My Product Review Philosophy

Almost twenty years ago, my friend Mark Amundson (FOH Magazine’s Tech Editor at the time), answered my complaint about the vagueness of his reviews and their general lack of criticism with, “You have to learn to read between the lines, Tom.” Mark had just reviewed a Midas analog console followed by a large channel count Peavey console and I could not find any reason to spend the extra money on the Midas, based on Mark’s review. My reply was, “There is only white space between the lines, Mark.” He followed his response about reading between the lines (and my cynical reply) with a story about how a year of so earlier he had made a mild negative point about a major manufacturer’s product in a review and that manufacturer had pulled all of their advertising from the magazine in retaliation. That one barely critical comment cost the magazine thousands of dollars every month for almost half a year. Mark never made that “mistake” again. 
 

In my motorcycle magazine product review days, I experienced a similar (although less costly) kickback from a weird Chinese manufacturer, Hyosung. For the next couple of months, fires flared and were extinguished from that unimportant company’s sales manager and, lucky for me, my editor stood behind me. If you look at all of the Geezer columns that mentioned this motorcycle and experience, you might think I am someone who holds a grudge: http://geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/search?q=hyosung. You’d be right, too. 

The end result is that I don’t make any money from product reviews on this blog. I have zero motivation to say nice things about products I don’t like. Or to dis products that don’t deserve it, the stuff I really like will be pretty obvious. My reviews, like most reviews, are an opinion. However, mine are weighted by 50 years of audio and electronics experience, a good bit of practical audio engineering background, and my own biases and habits. I’m not going to apologize for any of that. Don’t like it, don’t read it. However, you can assume that any opinion I give is my own and no editor, advertiser, or other outside influence will have any effect on where I go in my reviews. You won’t find that in any modern audio equipment magazine.

Not only am I not an audiophile, I have done enough ABX testing on equipment and people to doubt pretty much any “remembered” sound quality analysis expressed by anyone. A friend, Dan Kennedy, once told a group of AES students, “If you can hear the difference between any mic preamp and a Mackie, Behringer, or Presonus preamp, you’re listening an ‘effect.’” I concur. Modern IC amplifier design is well-shaken-out technology and an engineer pretty much has to be a klutz to screw up preamp design. Transformer-less designs are, in particular, easy to do well and inexpensive. So when it comes to things that should be a “wire with gain” don’t waste time wondering “how does it sound?” It sounds fine . . . unless it is a disaster. Electro-mechanical devices, like microphones and loudspeakers, are a whole different can of worms. How a device functions, its ergonomic quality, its construction and durability, and product support from the manufacturer are going to be the things I want to concentrate on.

How Much Will This Cost?

One of the many things students don’t get much of in school is practical economics. As a result, the hourly rate lots of freshly-hatched audio technicians earn is embarrassingly unlivable. One of many reasons the career-longevity of people in the music and entertainment business is notoriously short. While I was working on one of those projects that usually inspires the notion “I could be doing better than this working at a convenience store,” I decided to write something about my own business experience in the music and audio business.

Until the day I retired, I had a price list for the various services I supplied to a variety of; from musicians and facilities who hired me for location recording gigs to studio and audio equipment repair services for musicians and recording studios to building contractors (acoustic design consulting) to law firms (audio forensics). Some of my price list was determined by the liability insurance required which was mostly determined by the customer (law firms) and the risk (to me, financially) involved in making a court statement about whatever the law suit involved. Acoustic consulting work for commercial construction was almost as risky and required similar insurance protection.

My rates ran from $75/hour to $275/hour. Those are “billable” rates, however, which are not necessarily the same as the hours I actually spent on a project. For example, a lot of recording work requires prep time and effort that the customer doesn’t see or appreciate. So, it just gets folded in to the billed rate. Recording projects are particularly expensive, time-wise, from my perspective. It’s possible at the high end of the “audio engineering” world that people actually make a decent income, but I always suspect a trust fund is involved when someone can afford to spend a career in entertainment.

