My Life in Surf Music

The Ventures were my first roadie gig, when I was 14. They played the Dodge City Civic Auditorium, sponsored by the local Catholic college, St. Mary’s of the Plains, in 1963 or around then. I was in a kid-band at the time and the other 3 guys in the band were a year or two older than me. They all attended the local Catholic high school and had some connections including their parents. Most importantly, they knew the nun in charge of promoting/managing the concert and they got me an invitation to be the volunteer one-man stage “crew.”

I knew how to setup a two-piece guitar amp, I could tune a guitar fairly well and set it on a stand by the amp, and I could plug all that in correctly. Mostly. The auditorium’s sound goober was an old guy named “Sears.” I don’t remember much about him other than the fact that he set out one mic, probably a Shure 55 or something like that and connected up a Shure Vocalmaster PA (two columns and a mixer/power amp tube-type head).  Once he had said “test, test, one,two, three” into the mic and heard himself from both of the columns set at opposite ends of the stage, Sears plopped himself down in a folding metal chair just behind the stage right wing curtain and . . . went to sleep during the first song of the sound check. He didn’t move again till the show was over and the audience applause woke him up. Once my tiny bit of stage-handedness was finished, I climbed up a ladder at the back of the stage left wing to the scaffold plank and sat right over the band, with my legs dangling at least 20’ over their heads.

Sadly, I remember very little about that concert. I remember almost falling off of the scaffold on to the band, bouncing up and down to the opening chords of “Slaughter on 10th Avenue.” Their hit, “Slaughter on 10^th Avenue” was yet to be released, but they played it in that concert and knocked me out. The year before, my kid band played “Walk Don’t Run” and “Wipeout” on our way to winning a city talent show. I thought I knew all of their music, but they played all sorts of songs I’d never heard before and I was so jazzed to be there, to hear them live, and so pumped to have actually talked  to them before the show that I probably bulk-erased a lot of that night with pure emotion and excitement.

Before and after the show, I got to hang out with the band and I remember walking out of the auditorium with the band, after loading their gear into a trailer. I asked Nokie Edwards for an autograph. He said, “Surely,” and took the album from me. Bob Bogle said, “Don’t call that kid Shirley.” First time I ever heard that joke. Not the last, by 100s, though.

When I moved out a year later, my parents threw out that record and a ton of other stuff. After all the times we’ve moved, there is no chance I would still have it under any circumstances. Still, it would be cool to have that record cover and have it framed in my office.

In the late-1980s, I ran Front-of-House for Dick Dale at Anaheim Stadium. The sax player/bandleader, Jack Freeman, for a group I worked with for almost a decade there, Sum Fun Band, also had a small live sound rig he rented out. Since he was playing sax in Dale’s band that day, Jack hired me to run sound for the show (a pre-baseball game warm-up act outside of the stadium to entertain the tailgaters). Dale notoriously hated sound guys and Jack and a few friends in the business warned me that he might even take a swing at me if I pissed him off. His shows were notoriously loud, past the point of pain and permanent hearing damage and I’d seen him play a couple of times at the Huntington Beach national surf championships. It was a 5-piece band and we had 5 stage monitors to work with and a bunch of QSC power amps to drive them with (thanks to my employer). I put all of the monitors around Dale and drove them as hard as possible with almost nothing in any of the monitors except “the star.” It was so loud the sound pressure moved Dale’s clothes and strands of his scrawny ponytail like a breeze.

After the set, he hunted me down and told me I was the best sound goober he’d ever worked with. Jack was less impressed because he didn’t have any sort of stage monitoring and he and the rest of the band struggled to figure out what was going on. ;-) Not my problem, Dick paid the bills.

A Declining Market or Just Laziness?

At the suggestion (to put it mildly) of a couple of friends, I finally visited Dave’s Guitar Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin this past week. Weirdly, this small town near the border of Iowa and just across the Mississippi River from Minnesota is known as a “guitar mecca” to lots of guitar collectors. The store deserves that reputation, if for no other reason than not much else about La Crosse is likely to attract national attention. It’s a perfectly nice small city, but not much different from at least 10,000 other similar sized cities. Dave’s Guitar Shop, however, is quite a bit different from other guitar shops. For starters, there are hundreds of guitars and Dave’s is a premier Taylor and PRS dealer along with several other brands. That, alone, is pretty cool.

The reason it has been suggested that I “need to see” this store is that several of my musical friends think my fascination with my two Composite Acoustics carbon fiber guitars is “sick.” I live in a small Minnesota town with a lot of guitar freaks, many of the rich guys who don’t play much but have substantial guitar collections plus there is a community college here that specializes in teaching Guitar Repair and Construction; wood only, of course. One of my local friends died in late August and I helped his widow find homes for his guitar collection and assorted gear over the past couple of months. Even though three of those instruments were high end guitars, it didn’t occur to me that I should play them to see if I had any interest. Several years ago, he swapped a red Composite Acoustics Cargo for my black sunburst Cargo and that turned out to be his favorite guitar to the end of his life. He, still, thought I should own at least one wood acoustic guitar. I made one a few years ago, but gave it to my grandson.

Mrs. Day and I did not travel to La Crosse solely for the purpose of me looking at guitars. That was just a side-benefit of our trip, which was to look at migrating birds (who have yet to arrive in our area). We’re celebrating her 6th cancer-free year after successful treatment by the Mayo Clinic in 2016 and this trip was part of the celebration. After a 120 mile drive and a 2 hour medical exam, Mrs. Day was ready for a nap. I left her and the cat to relax in the hotel and I slipped off to play with guitars at Dave’s.

To be honest, I am not a motivated buyer; mostly just curious. I’d just read the last hard-copy Taylor in-house magazine and there were lots of “this guitar just spoke to me” comments from their many owners. I wondered if a guitar could speak to me or make me feel anything different than I already feel about my pair of carbon fiber acoustic guitars. Contrary to my friends’ opinion of my instruments, I’m pretty happy with them. They are definitely capable of more than I can do, they play easily and comfortably, are simple to maintain, and I like the way they look. So sue me.

First up, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was not surprised to see that The Gig Store, a live and studio sound equipment place (in the same building) and a drum shop next door to Dave’s, appeared to be closed indefinitely. The retail music business is in rough shape and it is likely to get rougher. Dave’s was open and full of guitars. The entrance is all electric stuff all the time, which was fun but not my reason for being there.

The acoustic guitar area is on the south side of the building, through a short and narrow hallway that could easily be mistaken for a shop area. There must have been 100s of acoustic guitars and I played a couple dozen of them. I was most attracted to the Eastman AC series, with a upper bout sound port and a chamfered edge, Eastman seemed to be at least making some effort to be different than the crowd. Feel-wise, though, all of the acoustic guitars I played had pretty much the same neck, body style and feel, general design, and other than variations on the appearance of the wood they might as well been the same guitar; for my purposes. I really wanted to grab a guitar by the neck and feel that comfortable, natural grip I have with my hot-rodded hand-carved Yamaha V-neck. I had wild hopes that someone would take a chance on doing something inventive with the most important part of any guitar.

But, nope. Vintage Martins are a slight V-shape, but too slight for me. In fact, I had to move fairly quickly from a typical round guitar neck to a Martin to feel the difference it is so slight. Somewhere between a “hard V” and this “medium V” is what I’m looking for. And there was nothing like that in Dave’s great big guitar store. Even the lone carbon fiber brand carried in that store, McPherson, totally wimps out on the neck shape. They don’t even list neck shape options on their custom build page. If I wanted one, I’d have to build it myself, but at this stage in my life I’m not sure I want one bad enough to mess with it.

The music business has undergone some huge changes, mostly for the worse, in the past couple of decades. What has been called “Moneyball-for-Everything” has done a lot of damage, if you’re interested in any sort of variety or creativity. Like every other area of US culture, the guitar is not the hip instrument it once was and the majority of folks buying (and collecting) guitars are old farts. Old farts are not looking for anything new, unusual, or even odd. They want a ‘55 Strat or Tele or a 40’s Martin or a 60’s Gibson and not much else. Companies not in that collector strata are making instruments similar enough to the old standbys that you can’t tell much difference between a 1950 Gibson or Martin and a 2022 Taylor or the rest of the crowd of wannabes. So, I did not find anything that tripped any sort of trigger or even interest in all of those fine instruments.

I did leave that shop wondering how I’d feel when I got home and played my own instruments and the next day I found out. I’m unreasonably satisfied with what I have.

Talent, Technique, and Tone: How to Hide Them All

Back in the mid-70s (as an old friend would say, “When the sun was little-tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet.”), I was a wannabe rock lead guitarist with a lot more confidence than talent and had just moved from rural Nebraska to a city within easy striking and gigging distance from the “Big City”: Omaha, Nebraska and, almost as often, Lincoln, Nebraska and, occasionally, Kansas City and Des Moines. It didn’t take long for me to learn that all of the hot players in town got together fairly regularly at the Saddle Creek Bar for an open mic/jam session and as soon as I figured out where Saddle Creek was I geared up to go into battle.

