Placing Bets

The music/audiophile equipment business has been selling snake oil to a gullible portion of the public for at least since Emile Berliner began making 5-inch “gramophone” recordings of chamber orchestras. Connectors and conductors are one of the biggest scams perpetrated on the gullible and wealthy “customers.” Lots of people have spent more energy than I on dispelling the myths and bullshit and I think this paper does it as well as anyone, Mission Engineering’s “Measuring Guitar Cables.” I’ve also spent some energy in my past career and more recent articles on some of this stuff, but I’d old, tired, and more amused than outraged these days. In fact, for the most part I’m now totally on the side of the con artists. The past 40 years of watching the incredibly stupid folks who call the rest of us “libtards” has convinced me that there is nothing unethical about scalping people who want to be scalped.

A few nights ago, I was hanging out with a couple of local musicians and one of them began to explain why his $250 guitar cable was better than a regular cable. He is an electrician, by trade, and I’ve found that those guys are typically strong on the NEC and weak on electrical theory and this guy was no exception. He first started off by tossing out a word, “hysteresis,” that he clearly did not understand as some kind of quality connected to electrical conductors. Then, he went on to try and tag the “skin effect” to how he imagined that his new, grossly over-priced cable could make a passive electric bass guitar sound like one of his active instruments.

Pause here while I explain why I am not rich: I am slow-witted. When people say stuff that either blows me away with insight or astounds me in their stupidity I am equally stumped for an unacceptably long time. Sometimes days will pass before I come up with a relevant question or a snappy comeback. As disappointing as I am in print, I am way slower and dumber in person.

A day later, I realized I could have made some serious money that night. I am not a gambling man (at least not with my money), but this wasn’t a gamble. The next time this comes up in conversation I hope to be ready to bet $1,000 that I can easily setup a test that will prove this dude can’t tell the difference from a $10 Chinese-made cord and his grossly over-priced spread. All it will take is an agreement on what would be “proof” in the test (at least a 75% success rate), a blindfold, a pen and paper, a quiet unbiased witness or two, the two test cables, an instrument (especially a bass), an amplifier, and a dozen cable-swaps and about 15 minutes and I’ll be $1,000 richer.

In case you care, the ONLY things that matter in guitar cables are reliability and shielding quality. Reliability is directly connected to the size and quality of the connectors, the ability of the inner conductors to “slip” inside the outer sheath (either with slippery insulation materials or paper/plastic wrapping), and the care the manufacturer takes in assembly. Most shielding, either braided or double-wrapped, provides 100% shielding and, contrary to your high school football coach’s bullshit, 100% is as good as it gets. Avoid aluminum foil shielding because it will become noisy when it is flexed. Long cables are less reliable and more likely to become noisy. Noise is a relative thing with guitars, though. Since they are unbalanced and high impedance, your pickups are likely to be a bigger noise issue than your cables.

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.

Backing Away from Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Is Not A Studio

About 5 years ago, I wrote a diatribe about motorcycle helmets, titled “That’s Not A Helmet.” After hearing a friend’s description of a few hours in a local “recording studio,” a lot of the thoughts behind that motorcycle rant came back to me.

First, a recording studio should be an excellent acoustic space. If it is not that, the best you could call it would be a “practice space that also stores some recording equipment.” Let’s be honest with why people want to call an overdub space, lousy practice room, or even a living room “a recording studio.” Money. Money. Money.

1) Money spent by the wannabe recording engineer on equipment that far exceeds both the talent of the user and the acoustic capabilities of the space. If you spend $5,000 on a half-dozen high end preamps and an outragesously cool A-to-D interface and your acoustic space is like any of the spaces I’ve collected in the pictures in this rant, you’re fooling yourself. You don’t need 100dB S/N or 126dB of dynamic range, because your crappy space has a 55dBA noise floor. No manufacturer currently selling equipment makes a preamp that is anywhere near as awful as your recording space. $200 is overkill for your room.