Oddly and classically American, my experience with the high-ticket projects came dangerously close to being volunteer work because my liability insurance was so expensive. When I started planning for retirement and was winding down my businesses, the legal work went first. That saved me about $3500/year in insurance costs. The only way doing that work makes sense is if you do enough of it to make up for the insurance cost; at least 20 billable hours. It isn’t reliable work and lawyers, as you might guess, don’t pay their bills quickly and are hard to collect from. It was easy work to give up.

For that same reason, the acoustic consulting work went next. That saved me about $1500/year in insurance costs. Again, it is work you can’t count on and it’s usually not much fun. Although the engineer for the last contractor I worked with was terrific. He did everything he could to take responsibility from me for liability and customer interaction. Designing a quiet staircase in a multi-use building or plugging all of the sound passage routes between a first floor pediatric dental office and a lower-level computer programming company is just not exciting work. Recording studio work is fun, but not particularly profitable. Most of your customers are cheap and not particularly sophisticated and your competition all has a trust fund to spend.

Mostly because several of my ex-Studio Maintenance students were doing a lot of studio maintenance and looking for more work, that business was mostly easy to quit. I just started directing inquiries to them. In the last two years, I’d raised my prices to $225/hour hoping that would drive the business to cheaper techs. When that didn’t work, I had to tell a few customers that I was absolutely no longer interested in crawling around their studios or scouring the food, drink, and drugs out of their wreaked equipment. At least one of those characters had alienated every decent tech I knew of and, I suspect, they simply shut down the studio after the last piece of gear quit working.

Since the 70’s, I haven’t done music equipment repair for anyone other than myself, mostly buying broken gear and selling it in original or hot-rodded condition. In March, 2018, I had about a half-dozen pieces of equipment left in my shop and I am slowly working my way through the pile. When it’s done, I’ll probably convert the electronics shop to a guitar building and repair shop. Or maybe I’ll hand the bench over to my wife for her art projects.

I still do occasional location recording gigs, but with really limited capabilities: no more than 8 simultaneous channels and my interest in working on overdub or large-track-count projects is close to zero. My simple rule for recording projects is, “If I like what you’re doing and the project is fun (meaning, you are not an asshole), I do the job for my cost. If I don’t like you or the project, you can’t afford me.” Most people can’t afford me. I’ve quit pretending like people or projects that I’d just as soon avoid.

I’m not being a snob, I would just rather be retired and working on my own projects than worrying about pleasing someone else. I spent more than 50 years of my life trying to make other people happy. For the few years I have left to live, the only person I’m interested in satisfying (avocationally and vocationally) is me. I’ve paid all of the multi-tasking, menial labor, service-job dues I’m planning on paying until I croak. For a long while, I was fairly good at pretending to care what marginally-talented, egotistical, humorless, joyless people thought of my work. Those days are done and, unless I find a way to go broke between now and my last breath, they will never return.

Series Review: Soundbreaking, Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music

Quite a while ago, a friend recommended that I watch the 2016 PBS series “Soundbreaking, Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music.” At that time, I gave it a show by watching the segments on the PBS website and gave it up as a bad experience, mostly because the PBS webpage was a pain in the ass and I’ve never subscribed to cable television. The reminder came around again this past week and I finally hunted the series down on DVD from my local library. It was worth it.

I should have known it would be worth the effort, since one of my heroes, George Martin, was the show’s producer. It was Sir Martin’s last projects and one worthy for a career cap of one of the most competent, creative, and original people ever involved in music and recording. While I’ve never been much of a Beatles fan, I have always been a George Martin fan. When Lennon was throwing his poncy hissy fit about Martin being the “5th Beatle,” Lennon said, “When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?' I noticed you had no answer for that! It's not a putdown, it's the truth," I, immediately thought, “What about ‘Blow by Blow’?” Lennon would never sit in a recording studio that accomplished that much from his first day to his last. But, I was never a Beatles fan, so what do I know? I am, however, a lifetime Jeff Beck fan and, lucky for me, there are a few Jeff Beck interviews in the series.