My amp and gear, at the time, was a 1970s Peavey Artist 100W combo with a Peavey 12” speaker. It was more than enough amp for any gig my band ever did and with an assortment of pedals screwed to a board and a Morley wah, I could handle almost anything on the pop charts at the time. That was considered a “tiny” rig at the time for a rock band guitar player. The Artist was the first amp I ever owned that had a “switched” input setup where I could go from a clean channel to a distorted one with a footswitch. The distortion that amp provided was pretty much fuzz-box quality and, at the time, my tone roll model was probably Carlos Santana.

The Saddle Creek jam session was a different setup than I’d expected. The stage backline was a permanent setup. As I remember there were a couple of Fender Twin Reverbs for the guitars, a Rhodes, a drum kit, an Ampeg bass amp of some sort, and 3 or 4 vocal mics; all set up and ready to go. This was 40 years ago, so my memory of the equipment is open to question, but I won’t be far from wrong. As a guitar player, I was “allowed” to bring myself and my guitar, but no pedals and sure-as-hell no amp. What I learned about myself that first time at Saddle Creek was that I sucked. Without the crutch of distortion and sustain to cover up my mediocre right and left hand technique, I sounded embarrassingly mediocre and having to pick every note or cleanly hammer-on or off slowed me down to 1970s country and western music territory. I went home with my tail between my legs, my ego squashed, and my confidence turned into brutal humiliation. Not that anyone I was on stage with or who heard me said anything. They didn’t need to, I said it all to myself.

After getting my ass handed to me, I went home and re-evaluated my equipment choices and my playing technique. There were a lot of terrific musicians at the Saddle Creek jam and I desperately wanted to go back and, even more, I did not want to suck in front of my peers. I started practicing on an acoustic guitar, even with the band. We lowered our practice volume drastically to accommodate my acoustic guitar and to protect our hearing. For performances, I sold the Peavey Artist and lucked into a 1950s Fender Harvard, which I immediately “hot-rodded” with a JKL K120 12” speaker, Marshall-style tone controls, and a foot-switched gain-boost circuit (all tube). [Yeah, I know. I destroyed the “collector value” of the amp. I did that sort of thing to a few hundred amps between 1974 and 1984, so get over yourself.] No more pedal board, no fuzz box sound, just a collection of tones produced by my Moonstone guitar, my amp, occasional contributions from the Morley wah pedal, and my fingers.

A few months and dozens of gigs later, I went back to Saddle Creek and I didn’t suck. I went back often over the next few years and learned more from that experience than I had from practicing and playing in bands in the previous dozen years. In the process, I also learned a lot about live sound systems, acoustics, electronics, and even audiences. Not only did I improve, as a player, enough to feel reasonably happy with my performance among the great players at the Saddle Creek Bar, but my band’s overall sound improved enough that I would often have other musicians walk right by my little Harvard, on it’s folding stand right behind me on stage, They’d often ask, “How do you get that sound from that amp?” And they’d be pointing at the bass player’s SVT, totally ignoring the little Harvard they’d walked past.

And so, sometime around 1976 I discovered “small is better” and I have never found any evidence to the contrary. But I have seen a lot of evidence that big is bad from everyone from the rich and famous to the godawful cacophony produced by wannabe guitar players in cover bands from Texas to Nebraska to California to Colorado to Minnesota and the surrounding territories. When my Nebraska sound company was designing and building sound systems for bands in the late 70s, I’d tell whoever was spending the money “For every 100W Marshall you let on to your stage, you’ll need at least 1,000W of PA system to get the vocals over the guitar.” I haven’t seen any evidence to conflict with that advice, either.

The Stuff We Collect

A good friend died near the end of this past August. He had been a hobby guitarist for most of his 76 years, but got “serious” about the collecting part about 20 years ago. When he retired as a waterfowl habitat Project Engineer from the federal Interior Department, he gave himself a couple of options: go back to school for a math degree or “learn to play lead guitar.” Neither of those skills come naturally to most of us, so it’s not like he was planning on slacking off in his last 20-some years of life. He also biked all of the transcontinental trails, north-south and east-west and maintained several other complicated and skilled hobbies. However, after picking the lead guitar option his approach to that skill set was to start accumulating information, instruments, equipment, and tools. In other words, he approached music as if it were an engineering project. If he had pursued the math degree with the same tactics, he’d have been on the path to a PhD. As a guitar player, he quickly stalled while he concentrated on trying different tools (guitars, amps, pedals, expensive cables and cords, books and DVDs, etc) and gathering resources.

I recently joined a Facebook group that focuses on a particularly unconventional electrical guitar design. I’m considering making one of those instruments as a winter project and started lurking on the FB group to gather information. Upfront, I discovered some of these guys are also far more collectors than guitarists or builders. I was reminded of a conversation with a friend who is an accomplished and well-paid professional musician and who also works at a busy music store as a salesperson. At a party, someone asked him about what kind of equipment professionals use and his response was something like, “I have no idea. If the music store had to rely on musicians to pay the bills, it would have closed a week after it opened. It’s the hobbyists who spend the real money.”

That isn’t the world I came from, but the people who own recording studio equipment that needs fixing and are, mostly, willing to pay for it are professionals. The hobby studio geeks (and Prince) just toss broken stuff in a closet or sell it as-is “for parts” on eBay. That doesn’t even happen with 20-year-old guitar amps in the Music Instrument (MI) world. Hobby musicians have been “the rich guys” for at least 25 years.

In the 1980s, places like L.A., New York Chicago, Austin and Dallas, and a good bit of the southeast-coast clubs stuck bands with pay-to-play gig expenses. Instead paying for entertainment, the clubs realized there were a LOT of bands hoping for a shrinking number of stages and decided to make the bands pay upfront for the privilege of being seen and heard. Usually, the band would get a package (50-100) tickets to sell or give away as “compensation,” but the damage was done. The money went out of music for most players. Obviously, the club owners were right. There are a lot more bands that desperately want to be seen and heard than there are places to be seen and heard.

About the time working musicians were getting kicked in the financial balls, analog and digital recording gear started to get cheap and lots of hobbyists discovered microphones, recording equipment, high quality studio monitors, and the internet soon provided a way for the people with excess cash to find the people who would make equipment to sell them. That also went for guitars, amplifiers, keyboards, drums and percussion, and every other instrument that could make a claim to “professional quality,” vintage value,

In the end, we all find that things are only worth what someone will pay for them and that is a hard, sad lesson to learn when you are disposing of an estate. Turns out, a lot of those cool, high-end odds and ends aren’t worth much. Even the stuff we’ve been told “holds its investment value” doesn’t. Unless you stumble on to one of those weird collector instruments owned by Charlie Christian handed down to Les Paul who gave it to Jimmy Page at a R&R Hall of Fame presentation, your money is always better spent on actual investments. Don’t believe me, do your own calculation.

I bought my first guitar, an Airline/Danelectro solid body single-pickup electric, for about $60 in 1963. If I’d have dumped that money into a S&P tracking investment and left it there compounding the interest, I’d have about $19,000 in the investment portfolio right now. Left in the bank accumulating 3% average interest, I’d have about $650. Or I’d have a beat up 80-year-old guitar that would have cost me a few hundred dollars in repairs, strings, and other parts over the years that might be worth $500; if I can find the right sucker and I’m selling at the right moment during the economic swings of instrument value and desirability. Inflation-wise, $60 in 1963 money is $550 in today’s money. For example, I gave my daughter a late-1950’s Danelectro triple-pickup shorthorn 6-string guitar 30 years ago. It has hung on the wall of her office for at least 20 years. There is one on Reverb.com selling for (asking price) of $2,400. My advice to her is “Sell it, if someone will buy it for that.”

As for boutique guitar cables, guitar pedals and effects, and all of the other farkles and toys we buy to distract ourselves from practicing and actually becoming musicians, they will end up in a discount bin at your local Goodwill or Salvation Army store. Nobody wants them and almost nobody knows what they are or why they should want them. It seems like there should be a special place for this kind of stuff to be donated, but even music schools don’t seem to want any of it. Disposing of someone else’s music equipment gives you an interesting perspective on what all that room-filling stuff is worth.