2) Money being made by boutique and so-called pro-level manufacturers over-selling equipment to people who don’t need anything near high-end, wouldn’t know how to obtain high-end performance in a pro studio with a professional assistant, and who have almost infinitely more money than sense or talent. While I saw some of this when I was teaching at a music college, I’ve seen way more of it since living in what is essentially a retirement community in southeastern Minnesota. Every little rich kid in this 16,000 person town seems to have a “studio.” That universally means they have thousands of dollars worth of equipment and instruments crammed into a spare bedroom or basement family room space. At the most, they might have spent $200 on an Auralex kit, which they mindlessly applied to the walls in odd places. Everyone in the supply chain saw these suckers coming and sold them on the idea that “there is money to be made in those recording hills.” Trust me, there isn’t. As a brilliant and experienced friend often says, “The only way to end up with a million from a recording studio is to start with three.” You won’t even make minimum wage renting your space to friends and suckers and if you ever knew how to calculate ROI you’ll have to completely ignore that knowledge if you want to stay sane.

3) Money being made by the various vanity distribution channels from CD Baby to YouTube to Spotify. Every one of those characters will be telling you that “you too can be a rock star.” You can’t. You won’t. And you shouldn’t be.

I’m no saying that you can’t make great music in a non-studio environment. You absolutely can. It’s just a lot harder to get great acoustic sounds in a lousy-to-mediocre acoustic environment. My real complaint is that calling a bedroom or basement rec room a “recording studio” degrades the phrase in the same way calling a garbage man a “sanitation engineer” pisses on the training and education required to actually be an “engineer.” Find another word. I call my workspace “our spare bedroom” or “my office.”

One Story, Two Books

One of my wife’s favorite concepts is “evolutionary convergance”; where the same evolutionary decision is made independently, likely because it is a good idea. The two books are The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll by Ian S. Port and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar by by Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna. Play It Loud is a 2016 publication and The Birth of Loud came out this year. Your take on these two books will depend on your personality. The stories are, essentially, the same.

I read Play It Loud first and am just now finishing up The Birth of Loud. Of the two, Play It Loud is my choice.

There are too many technical flaws in The Birth of Loud and the writing style is too emotional and concentrated on personalities rather than technicalities. Your mileage will, probably, vary. Lines like this are show stoppers for me, “When Leo heard this story [about his pickups failing during a performance], he made sure that if the Esquire’s wiring shorted, the signal would only be diminished, not completely cut.” Wrong. If the wiring is “shorted,” there will be no output, regardless of Leo’s technical “genius.” Birth of Loud is littered with this kind of technical foolishness, to the point that when the author attempts to describe how anything works I have to kick into speed reading mode to get past his mistakes and misunderstandings. Otherwise, I’d toss the book in a pile and find something more interesting to read. There are moments in Birth of Loud that make suffering the flaws worthwhile, though. I knew almost nothing about Paul Bigsby, other than the fact that he knew the difference between vibrato and tremolo; unlike Leo Fender. By himself, he would be an interesting story, so the fact that there is a little more about Bigsby in Birth than Play makes that book worth reading; at least, for me. I do have to suffer through an awful lot of hyperbole, emotional language, and outright silliness to get to the good stuff, though. Port’s descriptions of the music discussed in the book are so over-the-top silly that it’s hard to take any of the book seriously.

Play it Loud is less emotional, more technically accurate, and a more entertaining and interesting read. The authors either check each other’s excesses and technical misunderstandings or they are simple more knowledgeable; or they had a better editor.

Interestingly, neither book is the usual Les Paul pandering that we’ve suffered for the last 40 years. I suppose Paul has been dead “long enough” that the shadow of his self-promotion is fading. I remember watching a Los Angeles AES discussion in the 80’s where Les Paul and Tom Dowd were on the panel and when Les started bragging about buying the “first Ampex 8-track machine,” Dowd reminded him that most of the design work on that machine came from Dowd and Ross Snyder’s idea of making a single 1” multi-track head, instead of Paul’s stacked individual heads and eight stacked ¼” tapes. Also, both Dowd and Paul ordered 8-track machines, more or less, at the same time and Paul’s was supposed to be delivered first, but Dowd snatched it off of the Ampex loading dock and installed it himself. Ampex delivered the 2^nd one to Les Paul’s studio and installed it for him. Les Paul was the Jimmy Page of his time, claiming the creation of everything from electric guitar pickups to solid body Spanish-style guitars to recording techniques to tube amplifiers. Of course, there were predecessors for all of those inventions, but Paul made his claims more often, louder, and more prominently than that actual inventors. His contribution to the famous Gibson Les Paul guitars is accurately reduced to his signature on the instruments and some of people who actually designed those instruments are credited. History is catching up to Les Paul’s legacy.