Some of the show’s highlighted producers, like Phil Spector, would naturally put me off because the records the show is celebrating from Phil and his ilk are records I have never liked much. Spector’s “Wall of Crap” sound always made me wish my stereo was quieter and of lower quality. Every single record he ever recorded made me wish someone had been able to tell Spector “that’s enough crap, stop while you are ahead.” Never happened, until the police finally delivered that message after he murdered an actress in 2003. Lennon brought Spector in to trash-up “Let It Be” and I never had much use for that record until “Let It Be, Naked” came out in 2003. That record stripped off the Spector crap and demonstrated the power of George Martin’s arrangements and engineering at the peak of that band’s capabilities. As Martin said when he was asked about the credits for “Let It Be,” “How about ‘produced by George Martin, over-produced by Phil Spector?”

The segments on Dr. Dre, Sly Stone, Les Paul, Jeff Beck, Al Schmidt, Tom Scholtz, Don Was, Brian Wilson, Marvin Gaye, etc. paid the viewer-bill, for me. The series is a terrific primer on the history of recording technology and, more importantly, the people who pushed the technology to its limits. It was especially fun to see Giles Martin, George’s son, playing with the old EMI console. Watching him reproduce segments of “Revolver;” “Tomorrow Never Knows” makes it pretty clear how much George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and the EMI engineers contributed to the sound we describe as “The Beatles.” Of course, John Lennon never approached that level of greatness again, but George Martin did.

The series episode titles tell you a lot about what you will see and hear:

• Episode One: The Art of Recording.
• Episode Two: Painting with Sound.
• Episode Three: The Human Instrument.
• Episode Four: Going Electric.
• Episode Five: Four on the Floor.
• Episode Six: The World is Yours.
• Episode Seven: Sound and Vision.
• Episode Eight: I Am My Music.

In this day of hyper-expensive microphones and zillions of digital plug-ins and analog or digital effects, it’s hard to imagine that many of the records today’s artists hope to equal were done using incredibly limited equipment and downright cheap dynamic microphones (many of them omnidirectional). Practically every home studio in the country has better and more powerful technology, more available tracks, easier access to instruments and sounds, and no excuse for not making equal or better music; except for the talent problem. The “Painting with Sound” segment does a wonderful job of describing how many of the great pop records were made: warts and all.

One of the series’ silly aspects, technology, was often highlighted by having Ben Harper explain a variety of technologies. Ben is a fine performer, but what he knows about electronics, acoustics, or technology in any form could be well-documented on a single fingernail with a relative coarse Sharpie. His “thoughts” were good for a laugh, though. There are a few other moments like that, but there are plenty of technically-sound moments to spell the laughter: Tom Scholtz, for example, Les Paul, Al Schmidt, Don Was, and more than a few other recording greats.

I almost held my breath through “I Am My Music,” waiting for the usual MP3 snobbery and I was really surprised and pleased with the absence of all that silliness. Mostly, my experience with ABX testing and audio repair work makes me really suspicious of “pros” who make claims to golden ear-ed-ness. But we didn’t have to listen to any of that here because the focus of the episode was about how the MP3, digital downloads, and the industry’s shortsightedness caused the music business to go into freefall; for good reasons.

Do NOT forget to watch the “extras” on the 3rd DVD.

Retired, Amateur, and Professional

Three categories of participating (used loosely) artists and technicians could be “retired, amateur, and professional.” I am desperately trying to be retired, but “professional” is the addiction status to which I am trying to overcome. A professional technician is, typically, required to “like everything” in order to work regularly, no opinion of the material involved is preferred. An amateur allows himself the often unappreciated luxury of being a step above a fan in preferences, although amateurs are often snobby about the stuff they don’t like. Retired is ideally when the commerce is gone from consideration. A retired guy gets to say, “fuck this, I don’t like it and never did”: my opinion of banjos and bagpipes, for example. I’m working toward being totally consistent in making sure everyone knows if I’m not happy, they can’t afford me. So far, I’m batting about .500, which means I still get pulled into projects I wish I’d never seen or heard.

As a kid listening to jazz and playing in rock and roll bands for the experience, money, and escape from Kansas, I despised country music (except western, but not country and western, just “western” or cowboy songs). Everything I hated about my hometown was well-described in country music and I wanted to escape to somewhere none of that bullshit existed. I would do practically anything to get to listen to a jazz player live, but I’d leave town to avoid the genres of music I didn’t appreciate. The stuff I could play was tolerable and, sometimes, fun but I dreamed of being a musician I never became. I didn’t become that musician, in large part, because I discovered that I could get into the same doors as a technician. Jarrett’s Law applied for me in a way that allowed/encouraged/eased me out of being a player and behind the glass or at a tech’s bench.