Product Review: Positive Grid Spark Mini

Silly me, I thought the Positive Grid Spark Mini was a fairly new product, but my resident guitar repair guru and guy-who-will-try-to-fix-anything about town, Brian Stewart (Tree Strings Music), has already repaired one in his Red Wing shop. I haven’t yet heard what the fault was in that unit. I ordered a white one from Amazon, thinking it might be a fun practice and outdoor jamming amp. I’ve had it about a week and, sadly, the fun is wearing off fast. The good and bad news is that almost everything about this amp is driven by a phone/tablet app, iPhone or Android. The good is that it has hidden power if you’re willing to climb the usual steep software learning curve. The bad is, like most apps, it’s glitchy, unpredictable and often counter-intuitive, almost completely inflexible, and very dumbed-down while pretending to be a product for the sophisticated, discriminating guitarist (the ultimate oxymoron?). A lot of the positive reviews you will find for this amp begin with something like “I’m new to guitar and have only been playing about a few months . . .” It’s easy to like or even love something if you don’t have anything to compare it to. In my case, it’s hard for me to look at any product with the eyes of a newbie. So prepare to be disappointed if you’re hoping for that kind of bubbly, happy-talk review. At 74 and after 50 years in various areas of pro audio and music, there is nothing new about me except for the crap that keeps popping up every time I have a doctor’s appointment. Having spent 20-some years in test and reliability engineering I tend to find more things wrong with software than right.

 

You can’t beat the Mini’s physical controls for simplicity. On the top of the amp chassis, you get 4-position Preset switch (Rhythm, Lead, Solo, and Custom), a Guitar volume, a Music volume control (Bluetooth or Aux In signals), and a guitar input. The back of the chassis has 3.175mm (aka 1/8”) Line Out and Aux Input jacks, a USB-C port for charging the battery and (sometime in the future) a functioning digital audio interface), a Bluetooth “Pair” switch (the Pair switch also fires up a rudimentary guitar tuner), and a power switch. The amp comes with a cute leatherette strap and a pair of buttons to attach the strap on the side. The amp is a 10W Class-D unit that, supposedly produces 90dBSPL at 1m. The cabinet has two 2” speakers and a bottom-facing passive radiator. The 3Ah battery supposedly provides power for 8 hours (on mid-to-low power output) and charges from empty to full in 3 hours. The firmware contains “33 Amp Models, 43 Effects, (Noise Gate, Compressor, Distortion, Modulation/EQ, Delay, Reverb – fixed in that order) and the USB interface is a 44kHz/16 bit A/D. You also get a a free download of PreSonus Studio One Prime recording software with your original purchase. Registering for your software is the closest thing to registering for warranty with Positive Grid. You can buy (for $110) a Spark Control footswitch to either control the presets, turn on and off various virtual pedals, or a combination of those functions. The amp is 146.5 x 123 x 165 mm (5.76 x 4.84 x 6.49 in) and weighs 1.5 kg (3.3 lb).

As usual, the included paper “Quick Start Guide” is close to useless. Not so typically, Positive Grid hasn’t provided much in the way of useful information on their website, YouTube, or anywhere else. Figuring out the app and the various features of the amp that are only accessed through the app is up to the buyer.

For a beginning guitarist who doesn’t know any other musicians, some of the Mini’s app features are probably fun-to-useful. This “screenshot” is really a compilation of three different screens as typically displayed on a phone. The middle one is an example of a dumbed-down imitation of a fairly common DAW guitar pedal screen; like the one in Logic Pro. A big difference between the DAW pedal boards and the Spark is that you can’t reshuffle the order of the pedals to suit your purposes.

After spending considerable time playing with the various pedals I can say “they work.” The compressors in the Comp/Wah section aren’t up to DAW standards, but they are probably as good as most hardware pedals. The “Wah” function, also included in this group, is “Temporarily Disabled.” As usual, I don’t like the distortion (Drive) pedals much, but I rarely do. About half of the Drive pedals are red-flagged, which means you’ll have to spend $20 or more to enable those pedals on your device. So it goes for the Amp models, too. Most of the red-flagged amp models are variations on the mediocre Marshall models. The Mod/EQ models are predictable and not bad. The Delays are ok, except for the absence of a multi-tap delay. The Reverbs are typically pretty good, since digital reverb plug-ins have been fairly well staked-out territory for at least 20 years. I didn’t find a favorite from the verbs, but I didn’t find anything I hated either.

Irritatingly, with my Samsung tablet and the Samsung Music player, anytime I open the Spark app the music player starts playing something from my current playlist through the Spark Mini. Before you start babbling about some “play on Bluetooth connection” toggle in the player, get a grip on yourself. No other Bluetooth device that I own has this behavior: from consumer buds to Shure in-ears to three different Bluetooth speaker systems. It is a glitch in the Spark app and that has been logged by Positive Grid’s customer service and I wasn’t the first to make the complaint. If everything else was excellent this wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, just unpredictably irritating. (If it does this when I first open up the app, will it spontaneously do the same during a gig?) Yes, I could turn off the Music volume, but if I am using it as a backing track at the time it sort of defeats the purpose of that function.

With that out of the way, my impression of the guitar amp is somewhat positive. I’m not fond of electric guitar distortion in the usual buzz-box fashion, but some of the amp models deliver decent slightly over-driven sounds with the kind of amp EQ and tone you’d expect from what I’m guessing are the amps being modeled. Some of the setups both by other users and Positive Grid are fair-to-decent. I had some high hopes for Pat Metheny style sounds, but the lack of multi-tap delays squashed that. You could just add a pedal delay up front but that would defeat my purpose. I have an old MacBook Pro with MainStage that will do everything this unit does with a ton more effects including my multi-tap delay that I’d rather use with a small wired power speaker than add a pedal that is almost as big as this amp.

And speaking of power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mini an produce 10W, but the distortion at that output would be objectionable. That goes for the spec’d 90dBSPL@1m acoustic output, too. At any volume over a moderately loud voice or a strummed full-size acoustic guitar, the bottom end of this amp clips indecently. It is not a pleasant distortion, either. It is the usual splatting sound of digital clipping. That was the straw that broke the back of my interest in the Positive Grid Spark Mini. There were moments when I thought I was about to find the sweet spot for several of the Presets but “almost there” was as close as I got to something useful. When the amp sounded good, it was too quiet to compete with a couple of acoustic guitars. When it was loud enough to cut through a small instrument crowd, it sounded awful.

For a beginning practice amp the Spark Mini isn’t bad. Most beginners, however, will have a terrible time with the mediocre application software that is an absolute necessity for using the amp. Advanced users will be frustrated with the user-hostile programming of the app and disappointed with the little amp’s small performance.

Acoustic Guitar String Comparison

This all started when someone from Cleartone Strings sent me a note on my Wirebender Audio Facebook page asking if I’d be interested in reviewing sets of their acoustic and electric guitar strings. I’m up for free stuff, so I said “sure” and they sent me two pairs of their Custom Light 11-52 Acoustic Phosphor Bronze Treated Strings. These are not cheap strings at $17.99 a set, but I have been playing D’Addario 11-52 Custom Light Phosphor Bronze Coated Acoustic Guitar Strings for the last couple of years after almost 20 years of almost exclusively playing Elixir Nanoweb Phosphor Bronze Lights and Custom Lights and those strings are all in the same price ballpark. All of these strings make similar claims to longevity, also, with a special coating and other process secrets.

I have two Composite Acoustics guitars, the OX and a Cargo. I’ve been waffling on how I feel about the D’Addarios on the Cargo since I started using them, but I’ve been really happy with the OX’s tone with those strings. Mostly due to the added “edge” the brighter D’Addarios add to the larger bodied guitar, which isn’t an “effect” the Cargo needs.

Before I replaced my current set of D’Addario’s, I examined the strings and, especially, the coating and listened carefully to the sound and measured the output on my Composite Acoustics OX with both the pickup and a Shure KSM 141 microphone. I’m going to make a wild claim here that the CA OX, being a carbon fiber guitar will do a good job of neutrally demonstrating whatever character there might be to guitar strings. I could be wrong, so sue me.

The D’Addarios sound clean, relatively bright, and have enough bottom to make the guitar as full as a guitar this size should sound. They were recommended by my local guitar expert, Brian Stewart, Tree Strings Music, and they have been everything he said they would be, including long-lasting and a moderately different sound from my Elixirs. The Elixirs are more mellow, maybe slightly more full than the D’Addarios and that impression is true across the six strings. I have liked these strings for more than 20 years, especially during the years when I rarely played my guitars. Before using the Elixirs, my strings would often be ruined before I had an hour of playing time because of corrosion from being exposed to either the local humidity or the humidifier in my guitar case.

The ClearTone strings were a fail right out of the package. The first thing I noticed about the ClearTone strings was for the first time in the 6 years I’ve owned my CA OX the low E string buzzes like crazy. With the same gauge D’Addarios, the guitar rang clear and clean on all strings. It is only the low E that is rattling and I have no idea what that means, although the whole set feels lighter than the D’Addarios I’d just removed. [Obi-Wan-Brian Kenobi-Stewart suspects the ClearTones might be round-core, rather than hex-core strings. I guess round-core is a trendy “vintage” design, but it’s also know for being fragile, likely to come apart of the strings aren’t crimped near the tuner post, and to have problems like those I’m experiencing.] It’s nice that the guitar is more easily played, but at the cost of “clear tone” (pun intended) from all strings? Probably not so nice.