Leo Fender gets a similar look in both books, probably more harshly/realistically in The Birth of Loud. His personal and technical limitations have been rarely discussed outside of knowledgeable conversations between engineers or technicians. The fact that Leo overcame his technical limitations with hard work is a fact, but the fact that his products were littered with the downside of those technical limitations has barely received a mention. The contributions of the many people who compensated for Leo’s limitations are finally documented in both of these books. Rarely, does one person actually “create” a significant product; almost never, in fact. Fender’s guitars and amplifiers are the product of a lot of unheralded effort by many people who at least get acknowledged in both of these books, more so in The Birth of Loud, to the credit of Ian Port.

Why Don’t You Leave?

I've had a few people ask me how I ended up in Minnesota—the frozen north, Rocky and Bullwinkle country, Fargoland—after living in California for a decade and owning a home in Colorado. It is pretty simple and I think this song is a fairly straight-forward reminder, at least of California.

Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I can't slow down, I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
There ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good

Living in Southern California without a big inheritance safety net was like living on the edge of destruction for most of those years. “I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed” and every time I got a little safety margin built up it came crashing down on me with some piddly medical issue (we never had any major medical issues in California). California is a great place for skilled single people and an ever greater place for people who come from money. I moved there as the provider for a single-income family I was running-in-place for all but the very last year of my life in California. That last year, I was working full time managing QSC’s Tech Services department, going to Cal State Long Beach full time at night, and doing as much of the husband/father thing as I could manage while working and going to school 60 hours a week.

I remember standing in the middle of QSC’s chassis assembly area one afternoon. I was in that spot because I’d been in an engineering/marketing meeting earlier and I needed to install some upgraded product verification software in the assembly Audio Precision test fixtures. While I tried to upload the software, I was being bombarded by questions from people on the assembly floor, the final product test techs, and people who heard I was out there and had questions they’d been saving up for the next time they saw me. Tech Services was in another building and I didn’t venture into the assembly area any where as often as I had when I’d been the Manufacturing Engineering Manager; the job I’d had for the previous five years. The new manufacturing management regime didn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself or answering questions from assembly personnel, so there was some pent-up energy out there looking for an outlet. One of the techs, Tom Northway, watched a while and, when there was a small break in the action, said, “You have the answers for all of us, don’t you?”

I don’t think I ever felt like I had anywhere near enough answers, but I always thought I owed anyone who cared enough to ask for my help, or advice, some kind of attempt at providing that help. The end result, for me, was that I totally burned out trying to be everything to everyone, often at the same time. One of the things that originally attracted me to electronics engineering was the fact that I could focus all of my attention on a problem, a project, or even just a small aspect of a product design and no one would expect me to do anything else. By the time I left QSC Audio’s manufacturing management, I’d practically forgotten everything I knew about focusing on one thing. Moving to Technical Services was the right thing for me to do, for myself, but it was too little, too late. By then, I was so mentally tired that getting out of the California rat race seemed absolutely necessary.

That moment on the manufacturing floor where all of those minutes, hours, and years of constant head-spinning management frustration was eye-opening. For at least a year, I had been telling my family that I was leaving when I finished my degree at Cal Long Beach, but that frantic, frustrating, multitasking moment and Tom’s question sealed the deal. At that moment, I knew I was on the road again; a phrase that has followed me since 1965. Bob Dylan’s line, from “On the Road Again,” has been a song always near and dear to my heart, “Then you ask why I don't live here. Honey, how come you don't move?”

That’s a pretty good description of life in southern California. All my life, I’d heard about “La La Land” and how that “good old Midwestern work ethic” would blow away California (and New York). Don’t believe that shit for a second. Everyone who doesn’t have a permanent silver spoon stuck to their lips is running in place. The pace is frantic, the pressure is intense, the competition is fierce, and the cost of failure can be catastrophic and there are 100 people waiting in line to take your place, if your place sucks. If your place is a really good life, home, job, or opportunity, there are 100,000 people waiting to take it away from you. They probably won’t steal it from you. They’re just waiting for you to drop the ball for a few seconds and they’ll pick it up before you even know you dropped it. And when you lose in California, you might lose everything. The distance from superstar to living under a bridge is far shorter than you can imagine. The path back up is filled with traps, obstacles, opponents, and expenses.