So, I became a professional technician. As a professional, I wasn’t allowed to have preferences in much of anything. Not that anyone told me that, but there are only so many jobs and the bills don’t care whose money is paying them. In fact, getting the bills paid is the prime purpose of being a professional. “Art” and professionalism are almost in direct opposition of each other. In a group activity, the only actual “artist” is whoever is paying the bills. Every step away from the bill-payer is just someone trying to squeeze in their tiny moments of inspiration and art without getting fired for being too creative. For many years, I couldn’t justify taking the salary cut to become more of an artist in my work. Since I’m not much of a people person, that easy excuse allowed me to constantly say to myself and potential employers/customers/artists, “I charge $90-225/hour (depending on the work and year) for my consulting/tech/engineering time and it’s not worth it to me to do whatever it is you want me to do for less.”

In retirement, the financial aspects of work no longer control me. I was ruthless enough in the above analysis for long enough that we’re pretty financially independent (as long as Trump and the Russians/Republicans don’t trainwreak the economy and banking system). I’ve been around some kinds of music and performance genres for long enough that I would just as soon never hear or experience them again. Some of the stuff that I’ve disliked for my whole life I still dislike and have no interest in pretending that more exposure will change that. Ideally, I should be down to the things I love and situations I am happy in, but saying “no” is just as difficult today as it was 50 years ago. But I’m working on it. Worst case, I’ll retreat to my dream Montana abandoned mine and practice filling intruders’ butts with rock salt.

That’s Not Serious, It’s Art

I arrogantly like to think my friends at Aerostich created their “Not Art” sticker in honor of an essay in Geezer my motorcycle column that explained how I do not consider motorcycles to be any sort of art and don’t want anything to do with a motorcycle that could be considered “art.” In that column, I made a somewhat related comment, “I've been some kind of musician almost all of my adult life and I know what I could play and what I couldn't and I try to spend as little time listening to something I do myself. When it comes to musicianship, I am my own definition of ‘artistic.’” And that definition is “if it ain’t fun to listen to, it’s not worth listening to.” I do not take art seriously under any circumstances, but if I’m playing music the best you can hope for is that it might be fun.

I have a theory that a rational society would determine income levels by the contribution made by each citizen. So, the highest paid people would always be those who society could, literally, not live or thrive without: farmers, scientists, physicians, engineers, technicians, firemen/persons, sanitation workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and so on. The people who get paid the most are the ones who would be missed the most if they vanished from the planet. Bankers, hedge fund banksters, lawyers, Republicans, actors and television/movie people, professional athletes and artists, etc. get paid the least because no one would notice them missing if they were to vanish. Their jobs would be filled immediately by perfectly untrained and sufficiently skilled people who would also be paid minimum wages. Yeah, we’d miss the Jeff Becks, the LaBron James, and Jake Gyllenaals, but we’d replace them quickly with even more talented unknowns. There is a world full of amazing amateurs and their skills will more than good enough. At the other end of the values and value spectrum, if all of the doctors in the world vanished, a whole lot of people would die.

When I first re-started my career in audio/music in 2001, one of my customers (later a co-worker) was in his usual state of panic when he said to me, “How come you’re always so calm when everybody else around here (mostly me) is freaked out and in a total panic?” I told him that in the industry I’d just left it was pretty common to get a call from someone that started out with “your piece of shit product killed my kid/spouse/parent/grandparent.” That puts piddly shit like a pop music recording at a pretty low stress level. Yeah, people make a living worrying about silly crap like that, but if they didn’t who would it inconvenience?