I was about to yank the ClearTone strings when I thought I saw a section of the wrap pulled apart. When I looked closely, the source of the rattling problem was obvious. The wrap (whatever that is called) at the ball-end of the string is so long (only on the A and low E strings) that it extends slightly past the edge of the saddle. You can sort of see it on the attached picture (at right). That explains why it rattles everywhere, because it is rattling at the freakin’ saddle! If I put a little bit of fingernail pressure behind the saddle, it rings clear. It’s a manufacturing/design problem and a weird one because every other string has shorter wraps, but none of them is consistent in length.

Outside of the design problem, the ClearTones are somewhat less bright than the D’Addarios and seem even a little more dull than the Elixers but with considerably less fullness of tone. In fact, I think the ClearTone strings make my guitar sound like it is made out of plastic (which it kind of is). I left them on for a disappointing week and discarded them to return to the D’Addarios. I was disappointed enough with the first experiment that I did not bother to try them on the CA Cargo.

Initially, I’d planned on doing a lot of data collection for this review: charts and graphs, screen shots of string amplitude and harmonic content, and maybe even some sustain tests. Honestly, I don’t think any of that would be useful information after what I have experienced with the ClearTone acoustic strings. Your experience may vary, but I’m just not happy enough with the initial experience with these strings to put much more time into them. 

I suspect my career as an “influencer” will be short. It’s pretty obvious that advertisers imagine that they are paying for a good review, not an honest one. Magazines have been threatened with and lost advertising revenue when a mediocre product is identified as such. All of my revenue from my blogs comes from the occasional hit my readers make to the advertisements in the blog. I have very little control of the ads (I can only tell Google and Wordpress not to use an ad I find objectionable.) and I kind of like it that way.

“You Can’t Hear What I’m Hearing”

This scene in the movie “Crazy Heart” is probably my favorite music business scene in any movie ever, including documentaries. Bear, the deaf-and-dumb front-of-house goober, tries to tell Jeff Bridges’ character, Bad, that he can’t believe his lyin’ ears and should trust someone who probably never critically or competently listened to a record in his life. “The mix is good man. You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here.”

Instead, Bad does what every musician should do in a live performance; he stops the rehearsal until the goober does what he tells him to do. “Yeah, you’d be surprised. Set it the way I tell you and leave it!” After a short, hilarious wrestling match between the goober and Bad, the show goes on. Of course an even better solution would be to have a bodyguard/assistant standing behind the FOH nitwit smacking him every time he touches a fader. It doesn’t matter how much the assistant knows about music, it will always be more than the FOH goober.

The power of the mix should be on the stage, but usually it isn’t because the musicians are so swollen up with their ego crap they don’t bother to listen to what the audience is suffering through. They smother themselves in a wash of stage monitor noise that buries the FOH sound and allows the worst people on the planet to torture their fans with incompetence. Worse, most musicians are convinced that being loud will cover up flaws, which is beyond stupid.

There are at least two ways (both negative) to take Bear’s reply, though:

1. “You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here” could be a reflection of Bear’s deafness: “I’m mixing to compensate for decades of severe hearing loss and general stupidity and you’ll never know what I’m hearing.”
2. Or Bear is pretending the FOH position is important enough to tell Bad “you can’t hear” what he’s doing because what Bear isn’t going to allow it. The goober thinks Bad’s opinion doesn’t matter. In other words, you don’t have permission to “hear what I‘m hearin’ out here.”

I Hated Steve Martin

Between  1973 and 1978, I absolutely despised Steve Martin. There, I said it and it’s true. Yep, that funny guy on the right side of the pair of “King Tut” era Steve Martin pictures was a guy I regarded as a thief, at best. If he was in a movie, I wouldn’t watch it (I didn’t see “The Jerk” until ‘79 or so.). If he was on SNL or any other television talk show, I ignored it. I hated the man.

There was a “good” reason, believe it or not.

Sometime in 1978, I stumbled on to a brief article in Rolling Stone where Martin said his friend, John McEuen the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “came to me in a dream” and provided the inspiration to “King Tut,” which was performed by “Martin and the Toot Uncommons” (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members) and produced by William McEuen at McEuen’s Aspen Recording Society studio. And that was when I realized I was hating the guy I thought Martin had ripped off; himself.

Sometime around 1971, Mrs. Day and I went to a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert in Amarillo, Texas. The Amarillo City Auditorium had an intermission break policy, so they could sell concessions. Essentially, we’re talking a 60’s hippy band and a 60’s hippy audience and the Dirt Band’s usual concert was non-stop music for 3 hours and some change. They were not happy about having to take 45 minutes out of the middle of their show so someone else could sell popcorn. They’d apparently heard about this popcorn bullshit in advance and had brought “a friend” who was a comedian. I’m sure they introduced him, but I was probably looking at something sparkly and I don’t have a brain for names in the best of times. The friend’s purpose was to fill the 45 minutes completely enough that we’d all stay in our seats and the popcorn asshole would get frustrated and go home.

The friend/comedian more than did the job. He was freakin’ hilarious and a pretty good magician and banjo player, too. He did all the “let’s get small,” “excuuuuse me,” balloon animal, Steve Martin standbys that made the clean-cut guy famous., Then, a few years later the “other guy” appears on television doing exactly the routines and I thought (distrusting straight fuckers as did any hippy of the day) it was a clear cut case of theft. But . . . come on! You tell me, how the hell was I supposed to know the hippy freak on the right would instantly turn into the the geek in the suit at the top of this essay? In fact, I remember the guy I saw in Amarillo as being even more of a long-haired, bearded hippy. Martin is from Waco, Texas and, maybe, it was a “short” (by Texas standards) drive to Amarillo for that night’s gig.

Theory vs. Experience: Diffraction

When I taught “Acoustics” and “Room Acoustics” at McNally Smith College, one of my favorite theoretical devices was diffusion. “Theoretical” because almost no one ever wants to spend real money on that acoustical solution after spending really real money on isolation and absorption and cosmetics to hide the practical stuff. The end result has been that while I have built some diffusion products, I have not spent any time enjoying them. I have never had a location/facility or had the opportunity to experience a facility that would have accommodated substantial enough diffusion to have much of an effect. The stupid “convention” of a window between control rooms and performance areas pretty much wipes out any real opportunity to experiment with a diffuse sound field. George Massenburg and Dr. Peter D’Antonio’s Blackbird Studio C design is the posterchild example (at right) for how radical you have to get before diffusion really shows its stuff. It that isn’t an extreme look to you, you are my kind of people. When you look at my discovery that will be described in this essay, remember that Massenburg’s “studio contains slightly more than 100,000 lbs. of wood on the walls.” (That is 50 tons or 45359.24 kilograms of MDF wood!). And the calculations used to create this design came from a “10,000-page Excel spreadsheet based on acoustic diffusion algorithms.”

My personal moment-with-diffusion came totally as an accident; an incredibly fun, happy accident. I’ve been fooling with some mid-fi recordings friends and I made during the 1st 2 1/4 years of the pandemic through Jamkazam. I’m old, tired, and out-of-practice at tweaking and fine-tuning recordings that have a fair number of timing (thanks to long-distance latency) and pitch issues and it helps for me to get some distance from the tools (mostly Apple’s Logic X) and just listen to what I have so far. That critical listening includes stereo placement and my low-fi tool of choice has been a SoundFreaq Bluetooth speaker that sort of does stereo, but with about 6” of displacement. So, I bought a pair of very cheap, beer-can-sized MusiBaby Bluetooth Speakers and hauled them outside to listen while I read. This is definitely not an ad for MusiBaby speakers, but they aren’t as terrible as their $30/each price tag implies. The cool thing about these speakers is, being wireless, I can find a decent placement for them no matter where I am outside.

My favorite outside spot in our yard is pictured at left: sitting in a swingchair, in the shade of a pair of very large maple trees, with a great view of the forest and hills across the street. So, naturally I stuck the speakers on the ground close enough to be able to mostly overwhelm the traffic noise (except for the idiots on Hardlys and deaf bozos driving muffler-free cars and trucks who sonically litter our countryside). I’ve put the speakers on top of the firepit before and on a glass table that is out of sight to the left of this picture. But two days ago, I put the two blue speakers on the patio shelf to the left and right of the firepit. And while I was swinging back and forth, as I often do to keep the mosquitoes confused and working for their blood, I noticed that there was a spot in that motion that was amazingly full sounding.