I “made it” in California. I succeed in an occupation that has more failures and escapees than most (engineering). I supported my family in a middle class manner without a college degree or a nickel of inheritance or outside support. I even managed to collect a respectable college degree before I left; after almost 25 years of night classes. When I left, I was more than ready to move and I have never once been tempted to move back to the Golden State's constant stress and motion, high rent, and the precarious lifestyle of the middle class in California. And that is why I’m here in Rocky and Bullwinkle Land.

An Acoustic Guitar Experiment

One of many irritants about getting old has been circulation issues. I sleep with at least one half of my body tingling from lack of circulation regardless of which side I sleep on, bed softness or hardness (although, hard is better), sleep position (although after being married for 51 years I am “trained” not to sleep on my back), pills, or anything else I’ve tried. Playing guitar is one more place where my poor technique has turned into a minor medical issue. Like many non-classical guitarists, I “rest” my right arm on the edge of the lower bout. For 50-some years, that hasn’t been a problem for anything but the limitations in speed and technique it causes (which are substantial, I know, Scott). This last couple of years, it has begun to cause another problem. After a few minutes of playing or practice, my wrist, hand, and fingers begin to tingle and will eventually get numb feeling from the lack of circulation caused by that pressure on the edge on the blood vessels of my inner arm.

A few months back, I saw Brian Stewart—music store owner and guitar builder/technician extraordinaire—working on an arm rest for one of his customers. I wondered if that device might help with my circulation problem? So, I built one.

Saturday morning at the TreeStrings morning jam, I tried it out. For the most part, it worked pretty well. Brian and I talked about his design verses mine and we had some other ideas as to how this might become an actual product (which he really doesn’t want to build) and I thought about some of those changes while I played this morning. I wish I’d taken a picture of my original design, if for no other reason than to show the evolution of the idea and because I thought the original piece was really pretty. It did cover more of the top than necessary and was heavier than necessary, too. To keep from having to split another piece of walnut to start from scratch, I decided to hack away at my original piece. Might have been a mistake.  

When I got back home, I took that first attempt down to my basement shop and started carving it down to about half of the original width. I smoothed out the bandsaw cuts, sanded the piece back to a beautiful gunstock satin, and tried it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as my original design and that was a huge disappointment. So, I reshaped the top side, losing about 1/3 of the total thickness and creating a little more of a flat spot on top while keeping the soft edge I’d originally designed. I refinished that work and reattached the piece. For the initial experiments, I’m using fairly weak double-sided tape to hold the piece in place, but when I decide I’m happy with it I’ll use something more aggressive.

One of the things I did not expect to happen was for the guitar’s tone and output to change for the better. If you look at that guitar-playing picture (at the top of this essay), you’ll notice that the arm damps a fair portion of the guitar top (especially true when the player is wearing long sleeve anything). I play a very small Composite Acoustics Cargo travel guitar and I’d never really thought much about how much of the guitar’s top I was sacrificing with my playing technique (I know, Scott). After listening the “with and not-with” sound of the guitar, I was interested in the concept on a whole different level. I would guess the overall volume is close to 3dBSPL louder with the arm rest in place and it is substantially more full and brighter, too. In retrospect, all of that makes perfect sense, but I hadn’t thought about it until the evidence was right there in my arms.

I will be playing with this concept a lot more in the future. For now, I’m enjoying being able to practice guitar for several hours without numbness and that irritating feeling (or lack of) that comes with circulation problems.