When I wrote “We’re Releasing A Record,” I definitely had this thought in mind. The seriousness that kids take when they say that phrase is, even in a historical perspective, laughable. When he read that essay, a friend commented “. . . If you factor in revenue from sync, 'releasing a record' appears to be driven by something other than revenue, or very silly indeed. So Tom, is art driving these folks or are you suggesting that they are silly? Say it ain't so.” Sorry, Rob, it’s so. I mostly think non-essential functions are silly/fun or they are just pompous and ridiculous. I’m ok with silly, but I don’t take it seriously. If it was serious, it would be critical and necessary. Pretty much everyone is some sort of artist and the difference between good, great, and professional art is just not important by any definition of the word.

Fifty years ago, I took a “recording engineering” seminar through the Audio Engineering Society with Stephen Temmer, the founder of Gotham Audio and a legendary recording technician and grumpy old man. We immediately got into an argument about what “serious music” is because he said we wouldn’t be recording anything but serious music in his course and I said “serious music is an oxymoron.” After a bad start, he and I became friends when I discovered that he sang along with classical music (a genre I’d previous thought was painfully boring) on his car radio as if it were a pop song. He immediately saw my point, too. Anything that makes a 50-ish (he seemed ancient to me at the time) man wave his arms conducting a radio-orchestra while driving a full size rental car across an Iowa dirt road could not be serious; and either is the man.

Art is not a serious subject, at least not for me. I only look at or listen to “art” for entertainment. My life would go on without it, in any form. If it weren’t available, I’d make some when and if I had the time.

We’re Releasing a Record

You know you’re old when that phrase, “we’re releasing our record” means something significant to you. I realize it was a while ago when that statement meant a long process of:

• hyping a demo tape or EP resulted in getting a contract with a label,
• writing enough songs to fill out an album’s worth of material (at least 30-45 minutes of music),
• convincing someone at the label (probably the AR guy) that your material is strong enough and the band is good enough to book serious studio time,
• keeping it together long enough to get into that studio and get all of the songs recorded without anyone in the band killing someone else in the band,
• doing well enough in the studio that the material is deemed worth paying a mix engineer to put all the performances together into some kind of semi-coherent collection of songs,
• impressing the label, again, with those songs so that they cough up the money to send the mixes to a mastering engineer,
• once the mastering engineer has done his work finding someone at the label to commit time to getting the record and, hopefully, one or two singles played on the radio,
• and, eventually, selling enough records to pay back the label’s advance and even get some kind of return on the time and committment that results in the band making enough money to do it all over again.

That is what “making a record used to mean. But that was when music was some sort of “business.” Today, at the label end of the “business, the business seems to be mostly a money-laundering affair. Music sales are dismal, at best, and unlikely on average. Personally, I think the industry’s CD sales reports are bullshit, too. I absolutely doubt that they sell 1/4 of what they’ve been claiming for the last decade. If radio were any indication, there hasn’t been more than a dozen new records/CDs made in the last decade. Both bands and the pay-to-listen venues are buried in 30-year-old music and yak-radio. You could count the number of Milennial songs played on one hand, most days and nights. The music business has been mobbed-up since—forever—and it’s worse now than any time in my life. Like movies, major label music is a great place to wring out your illegal cash to keep the IRS guys from flagging you. I mean look at these numbers. Would you put your hard-earned money into this sort of vanishing business? That is one seriously steep declining graph. Unless it flattens in the next year or two, it will approach zero really soon.

The “indie” route is particularly profit-free, too. I have way too many friends who have gone the whole route on their own, from hiring great musicians, renting time in a professional studio, assembling a terrific collection of songs and performances, getting it professionally engineered and mastered, and the end result is a basement or attic stuffed with boxes of unsold CDs and a talent diminished by frustrated dreams. CDBaby, BandCamp,  and the other on-line distribution scams are full of stories of musicians “bragging” about selling $300 worth of music in a YEAR! If you can find a worse job than that, on a per-hour and financial investment basis, run don’t walk as fast as possible from that “opportunity.”

So, these days “we’re releasing a record” means “my friends and I cobbled together 20 minutes of mediocre songs, we spent a couple of hours recording them on mediocre equipment that none of us knows how to use, a friend ‘mastered’ the CD with Garageband, and now we’re hoping our friends and family will buy enough copies of our ‘record’ to make us feel successful.” Or, at least, not completely stupid. It’s a brave new world out there. I’m glad I don’t have to make a living in it as a musician.