You can see by the picture that I wasn’t doing anything particularly scientific in my speaker placement. I didn’t even more a couple of acoustic obstacles because I wasn’t expecting anything from this setup. Once I got into it, I did start messing with speaker placement, listening distance, and a few other things that might have some effect on the “effect” I was hearing. I honestly had to let this settle overnight before I began to figure out some things from the experiment. What I heard was an incredibly coherent and powerful center image from these two tiny speakers. When the speakers were at a reasonable distance from the firepit, close enough to get some reflective reinforcement and far enough for that reinforcement to be diffused, I heard things in my own mixes and other reference (for me) recordings that I can’t consistently pick out in my office “studio” setup, which has absorption in the center but no real diffusion anywhere.

I think the takeaway from this accidental demonstration is that the diffusor needs to be substantially larger than the speaker, especially taller, and mass, as always, is our friend in acoustic treatments. Those retaining wall bricks are about 40 pounds each, for example. Massenburg and D’Antonio used MDF in their diffusion design at least partially because of the weight, I’m guessing. MDF is about 49 pounds/square foot and pine, for example, is about 30 pounds/square foot. Not a small thing when you are making something as substantial and Blackbird’s Studio C. It would be interesting to build a floor-to-ceiling retaining wall curved diffusor and see how it sounds in a real studio environment. Just don’t do it anywhere that can’t support a few tons of brick.

From Whence It All Began

Recently, I saw a Facebook post on Pat Metheny’s page where he said, “"The Beatles were huge for me. Without them, I don't know if I even would have become a musician or a guitar player. When their hits started coming out, I was 8 and 9 years old and it had a tremendous impact on me. . .” and he proceeded to play “And I Love Her.” Obviously, Pat turns a fairly deplorable song into something very likeable and almost infinitely more complex than the original composition.

I have been a Pat Metheny fan since his Gary Burton days and he is in my Top 5 guitarists, some days at the top of that list. I played in bands that had a fair share of Beatles songs for 20 years, but in my mind I was always pandering to the lowest common denominator when I played most of those songs. (I admit to liking “Taxman,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Got to Get You into My Life,” and “Birthday” [for about a decade, the only song I would play when someone requested “The Birthday Song” and one of the Beatles only actual rock songs]). Otherwise, the band often labeled as “the greatest Rock and Roll band ever” mostly left me wishing for silence.

I absolutely admire George Martin’s genius in recognizing that 4 moderate talents were visually (and could be made to aurally be) the exact right thing for a crowd of blooming Boomer teenagers to obsess on. His commitment to molding that mess of “talent” into what the Beatles became is historic in R&R history. If Martin hadn’t forced the Goofy Three into dumping a mediocre drummer and accepting a professional musician who rewrote the job of pop drumming forever, they likely would have been a one-hit-wonder; if that. To highlight that point, in 1971 neglected and mostly unsuccessful John Lennon asked “What's he done now?” in regard to George Martin’s post-Beatle career. I have loved that typically clueless moment in John’s feet-in-mouth career for 50 years. Wikipedia’s George Martin discography is only a partial list of Martin’s accomplishments before and after the Beatles. “Blow by Blow” alone changed as much in pop music and recording history as had most of the Beatles’ output. (There, I said it and I hope that is out of my system forever.)

But Pat’s comment started me thinking about my own considerably less creative or interesting original musical path origins. One band is probably most responsible for me giving up on my Dizzy Gillespie clone trumpet-player pipedreams and that would be The Ventures. I’m older than Pat, so there is that, too. I was 12 when Walk Don’t Run became a hit in 1960 and had been flailing at the trumpet for 3 years by then. With paper route money, I bought a terrible Sears acoustic guitar and two years later gave up on the trumpet forever. When I was 13, I was in a kid band playing (badly) surf music and Venture’s hits and the summer I turned 14 someone in that band had a connection to the nun (not a typo) who was responsible for bringing the Ventures to the Dodge City, Kansas City Auditorium. Their concert was being promoted and organized by the now-defunct St. Marys of the Plains Catholic College and two of my bandmates were very Catholic Italians and at least one of them had a good enough connection to the college to get me a “job” as a stage hand for the Ventures’ show.

Back in those days, setting up a stage for a rock and roll show was a whole world different than the past 40 years of pop music. The Ventures had three guitar amps and one bass amp, all Fenders, and their instruments, also all Fenders. The auditorium provided the “sound system” for any vocals or dialog, a three or four-channel Bogen tube mixer with about 20W of power and a pair of awful Bogen columns. Worse, it was all being manned by an old man who, I think, was a plumber by day and, later, ran a Suzuki motorcycle shop. As I remember, the “sound check” amounted to him plugging in a mic on a stand and tapping on it. He quickly went sleep next to the mixer before the show even started. Talk about a harbinger of what live sound would become in the future!

I carried amps and guitar cases from the loading dock to the stage and did whatever the band wanted me to do and was finished with my part of the job in an easy hour or so. They noodled around a bit with the guitars and amps, but didn’t really do anything resembling a sound check or rehearsal before they headed off to the backstage area to wait for the crowd to show up. With no adults in the room to care about what I did until after the show and load-out, I climbed the ladder to the grid over the stage and found a great seat right over the middle of the band about 20’ up and well out of sight of the audience. In the dark, I dangled my legs over the edge of the waffled grid and hung out in nervous excitement for the band to appear and the curtains to open.

Someone from the college walked in front of the curtains and said something like “Ladies and gentlemen, the world famous Ventures!” and the current opened up, the band walked to their instruments, strapped them on, and with a short count-in started with the as-yet-to-be-recorded or released Ventures’ version of Richard Rogers’ opera “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” When they struck the opening chord, I almost bounced off of the grid and rained down on their unsuspecting heads. Only luck and a good last minute grip kept me from “bringing the house down” before the first verse. As good as this remastered version of their record sounds, in my memory the live performance was 1,000 times better and more powerful.

Except for the songs they played that night that I’d yet to hear, my band covered almost everything in their catalog from “Walk, Don’t Run” to “Sleepwalk” and all of the surf tunes. Nothing I’d heard in those recordings prepared me for the real, live Beatles . . . I mean Ventures. My life was changed forever and for the next 15 years I was focused on becoming as much like those four guys as possible, except for the greasy hair. Not that I didn’t admire their hair, I was just too lazy to comb mine let alone coat it in Brylcreem.

After the concert was over and I’d helped load everything back into their vehicle, I remember walking across the parking lot with Nookie Edwards, Bob Bogle, and Don Wilson and asking them to autograph something I’d managed to find that was autographical. The response from Nookie Edwards was, “Surely.” And he reached for whatever I had to sign.

Bob Bogle said, “Don’t call the kid Shirley.” And they all broke up. That was the first of a few thousand times I head that joke, but every other time I’ve heard the lines it brings up a fabulous memory of getting to hang out with my childhood idols. For me, the Ventures started it all, first with their records, second with a live performance. Live sound, recorded music, technology and a life-long fascination with audio electronics, and whatever music I have managed to reproduce or create in my limited-talent life as a bass and guitar player. No band, ever, more deserved to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A Dog's Life

 I began writing this piece on 4/19/2022. I plan to work on it until our close friend, Gypsy dies. It isn’t a journal of those sad days. It is intended to be an obituary of the most amazing non-human life I have ever experienced. Gypsy died on 4/29/2022 at about 12:30PM. In death, as in life, she did her best to be as thoughtful as possible.Posting it to my Wirebender site has a special to a few of my audio friends. One of the more brainless years of "administration" at McNally Smith College of Music the mismanagers decided to forego the spring semester graduation party and ceremony because there "weren't enough students" to make the expense worthwhile (for who?). The Production Department had the usual number of spring graduates so we decided to host our own graduation party at my home in Little Canada. Gypsy was our official greeter and entertainment for that party.

This week, as I begin to write this essay, which is very likely to become an obituary, Mrs. Day and I are watching the last days of our 15-year-old best friend, Gypsy, play out. She joined our family, often as the smartest member, a little more than 14 years ago, near Mrs. Day’s birthday in September, 2007. She was a shelter dog and she and a sister had been caged convicts in a puppy mill that the Minneapolis SPCA had raided a few weeks earlier. Gypsy looked like a cross between an Australian Shepherd and a Blue Heeler, so that’s what we described her as her whole life. Her sister appeared to be a classic, black and white spotted Australian Shepherd. Both dogs were being treated well by the adoption agency where Mrs. Day found her and they appeared to be calm, friendly, and intelligent. It could have been a quarter-flip as to which dog we picked, but Mrs. Day really liked the Heeler color and markings. So, we went home with Gypsy (the name Mrs. Day gave her, not the name the shelter had given her). Our previous dog, Puck, who had lived with our daughter’s family for a few years, had died a few days earlier and Mrs. Day was convinced our granddaughter needed a dog to live with. I still hadn’t finished mourning the dog before Puck, a chow mix who had died 5 years earlier. I doubt that I would have ever brought another animal into my life if Mrs. Day weren’t so resolute that we “needed” one.

