah, but pop music listeners are not in any way discerning. 

There are many areas of “art,” industry, science, medicine, law enforcement and legal system administration, transportation, and clerical tasks that AI will very likely do as well or better than human competition.  Since the 1980s, when I first heard about autonomous cars, I’ve argued that it wouldn’t take more than a Zilog Z80 processor with 64kb of memory and a 5Meg hard drive to outmaneuver 99% of American drivers. 

In general, and on average, humans suck at complex tasks requiring actual multitasking and computers excel at those same kinds of chores.  Our “justice” system is plagued with issues as blatant as judges issuing harsher penalties before lunch, than after, to the obvious fact that rich people have a totally different set of legal rules than the rest of us.  Doctors are overwhelmed with information and responsibilities and, as their numbers shrink (Thanks to Reagan’s idiot tax changes.) and workload increases and their patient data flow exponentially increases, AI will be moving from providing assistance to making decisions.  Electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering decisions and designs are becoming more AI-driven every year.  Everyone from self-publishing authors to book publishers are resorting to AI-generated artwork due to speed, flexibility, and necessity.  (Watch for my next essay.)  Currently AI is used for 5–10% of movie CG generation and that will increase exponentially in the next few years.  Pop music just isn’t anywhere near as complicated or, usually, creative an enterprise as any of those tasks. 

However, nobody (almost nobody, anyway) is likely to want to pay money to attend an AI concert and we’ve already suffered through disco and we’re not likely to go back there soon.  Musicians, live and locally, are not likely to be inconvenienced by AI music and that might not mean much change for 99% of music “artists.” 

How Idea “Compounded Interest” Works

 Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

In the late 90s, I created three Google Blogger blogs: The Rat’s Eye View, Wirebender Audio Rants, and Geezer with a Grudge.  The Rat’s Eye view was, originally, going to be a repository for a collection of articles I had written in my position as a freelance manufacturing/management consultant with Productivity, Inc. (A long dead manufacturing consulting company out of Temecula, CA.)  That gig didn’t last long, mostly because I was disgusted by the executives I worked with as a consultant and moved on to other money-making ventures.  But I kept writing in The Rat’s Eye, even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention.  About the same time, I had become a regular contributor to a regional motorcycle magazine, The Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and my column was called “Geezer with A Grudge.”  I almost always wrote more articles than the magazine could use and I started storing my “extras” in the Geezer blog.  A few years later, I started working, part time, at a music college, first as a technical support consultant and, later, as an instructor.  I also had three music-related one-man businesses that I called “Wirebender Audio Services.”  So, to promote those businesses, I started Wirebender Audio Rants.

I haven’t written much about motorcycles since I had to quit riding, last year, for reasons of old age.  So, I haven’t paid much attention to that blog’s statistics.  Today, I discovered that sometime ago the Geezer blog past 2 million views (2,028,204, as of today, in fact) and is averaging about 6500 views per month!  So, I checked the other blogs and found that The Rat’s Eye View, my least likely candidate for readers had 393,543 views and for the past year has been averaging 3500 views per month and Wirebender Audio Rants and averaged 9100 views per month and a total of 332,501 views for the blog’s lifetime. 

For a while, Google’s Ad Sense actually paid money for advertising links in the blog and the Geezer blog made me an average of $100/month for the advertising hits.  A few years ago, Google decided to keep all but a few pennies of the advertising revenue to themselves and I deleted Ad Sense from all of my blogs.  That was several (about 10) years ago and, since then I just write for the excuse H.L. Menken gave, “for the same reason cows give milk.” 

The point I lamely tried to make with this essay’s title was that many things that we do, creatively and without much hope of notice, can pay some fun dividends if you last long enough.  Way back in late 2020, I was still writing fairly regular Geezer columns and paying attention to the numbers.  I was pretty impressed with myself when that blog made it to 1,000,000 hits.  I know that’s pretty lame in a world where a Tik Tok or drunks-in-a-bar YouTube “influencer” can, apparently, easily gather 1,000,000 followers.  My most “popular” blog, the Geezer, has a grand total of 90 followers and The Rat’s Eye has 2 and Wirebender has 14.  I’d be embarrassed by those lame numbers, except that . . . I’m not. 