Overrating Repairability

Back in the mid-80’s I thought I had a small vision of the future. I imagined that there would be a much larger market for small, high fidelity, high reliability power amplifiers for the home studio market. First, I talked Pat Quilter into designing a one-rack-space Series One amplifier for that market; the QSC 1080/1100. From my own studio experience, I added a pair of headphone jacks for control room monitoring, with independent and easily replaceable limiting resistors so that two different monitor headphones could be plugged into that amp with the expectation that the acoustic output would be the same on both phones regardless of sensitivity or impedance. My contribution to the company’s documentation was the schematics that were found at the back of every owners’ manual for more than a decade. I also spec’d all of our circuit boards at 2 mil thickness to make servicing easier without causing damage to our boards during repair and to add to the durability of our products. I even argued that slotted screws were more repair-friendly than Philips screws, due to my experience working on Japanese motorcycles. (I was wrong in that argument.) 40 years ago, I was a big believer in designing field-repairable products. Today, not so much.

I have a long career in music instrument (MI) and audio equipment repair. That means, I have worked on equipment from the end of the tube design period through the 30-some years of analog equipment and discrete-to-integrated-circuit designs to today’s surface mount technology (SMT) components and our current age of equipment that is so complicated it is very nearly unrepairable for anyone but factory technicians. I have worked for several manufacturers, either as a captured employee repairing company products or as an independent tech working as an authorized service center or repairing equipment long past warranty. I’ve worked on a lot of equipment after someone else has attempted to make repairs. I’ve seen butchered single-sided printed circuit boards (PCBs), slaughtered double-sided PCBs with nonsensical jumpers scattered all over the board to bypass the wreaked traces, and point-to-point terminal strips so buried in cold solder that I needed a bottle of flux to get the solder to flow well enough to remove past repair attempts. And those messes were often created by factory authorized service center technicians and even the factory technicians! There are at least two well-known, high end Eurotrash console makers (who may or may not remain nameless) that were infamous for shipping new consoles with so many butchered and jumpered boards and wiring harnesses that we just assumed their crap would need reworking out of the crate. All of that equipment was repairable, but it needed repairing on a constant basis; rarely less than every 100 hours of use.

In fact, most of the products from our past that are “repairable” were made that way because their expected lifetime was incredibly short without occasional repairs. The old VW air-cooled motors lasted about 35,000 to 50,000 miles between major overhaul (35 for the van, 50 for the Beatle). In the good old days, an analog tape deck required recalibration with every new reel of tape and serious and expensive maintenance every two thousand hours (about 250 8-hour-days) of operation. In modern vehicles, safety features like crumple zones, air bags, ABS brakes, and other electronic-controlled features and functions limit repairability to module replacement because of their complexity and design. It’s not just the SMT components, but the incredible increase in complexity of the circuit designs that limits field repairs.

However, we’re at a point in auto manufacturing history where any vehicle that doesn’t last 200,000 miles between major service intervals is considered a lemon. Other products offer similar longevity expectations. I’m still using a 2008 Dell laptop, although it is on its 3rd keyboard (which was designed to be easily replaceable). While Millennials seem to think a cell phone is obsolete after a year or less, my flip phone has been working just fine for the last decade and it is still on the original battery. Televisions usually get replaced becauses they are “too small” or don’t have current features, not because the CRT or other tubes and components have failed. Appliances are often handed down to a home’s next owners because, on average, Americans stay in their houses fewer years than an appliance survives.

Much of what we buy today can be repaired, it just costs so little to replace it that we do that instead. Click and Clack, the guys on the old Car Talk NPR radio show once estimated that it cost an average of $600/year to maintain an old car, far less than car payments. People still buy new cars, even when their current vehicle is probably good for another decade or two. My father, on the other hand, habitually traded in his “old” Chevy at 50,000 miles because he was used to his cars falling apart about then; and losing trade-in “value.” My first decent vehicle, a 1973 Toyota Hilux pickup, lasted for 350,000 miles with a valve job at 250,000 and a rear transmission seal at 275,000 being the only significant necessary repairs. I sold it for almost exactly what I paid for it, thirty years later. Now that is both longevity and repairability, but no crumple zones, no ABS, decent fuel economy but lousy emissions, lots of vehicle noise, and not much interior comfort. My current 2008 Nissan pickup has most of the creature comforts and safety features of the best car; at least as of 2008. It is pretty servicable, too. My brother’s new Toyota coupe looks like a nightmare to service, but it has a 100,000 mile power train warranty.