The ride home was a warning of what the next 15 years would be like. Gypsy whined, shivered, and paced frantically in the back seat of the car all the way home. As soon as the car stopped and she jumped out, she was “normal” again. For at least 15,000 miles of our lives, Gypsy put on that same show every time she was in a moving vehicle of any sort. She was terrible to travel with by vehicle. If we’d have wanted to walk from Minnesota to California, Gypsy would have been all for it.

The first day Gypsy was introduced to our household, she knew she belonged there and did not ever want to leave. We had a cat at the time, Spike. Spike was a neutered male who pretty much thought he owned the house. When we first got him, Puck was already part of our household. Puck accepted that kitten as if they’d known each other their whole lives. Likewise, when Gypsy arrived terrified, shy, and confused. Spike took a good look at her and walked away, back to his usual routine. Until the day Spike took off on us, after about a week living in our camper, they were the closest of animal friends. I am not lying here, but I wouldn’t believe it if you told this story to me: Spike would catch and kill rabbits, squirrels, and other wildlife in our Little Canada backyard and deliver them to Gypsy to devour for the cat’s entertainment. I really wish I’d have taken a picture of that behavior. Spike would just drop the dead animal at Gypsy’s feet and she’d make the prey vanish as if it had never existed. Barely a puff of fur left over, at most. When our most recent cat, Doctor Zogar, came into our family, Gypsy gave that nasty little brat the same kind of generous welcome Spike had given her. Gypsy played with both cats as energetically as if they were all kittens from the same mother, but she was always careful not to hurt them. I can’t say that care was repaid with any sort of kindness by Zogar. (Who I always called “Stinker.”) Zogar regularly spiked Gypsy’s nose and tried for eyes occasionally. I never hit Gypsy in anger, ever, but I batted that damn cat across the room fairly often when he hurt my dog.

Mrs. Day took her for a walk in our Little Canada neighborhood that first afternoon and Gypsy slipped her collar and ran off several blocks from home. Mrs. Day was convinced her $300 “investment” had run off and vanished on the first day, but Gypsy was waiting on the front porch when Mrs. Day came home. For several weeks, Gypsy didn’t want to leave the house and had to be forced out the door into the backyard to relieve herself. If we weren’t quick enough, she had decided the area in front of my office closet was a satisfactory “bathroom.” In a few days, the carpet and floor under the carpet were ruined.

We had a fenced yard, but she was unhappy inside that fence. So, I bought a “wireless fence containment system”: essentially a transmitter with a shock collar. I sent the collar to the lowest shock setting and walked her around the wireless fence perimeter, which I’d marked with flags. She freaked out at the first shock and we only stayed near the border long enough for the collar to beep after that. We did the same routine the next day, without the shock and she had it figured out. From then on, she was the smartest animal any of us had ever known. She marked out exactly the boundaries of her electronic “fence” and patrolled that area like a military guard. She did discover, much later, if she ran through the border and kept running down to the lake shore she’d either escape the shock or it would be brief enough not to be a problem. She rarely did that, though.

In December of 2011, I had a full hip replacement. I was determined to be mobile again in time for the 2012 motorcycle safety training season, which would start in mid-May for me. I had even loftier, less realistic goals for before that deadline and I was slowly failing to meet any of those targets thanks to pain and Minnesota winter. By then, Gypsy was a spectacular frisbee dog along with several dozen other amazing tricks and behaviors; including being able to jump into my outstretched arms on command, leap head-high (to me) to snag any object out of my hands in a running, flying leap, and jump on to any reasonable object around 5’ high from a standing start. One of my favorites was called “go ‘round.” On that command, Gypsy would run the perimeter of our yard full blast, which was as fast as I have ever seen any animal run. I’d seen something like that in the sheep dog demonstrations at the fair and Renaissance Fairs. My grandson helped teach her the trick by running ahead of her until she figured out the routine. Then, no one alive could have kept up with her let alone lead her. She was the dog I’d dreamed about when I didn’t even know I liked dogs. (I delivered newspapers as a kid and read water meters for the City of Dallas for 3 years. At the end of those experiences, dogs were never high on my list of interests.)

So, as I was struggling with maintaining my rehab discipline I kept up our afternoon walks and tried tossing her the frisbee. The problem with the frisbee was that I had initially trained Gypsy to drop the frisbees at my feet. We would sometimes do a kind of relay toss where I’d flip her a frisbee 15’-20’ out and she’d return it on the run, drop it at my feet, and keep running in the same direction where I’d toss her another frisbee. (I wish someone had video recorded us doing those things, but I’m the only person in my family who knows how to use a damn camera.) After the hip surgery, bending over to pickup a frisbee from the ground was close to impossible. Gypsy figured that out on her own and started handing me the frisbees about waist-high. That became a huge, incredibly distracting and enjoyable part of my daily physical therapy and, thanks to my dog, I was back walking 11 miles a day and teaching a full schedule of motorcycle classes in early May of 2012. My dog was my best, most dedicated, most sympathetic physical therapist and I can only hope I never need that kind of help again because she won’t be there to take care of me.

If you are one of those unperceptive, species-centric goobers who believes that animals do not have a sense of humor, Gypsy would have laughed in your face and you would have to be a complete fool not to know it. She had a wonderful laugh and a smile that was, literally, ear-to-ear. Her joy in running, jumping, wrestling, and performing her many tricks/behaviors was undeniable. On my worst, darkest depressed moments, Gypsy could make me smile and laugh. As happy as she often made me, I don’t think I ever realized how sad I would be at the end of our life together. As I write this, I feel like my head is overfilling with tears and sorrow. It physically hurts as badly as the worst headache I have ever experienced. I can’t imagine being willing to go through this ever again.

Gypsy had so many tricks (“behaviors” for the politically correct crowd) and she’d taught herself most of them. Speaking of the sense of humor, one of the first things she did was when someone would say “cute face,” she’d cover her face with both paws and act shy. That unmistakable guffaw would often follow that if someone would pet her and talk baby talk at her. She had the most gregarious hand-shake of any animal on the planet. She would raise her right paw even with the top of her head and swing it into your hand to shake. It looked like she was someone almost impossibly happy to meet you. The usual “roll over,” “sit,” “lay down,” “stay,” “speak,” and dozens of other words and actions were almost naturally in her vocabulary. We had to spell words like “walk,” “hike,” “go out,” “outside,” and anything else that might imply going for a walk or she would be whining at the door, looking up at her leash, waiting to go for a walk. Like most dogs of her breed, “heel” was a tough command to obey. She could do it, but she’d much rather take off to the end of her leash and nose about. Early on, she was a plow horse but she learned that obeying “don’t pull” got her a lot more freedom. She also understood “right” and “left” even off of the leash.

While Gypsy might have been the worst traveling companion possible, whining in spectacularly irritating and painful ways non-stop for whatever the length of the car ride, she was the best camp dog imaginable. She was fearlessly protective of Mrs. Day (as seen at left worrying about Mrs. Day on the back of a horse) and kept us aware of everything and everyone who came near our campsites 24-hours/day. She slept at the foot of our camper bed, every night, and always seemed to have one eye open for threats. Once, when she was tried to the bumper of our camper, a coyote had the gall to try and cross the outside edge of our campsite and Gypsy nearly pulled the camper uphill to get at the coyote. The coyote ran away with the knowledge that he’d have been in a fight to the death if Gypsy had gotten loose. People, however, were automatically given a pass unless Mrs. Day seemed nervous. And she was always ready to go for a walk, on a leash or not, and delighted to do it.

She liked everyone and loved many. For most of her life, she was free to roam our backyard and when delivery people came into the yard to drop off packages, she was always quiet and friendly. Many of them came to like leaving packages at our home because they got to visit with Gypsy. Deer, rabbits, and squirrels, not so much. One of my favorite indoor activities was, when I would spot a squirrel attempting to mangle one of my bird feeders, I’d let Gypsy out into the yard and say “squirrel!” She’d dash into the yard, looking for squirrels, and chasing any who were dumb enough to ignore her into the trees, over the fence, or up the hill into the woods. She loved terrorizing squirrels and rabbits and would not tolerate deer or other large wildlife in her yard. Mrs. Day’s hostas will likely be substantially less lush without their guardian.