My comparatively new Substack page, “T.W. Day Stories and Rants on Random Subjects,” has 24 “subscribers” (all free) and that page has had about 6,400 hits since it started in December of 2023.  It has ben a slow, somewhat exponential, reader growth and I’ve made-little-to-no effort at promoting my page.  My “biggest” month had a little over 900 hits.  Every source I know of claims that reading isn’t something that many people bother with today.  My wife, more typically, gets practically all of her knowledge from YouTube, which is a sure way to drive me from any room or gathering.  I really don’t want to think about how many people use Tik Tok for that purpose.  I never expected to be read as much as I’ve been on any of my Blogger blogs and I’m delighted with the slow progress of my Substack page.  I’m incredibly grateful to everyone, even the critics, who has take the time, exercised the patience, and kept a rare skill alive by reading my essays. 

Gratefully,

T.W. Day

“I’m An American” (also 😊, me too)

 Bruce Springsteen’s song, “The Streets of Minneapolis” came out of the gate swinging and smacked Donny’s fragile ego right in the balls.  In “response,” Pedo President came out moaning, “White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson shared in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities — not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information. The media should cover how Democrats have refused to work with the administration, and instead, opted to provide sanctuary for these criminal illegals’ and Pedo himself whined back with a limp-wristed slap, calling Springsteen “dumb as a rock” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” (I guess Trump thinks he’s an expert on “dried out prunes,” since he has to look at one in the mirror while some poor makeup “artist” slathers orange paint on his face.)

But even a biased right-wing source like Forbes Magazine has been forced to admit, “Bruce Springsteen’s ICE Protest Song Soars To No. 1” and not just in Minnesota or the USA but in 19 countries and counting.  Bruce took his rage and channeled it into an anthem that people are singing around the world and in some very unusual places.  Fairly often, I volunteer at our local hospital and last Friday, as I drove to my “shift” at the hospital, I was listening to “The Streets of Minneapolis” in my car.  It put me in a good mood, which has been rare the past year.  As I was pushing my cart through the hospital, the song was a total earworm and I have never enjoyed the stuck song syndrome more.  In one of the clinic’s departments a nurse who I often talk to when I’m doing that job asked, “What’s got you in such a good mood?” 

I said, “I have a song in my heart and it’s moving my feet, too.”  She wanted to know what the song was and I asked, “Are you sure you want to know?”  She did and I played the chorus of “Minnesota” and, in less than a line in, she and two other nurses started singing along with Bruce and the E Street Band, “Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice, singing through the bloody mist.  We'll take our stand, for this land, and the stranger in our midst.  Here in our home, they killed and roamed, in the winter of '26.  We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.” 

If you are living under a fucking rock and haven’t heard this new anthem for protest, freedom, and getting off of your dead ass (if you’re American) and standing on your hind legs and doing something, here it is:

In early 2020, friends and I started playing music online through a couple of online, real-time music collaboration services (initially Jamkazam, currently Sonobus) and that resulted in e writing my first original tune since the late 1970s, “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore.”  The constant barrage of Republican lies during the early days of COVID and as the 2020 election approached “inspired” me to write a second song, “I’m An American (Lie to Me).”  The bullshit was so intense I actually made a slight attempt to move this song into public view with a YouTube video.  Last I knew it was on a few of the music streaming services, but I haven’t kept up with that because it’s not worth anything other than some kind of ego boost.  Bruce’s song, in 4 days, has 368,000 hits and my song, in 5 years, has 368.  We’re not in the same league.

However, when I was ranting about how great “Streets of Minneapolis” is to a friend, he told me he thought “I’m An American” was at least as good.  It isn’t, but I’m not ashamed of it, which isn’t a small thing for me.  As my YouTube video description explains, “It would have remained an acoustic guitar-only folk song without Harold Goodman's having written and recorded a killer bass part, which forced me to add electric guitar tracks to the song. Stu Anderson and Scott Jarrett added pedal steel guitar and keyboards, online, through Jamkazam.com. Michael McKern recorded the drums in his home studio space.” 

It’s almost impossible to explain how much I dislike video editing and the fact that I’ve only managed to put two of my songs into videos is some kind of evidence to that fact.  My friends and I (we call our group thing Downstream Consequences) have managed, so far, to record 41 cover songs and 19 originals since 2000.  And you can listen to it all in my Dropbox Original Music MP3 folder.  Even download some or all of it, if you feel so inspired.  In the absence of an album cover with snazzy artwork, credits, and the usual album stuff, I’ve created a document, “Liner Notes.pdf,” that does all of that paraphernalia in a small, electronic format. 

For what it’s worth, I’m adding “I’m An American” to the long list of songs inspired by Trump and the fascist in a long line of protest songs that goes back far before Woody Guthrie and even the labor protest songs of the 1890s.  When we can’t do anything else, song, poetry, and story is how we mark where we stand against inequity, violence, lies, misery, and outright evil. 

Thanks for your attention to this matter and, Donald Trump and all Republicans, fuck you. 

“I Can’t Work Under These Conditions”

 Still on my bucket list after 60-some years.

My first “job” (other than a two-year run at a paper route between ages 10 and 12) was working for Dodge City’s Boot Hill Museum, running the small concession stand outside of the museum’s cemetery building, cleaning the museum toilets, sweeping floors, selling hotdogs and sodas, maintaining the robot gunfighter, and getting shot off of a hillside by a drunk playing town marshal during the bi-daily gunfight.  All for $0.60/hour.  I was 13-about-to-turn-14.  Toilet duty at the museum is still close to the grossest job I’ve ever had.  Tourists are particularly gross and the women’s bathroom was a horror show of randomly discarded sanitary napkins and worse; much worse.

Getting shot wasn’t a picnic, either.  The “marshal” was often a one-legged hobo who looked like he belonged in Old Dodge City, but who had a terrible time remembering the script.  He was supposed to come out of the Longbranch Tavern, which used to be on the west end of the replica street, with a double-barrel shotgun and his pistols holstered.  After a brief argument in the street with the “bad guys,” he was supposed to take several steps east, toward the bad guys, before being warned that another bad guy, me, was about to back shoot him.  He would, then, turn and shoot me with one of the barrels of the shotgun.  Sometimes, maybe not having recovered from the previous night’s celebrations, he’d come out of the saloon and fire off one or two barrels of the shotgun at me from a LOT closer than scripted and I’d get a blast of cardboard blank wad in the chest.  Sometimes, the cardboard would be on fire as I rolled down the dry weed-covered hillside.  I still have some weird looking scars on my chest from some of those fires. 

Since then, I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs and a few really decent ones.  Maybe starting out like that made an impression on me that there is no job so crappy that I shouldn’t expect to be the one doing it. 

For a few brief moments in my early 20s, I imagined that I’d learn a trade and move to the Pacific Northwest to get good at it.  Early in the “learn a trade” phase, Ms. Day decided that she wanted to be a mother and, as a byproduct, I would be a father.  That sudden change in plans force me to dump the formal part of learning a trade and find a job that paid more than minimum wage.  Since minimum wage in 1970 was $1.30/hour, you’d think that would have been easy, but you’d be wrong.  The closest, surest thing I could find was an electronic scales technician position in Hereford, Texas at $3.20/hour. 

Well over 90% of the equipment I installed and serviced was mounted on trucks and trailers.  The drawing (at right) is a sterile illustration of the kind of equipment I worked on and the components (load cells) that most often needed servicing.  But to really get a feel for what that job was like you’ll have to imagine that truck coated from stem-to-stern and top-to-bottom with cow and/or pig shit.  The “clean” equipment I worked on were grain mill platform scales, which were still often coated in animal feces which held the grain and silage spillage in place (and in my face).  In accordance with Murphy’s Law, the hardest to get-to parts always failed in the worst weather and at the most critical (according to customers) time.  I “specialized” in that equipment for about 6 years, driving 100,000 miles/year every year I was in that business and working overtime so often it felt like regular time.  After six years of that, I got my first manufacturing engineering position with an ag equipment manufacturer.  The company had just invented a design to “fill the corners” on center pivot irrigation systems, but to do that required electronic systems that didn’t yet exist.  The “clean part” of that job was design and fabrication work, which I loved and was pretty good at.  However, once that was done someone needed to setup an electronics manufacturing facility and I got tagged for that job.  In the 1970s, electronics manufacturing was a pretty awful job.  I used to have a book of the EPA’s hazardous chemicals and all of the first dozen chemicals listed as “carcinogens” were chemicals I’ve used in electronics or mechanical manufacturing.  There is a Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns gets a physical exam and learns that “all of your diseases are in perfect balance” and, as long as he doesn’t get any of them cured, he’ll be fine.  That might be me and my chemical exposure. 