Her will to live is inspiring. As of today, April 25th, she can’t eat or drink anything without throwing it back up. Her energy is a microscopic fraction of what it was a week ago and she was a shadow of herself then. Every morning, she drags herself out of bed and walks to the back door to be let out. (Yes, she has always been smart enough to know where her home is and did not need a fenced yard or tether until the last couple of weeks.) She is mostly operating on habit, since she isn’t ingesting anything she rarely expels anything. It is very much like she doesn’t want to inconvenience us with the process of her dying. If you are one of those who believe dogs are incapable of love, I can’t imagine what I could say to you. Even when she is on her last legs, she would rather sleep on the floor near Mrs. Day than in a comfortable bed in the living room. She has a bed in the bedroom, too, but in these final days she wasn’t to be closer.

Gypsy died today, 4/29/2022, at about 12:30PM. She had a rough night, mostly waking up and thinking she was alone. She didn’t seem to be in pain. For the 2nd time in the life we’ve known her, she soiled herself last night and when I carried her outside to lie on the deck bench she was still responsive but had no strength at all. She couldn’t even hold her head up and I had to carry her like a baby, supporting her head when I laid her down. We went for our last walk 10 days ago, it that one didn’t last long due to her strength. The day before, we walked almost a mile and she was slow but still moving well at the end of that walk.

Her will to live throughout all of this miserable week was inspiring and humbling. She did not want to give up and we did not feel that we had the right to make that decision for her. She was struggling out of her bed and staggering to the back door to be let out up to Tuesday evening. Wednesday, I carried her out after she was able to get up but couldn’t walk without falling down. We stood in the backyard for a while, listening to birds and night sounds, but she needed to lean on his leg to stay upright. Thursday, she soiled herself and wet the bed overnight. She was conscious most of yesterday and responded to being touched and our voices, but we think she was in a coma most of the day.

Last night, we left her in a bed we’d made for her in the living room but about midnight just as I was going to bed she started whining for the first time in a week (Gypsy whined a lot, that was her “voice” for communication, so the silence over this past week has been weird.) and we laid down beside her. That was what she wanted. I carried her into the bedroom where she had a “bed” and she was fine most of the night, but she woke up twice afraid and I comforted her until she was quiet. I honestly think Mrs. Day’s snoring helped keep her calm for most of the night. Me, not so much.

She seemed to be comfortable on the outside bench and she was there for about 4 hours before I discovered she had kicked off one of the blankets and died. She had been alone for about 5 minutes. I guess she was being considerate to the end.

Life is short, precious, and painful. And if you are as special as our dog, when you go your loved ones will miss you desperately.

How to Host an Open Mic/Jam Session

Sadly and like most everything else I’ve ever learned and experienced, the “rules” I’m going to list here could be flipped into a “how not to” list. Most everything I’ve learned in my life came the hard way, from doing or experiencing it wrong first.

And “open mic” is often a misnomer. Often, it’s just an excuse for a band or wannabe performer to attract a captured audience while holding out the false hope that other musicians might get to play for a bit. Likewise, “jam session” is sometimes a similar con; you invite people to bring their instruments to accompany you. Both of those experiences are rarely repeated by most of us. Con me once, shame on you. Con me twice, shame on me. So the first rule is “tell it like it is.” If you are trying to attract an audience, don’t bullshit musicians into thinking your invitation is about anyone but you playing music and them listening. Once we’re past that, here are some other pointers from someone who has suffered and enjoyed 50 years of open mics and jam sessions.

1) Don’t mess with the sign-up order. I don’t care if one of your personal heroes shows up and insists that he/she doesn’t have time to wait his/her turn. People do not react well to favoritism, no matter who the favorite is. I’ve sat for an hour at a really awful open mic, watching the names tick off and my name get closer to the top, and when the floor manager suddenly decides to hop a couple locals over me, I just leave and never come back. For all I know, it was the only time it ever happened, but it happened to me and I am not that desperate for mic-time.

2) Use the provided gear. If you can only get “your sound” on your amp, acknowledge the fact that you suck and can only pretend to be a musician if you are so loud no one can tell how bad you are. There is a ton of value in having to make do in these situations. Almost 50 years ago, I thought I was a hot shot, gun-slinging lead guitarist because that had been my role in the last 3-4 bands I’d been in. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t great by any standard. Some friends introduced me to the Saddle Creek Bar in Omaha and the almost-famous jam session that club hosted every Monday night. The next week, I brought my guitar, amp and pedals and was told that I had to plug into the amps on stage and that my pedals were unwelcome. I suspect I whined a bit, but I plugged into a nice blackface Fender Vibrolux and proceeded to demonstrate how sloppy my technique was. My rig at the time was a Peavey Artist amp and a half-dozen distortion, gain, dynamics, and modulation pedals and I needed all of that to disguise that I rarely picked a note. My playing consisted of hammer-ons and pull-offs with an occasional picked harmonic and I counted on my very distorted over-driven rig to disguise my lazy technique. I quickly found a 50’s Fender Harvard amp, tweeked it a bit and replaced the boring CTS stock 10” with a K120 JBL and started working on my technique without electronic assistance. [I played that rig live and in the studio for the next 20 years before I sold it to an LA studio player on my way out of California.] After a few weeks of practice, I went back to Saddle Creek and held my own. I kept going back until I kinda was a hot shot, gun-slinging lead guitarist.

3) If you are the host or the host band, constantly remind yourself that the job is is more about being an MC than being a performer. Sure, get the ball rolling with 2 or 3 tunes and invite people to sign up while you’re playing. If the night starts to slow down, you can always get back up to close out the evening. But don’t be a stage hog, you’re just turning the night into a gig for you or your band and letting everyone else know that you imagine yourself to be a star.

4) For open mics, use a freakin’ signup sheet and put it somewhere everyone can see it. Ideally, use a chalkboard or whiteboard so the names can been seen by everyone from a distance. A white board is especially useful if you start attracting a lot of players; you can switch colors as you get near the end of the list and have to start over from the top. Holding on to the list so that you can pretend to be Ed Sullivan (ask your grandparents) and pick the talent is bullshit and the kind of control freak thing you need to not do if you want a big turnout.

5) For open mics, it is critically important that you put a time limit on stage time; say 3 songs or 10 minutes MAX per performer. You can always start your list over and give everyone another 3 or 10, but if you don’t set time limits Murphy’s Law of Musicians says “The worst performer will always hog the stage the longest.” Don’t torture your audience or drive out actual musicians by letting some total goober fumble around for 20 minutes jabbering about “how I wrote this song.” Put a damn time with a big display on the stage so nobody can pretend not to know when their time is up. If you have to, get a stage hook and drag them outta there.

For jam sessions, I’ve found that one or two songs per performer is the most fair way to decide what the group will be playing. Usually, jam session players naturally arrange themselves in a circle, which is perfect for determining who is next in line. Just pick a direction for the player rotation and everyone gets to either choose and perform a song with the rest playing along or “pass.” Don’t try to bully or con someone into playing and singing when they don’t want to do it. They might change their mind on the next time around. Some people just want to play along and not have to lead anything, so let them. A really asshole move is to pick a song and try to con someone else into singing it. If they wanted to sing your song, they’d have picked it for themselves. Put your big kids’ pants on and either play or get out of the way.

6) Watch your volume. Regardless of whether it is an acoustic or electric situation, music is a group activity (unless you’re a solo act) and trying to be the loudest guy in the room is another asshole move. Blend in with the rest of the players. If you are doing something unusually good, they’ll quiet down to hear you better. If you suck, you’re better off being ignored. That goes for your audience, too. If you’re any good, they listen and if you aren’t volume won’t change their minds.

7) Most important, have fun, be nice, and let music do what it does best: create a community between players and the audience.

“Just Good Enough”

A friend who is desperate to get back to making live music has, almost unwillingly, become interested in dealing with the sound of the live shows he’s trying to promote. He is a drummer and not in any way technically inclined. [I know. That does sound like the perfect candidate for a front of house technician.] A few nights ago, we had an hour telephone conversation about his last gig, which I attended for a few moments, and his questions about what went wrong with the sound.

The short answer was “everything.”

First, there was no sound check because, as usual, the musicians spent so much time fiddling with the usual unimportant crap. There was no time to do anything more than jabber “test, test, one, two, three” into each of the four microphones to ensure they made noise before the small audience got bored (which they did anyway) and started yelling at each other (aka “bar talk”). Two, one of the three players, the keyboard player, has a very high opinion of himself and is absolutely certain the audience would rather hear him pound on his keyboard than hear the vocalist or any other sound in the room. Three, there were as many as five guys who felt the need to mindlessly tweak the EQ on the mic channels, boosting the bass and low-mids 6-12dB to add “power” to their weak performances and mediocre tone. [Yeah, I’m being a bitch. Bring it on.] The end result was a booming mess filling the room with volume and no music and an audience that paid as much attention to the musicians and music as they did the ceiling fans.