 

In the early 2000s, a friend was starting up a live sound reinforcement business and he asked me to help with one of his first big shows.  The headliner was a South African reggae artist named Lucky Dube.  There were also two opening acts.  The touring crew was a bunch of South African white guys who mostly stood around and tried to look important while we busted our asses to setup the stage and do a soundcheck.  I wasn’t familiar with the FOH (Front of House) console, but it was pretty straight-forward and we managed to get everything sorted out for the two opening acts.  When Lucky’s band came on for a soundcheck, the touring FOH goober took a look at the board, pissed and moaned a bit, and headed for the auditorium door saying, “I can’t work under these conditions.”  Up to that moment in my life, I’d never heard anyone say anything like that out loud, although I know I’d seen essentially the same thing displayed, unspoken.

He stormed out and I finished the soundcheck for the headliner band.  Soon afterwards, the auditorium doors opened for the audience and the show started.  The opening act did a few songs and left, followed by the next band and their set.  Lucky’s band came out and did an intro number that ended with Lucky, himself, coming out Motown-style, and they got into their set.  About half-way through the 2^nd number, the touring FOH goober showed up and elbowed me out of his way.  I’d labeled the console and arranged it the way I usually setup a mix, but he was apparently thrown off by the organization and the labels were below his paygrade; or something.  So, he spent the rest of the set fiddling with the sliders on several graphic EQs, which were all bypassed because I never use them and he hadn’t noticed that fact.  Since that experience, I’ve wondered what it would be like to be so valuable that you could say, “I can’t work under these conditions” and walk out, expecting someone to fix it so the conditions were right for me to work under. 

So far, it’s never happened.

Skip ahead to my post-retirement hobby, working backstage at Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater between 2015 and 2020.  I sort of stumbled into that gig, mostly, because I know how to rap audio cables and use audio equipment.  The dead last thing I wanted to be doing was working live shows, but I love doing the stage setup: selecting and positioning microphones, laying out a trip-free stage, getting the soundcheck sorted out, and I don’t mind the tear-down, either.  I just don’t enjoy the usual excessive volume and typically awful sounding live show.  The Production Manager liked me enough that he’d let me help with everything up to the soundcheck and, if I thought the show was going downhill from there, I could sneak out and either come back to help with the loadout or call it a night. 

Sometime around 2016, Kathy Mattea and her band were our headliners at the Sheldon.  The soundcheck was easy and fun and the band was totally professional.  Kathy, as stars usually do, showed up for the last bit of the soundcheck to get her instrument, vocals, and monitors sorted out.  There was some administrative crap that went on at the beginning of the show and it was still going on when the band arrived backstage to get started, on time weirdly enough.  Someone, I think the City Mayor, was running on about some nonsense and everyone backstage was getting antsy.  Kathy was kind of hopping from one foot to the other, joking with her band and marking time.  After a bit, she said, “I can’t work under these conditions” and faked heading back to the dressing room, which got a solid laugh from the band and the rest of us backstage.  Of course, she waited until the nonsense was done and did a great show (which I stayed for). 

Obviously, I’m not the only one who would like to be important enough to throw a fit and stomp out when the “conditions” aren’t ideal. 

#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 disappointing experience in the audience at the Sheldon Theater with the Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel band in Red Wing, MN last month.  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 “Live 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.  Properly orienting the stage, width-wise, 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 a couple of hours before the concert began.  A month earlier, 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 first 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 Allmans 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.  Outside of a Trump rally, that was 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 (I would prove that to be wrong, several times, in the future.)  Finally, the yokel noise stopped and Grinderswitch staggered off the stage.  I was ready to leave.

We didn’t have any place to go and the Allman’s crew quickly repurposed the stage and the lights went down as the band found their places via Marshall amp pilot lights and roadie assistance.  The opening rhythm and bass riff 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 front corners of the stage.  There was a Front of House (FOH) 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. No more 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 heroin 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 that night.  Thanks Mike!

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. 

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.