In the process of describing what should have happened, my friend and I ended up recounting the few decent musical performances we’ve experienced in our cumulative 80 years as musicians and audience members and (in my case) production experiences. As a member of the audience, I can count them on the fingers of my two hands and, it’s possible, I might have some change left over. As a musician, I am probably being egotistical in saying I might have participated in twice that many decent sounding shows (out of several hundred shows that went off of the rails). As a technician, I’m back to the 10-fingers-with-change. The problem with live music is that almost everyone settles for “good enough” because doing it right takes “too much effort.” It does take a lot of effort and, based on popular music history and trends, it might not be worth it. If only a miniscule portion of the audience cares, why bother?

Of course, that argument pretty much drives everything to be mediocre. If that is your goal, you have set a highly achievable target for yourself.

50 years ago and beyond, the only people who had an amplification system for anything other than electric guitar or bass were professionals working major venues. You did not often see or hear PA systems in night clubs, bars, restaurants, or small concert venues. You didn’t need to, either. There were two reasons for that: 1) musicians were less arrogant, they didn’t need the ego reinforcement that demanding attention by being the loudest noise in the room and 2) audiences hadn’t been exposed this this kind of abuse so they were less hearing-impaired. And, more importantly, everyone from the musicians to the audience to the bar tenders and service staff were more polite.

More than 40 years ago, my studio partner and I were asked to record a local Lincoln, Nebraska “world/jazz/folk” band, The Spencer Ward Quintet, at a local nightclub. It was going to be the band’s last performance before the band members not only left the group but they left the area in five very different directions. That put some unusual pressure on getting it right the first time. The club had an oversized pa system and my partner had designed a very high fidelity sound system that he had been developing over the past several years, but I wanted as little interference from the sound system as possible which meant minimal sound pressure and maximum directionality from that system. I decided to go with my JBL 4311 studio monitors as the FOH system and nothing but the room acoustics and stage volume from the mostly acoustic instruments for ‘”monitoring.” The band was mostly willing to try my approach and other than the bass player the instruments on stage were all acoustic: guitar, vibes, percussion, violin, and electric bass. Naturally, keeping the bass volume under control proved to be the most difficult problem through out the evening.

The audience and club more than cooperated, too. Throughout the concert, the audience (which was mostly area musicians) were almost dead quiet. During the first break, as the band members were shedding their instruments and leaving the stage, I was almost injured by a jet engine sound in my phones. I pulled the phones off and looked around, assuming something somewhere in my signal path had self-destructed, but the noise was in the room and lots of people were laughing. Turned out, the bar tenders had decided not to make any blended mixed drinks while the band was on stage and had collected every blender they could get their hands on, prepared the drinks in the blenders, and the moment the music and applause stopped hit the power switches on at least a dozen blenders. They kept refilling and emptying the blenders until the band walked back on to the stage. Then, the club went silent for the next set. Considering the limits of our technology and the fact that the only remaining copy I had of the recording was a cassette (dubbed to CD more than a decade later), I am not ashamed of this recording.

After the concert was concluded, Dan and I must have had a dozen local musicians ask how we got “that amazing sound” from the house sound system? The house system had been stacked along a wall on the stage behind the band. I used it as a rough bass trap, but it was never powered up during the concert. Everyone who asked about the system walked right past the 4311s sitting on box newel posts at each front corner of the stage. Looking back, I was lucky no one knocked them off of the posts since they were clearly invisible.

What that proved to me was that volume is more of a problem than helpful and audiences will respond to what you expect from them. I have preached that lesson dozens of times over the last 40 years and, occasionally, someone listens and the result is always better than their previous practice.

Missing the Analog Point

For the last couple of days, I’ve been enjoying Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. It is a story about the most famous photographer of the American Indian in our history. But it is also a story about a man and his art, photography, at the beginning of that technology. When I was a kid, for a little while I was a photography geek in school. I had a few cameras, stuff that I’d found in pawn shops, from 120/620 Kodak film and a huge and beat-up Kodak Vollenda expandable camera to assorted low cost 35mm cameras. I wasn’t particularly good with the cameras (no change from today), but I was fascinated with the developing process and was fairly competent at that for a while. Music drug me away from photography pretty quickly and until digital cameras made taking pictures easy and cheap I pretty much gave up the habit.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher has a lot of detailed descriptions of the chemistry and experimental quality of the developing process that reminded me of the analog recording processes and equipment that I grew up working with and wrestled with for more than 40 years. The book made me wonder if modern analog camera fans are as clueless about the technology they use as are modern analog recording freaks? Edward Curtis was a wizard in the darkroom, creating his own developing emulsions, processes, and creating effects with chemicals, development time and temperatures, and other techniques. His gallery in McCloud, California is a national treasure as was his art. Most modern analog photographers bypass the darkroom, for good reason. The chemicals are often toxic, at best, and the processes are tedious, hazardous, and unpredictable. Sending your roll of film into a company that owns and maintains the automated processing equipment is the surest, easiest, safest way to get pictures developed. It also eliminates at least half of the art of being a photographer.

The analog recording process, at its best, is a similar mess of technologies, lots of subjective judgement, experience, tedious technologies that require constant (expensive) maintenance, and ridiculous quantities of patience. Like analog photography, the results of all of those qualities can be emulated relatively simply and predictably with digital technologies with little-to-no downside. I am not saying that those emulations are perfect and I am absolutely not arguing that an analog master can not do things in that format that might be impossible to duplicate in the digital world. I am saying that if you aren’t a master of the technology, you’re probably bullshitting yourself if you think plowing money into obsolete equipment and media is going to magically buy you something you couldn’t do better with digital equipment.

It Is Not A Victimless Crime

At the moment where the US Congresscritters are contemplating decriminalizing marijuana use and establishing “procedures for expunging previous convictions from people’s records,” I’m thinking about ways to refill the nation’s for-profit prisons with real criminals. [We can’t ask those prison-owning billionaires to suffer just because the country has decided to be slightly more just and rational.] For years, I’ve advocated several punishment for lousy live sound reinforcement. In “What I Have Learned about Live Sound” I pretty much wrapped up a lifetime experiences and suffering with amplified . . . music? (For lack of a more accurate term.) In 2013, I wrote “Weapons of Mass Destruction – Live Sound” when someone I know butchered a Robert Randolph and the Family Band’s live show so badly I haven’t bothered to listen to or buy an RR record since. “Snarky Puppy in St. Paul” described one of the most embarrassing, awful, and disappointing anti-musical experiences I’ve suffered and one that was a turning point for me in that my response was “never again” regarding all things related to that band. “Isolation from the Audience,” “Where Did the Audience Go?,” back in 2004 I wrote an article for FOH Magazine that disappeared after my friend Mark Amundson died “Loud Noises,” and way back in 1991 one of my first Wirebender Audio website essays was “Loudly Killing Live Music.” I think I have sufficiently documented my case for prosecuting the “the moron behind the sound board.” Back in 1991 I said, “The solution is simple. When you think the sound clown is wreaking your favorite national or local band, he probably is. Walk up behind him and broom his line of coke into the crowd. Smack him in the back of the head with a mid-sized brick. Kick his chair over and spill him, head first, into the mosh pit. Unplug his effects rack. Narc him to the cops. Do whatever you have to do to make his life miserable. Scare him into going back to his boombox pickup truck and out of the wonderful world of music. No punishment is too severe.”

This moment in history presents us, the members of the civilized world and music lovers world wide, an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. As the nation and even the world considers relaxing penalties for victimless crimes, we could turn to prosecuting criminals with thousands of victims who to get our punishment ya-ya’s out. Obviously, the thousands of big bank financial scammers, government officials who advocate the overthrow the government, corporate executives who have profited from decimating the environment or harming citizens with dangerous products, and anyone who betrays the public trust should be on that list. Beside that, though, what about the many “morons behind the sound board?” These violent criminals have deafened thousands of unsuspecting music lovers without suffering even civil prosecution since the early 1960s; 60 years of blatant negligent criminal behavior without even minor financial penalties.

If it were up to me, I’d just put the bastards against the wall and shoot them. Your mileage may vary, but at the last I think doing the kind of violence to music and a musical audience that I witnessed at the St. Paul Palace Theater in 2019 deserves as much jail time as a minor marijuana possession used to earn: back in the 60s, someone caught with practically any quantity of grass might expect a life sentence in toothless hillbilly states like Texas and much of the Midwest. Today, there are still parts of the country, like Minnesota  where possession of as little as 42.5g (1.5oz) gets a 5 year, $10,000 sentence. And if you don’t think those nutty laws are still being applied, you’re nuts. I especially like the idea of applying the three-strikes “mandatory 25-years imprisonment for repeated serious crimes” to live sound goobers. Like I said, in 1991, what’s the worst that happens if idiots suddenly don’t want to do the job because of the risk? If no one ever touched a live sound board again, music would be the primary beneficiary.