Finally, while there is lots of talk about fighting the disposable product economy, there isn’t much energy going into actually doing it. Consumers are quite happy being ignorant about how practically everything they own works. I would bet that the percentage of consumers (including musicians and studio owners) who are capable of repairing even the most simple electro-mechanical problem is less than 1% and many of those would rather they didn’t need to. At some point in manufacturing history, someone asked “How many customers read our detailed owner’s manual with maintenance and service information?” When the answer came back, it was obvious that was a waste of time and effort. Soon after, someone asked, “How many customers care if a service manual is available?” That discouraging answer eliminated service manuals. As long as those kinds of questions keep getting money-saving answers, you can assume servicability will continue to vanish.

If you really like working on old junk, there is more than enough of that crap availble out there for you to play with. Since all of the post-Boomer generations appear to be mostly bdisinterested in “vintage” crap, prices are falling and demand is vanishing. At that rate, you should be able to buy Grandpa’s muscle car for less than your father paid for it. Hurry, though. Old stuff is showing up in the dump on an accelorated schedule. Turns out, most people would rather recycle old equipment rather than wrestle with fixing it.

The other end of the decision process is function, value, and price. For the cost of a 24-track record head you can buy 24-or-more high definition preamps with a high-resolution A/D interface that will likely last for a decade or more with no maintenance required. For the repair cost of a vintage Eurotrash tube condenser microphone, you can buy a modern condenser microphone that will emulate a whole collection of vintage microphones. If that kind of analysis doesn’t convince you to reconsider tossing good money after bad, you are clearly convinced that there is something special from obsolete technology and I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) change that.

Hey! This Guy Sounds Like Me

Steve La Cerra's “Mix Blog Live: How Big Does a Kick Drum Really Need to Be?” sounded a lot like the things I’ve been saying about live music for the last several decades. "In the past year or so, I’ve witnessed several major internationally acclaimed artists get murdered by their sound person. I won't mention names because there's no need to embarrass anyone, but I find it somewhat disturbing that an engineer can take a gig but not be responsible enough to do some homework, such as listening to the act’s recordings. It's a sign of respect for the band and their fans that an engineer is aware of an act’s musical legacy, and to honor that legacy." 

From rap to country to pop, it all sucks.

Screw that. I think the acts need to be named and the sound companies ridiculed until either this shit gets fixed or people quit going out for a night of sonic punishment from these nitwits.For two decades I've been advocating that every audience member pissed off at the lousy sound quality of a show "whack a sound doofus" on the way out the door. It is still the best option.

Describing “Good Sound”

A few days ago at a local outdoor concert, while I was suffering with the irratic, distorted, and sometimes painful mix of a local blues band a friend (a drummer) was practically luxuriating in exactly the same mix. His enjoyment came from the fact that when the rest of the group wasn’t blaring or a solo or lead vocal wasn’t totally overpowering the music, he could clearly hear the high hat. That was, in fact, true. Although most of the kit was masked by a muddy and too loud bass and the rest of the kit practically vanished when either one of the two lead guitars were soloing, the vocalist was singing, or the harmonica had either a solo or a fill, when none of those things were happening the high hat and other cymbals were audible. For a while, I was baffled by the thought that someone with a lot of musical talent and experience would zero-in on one aspect of the sound quality of the instrument he plays. After a few hours of thinking about it, I realized that the current state of live music “sound reinforcement” is so inconsistent and generally awful that anyone who really wants to enjoy live music is forced to concentrate on the few, little things that are done not-awfully.

That isn’t anythng new to me and it took me longer than it should to recognize it. As a recording engineer often working for bands and musicians rather than producers and record labels, I developed a psychoacoustics tactic that would often get me past the usual problem of volume wars between band members. Early in every song mix, I “introduced” every player at a level slightly above what I thought might be musicially ideal. If I picked a level and moment that was early and prominent enough that each player had an opportunity to focus on their part and its recorded quality each player would hang on to that impression of their place in the mix and carry it through to the end of the recording. More importantly, every time they listened to the mix hearing that moment would reinforce their feeling of presence and importance in the mix.

I’d love to say I invented this technique, but I have no idea where it came from. I do know that listening to Manfred Eicher’s Pat Metheny Group mixes taught me that “introducing” a solo player’s fills before that player’s solo arrived is a way to familiarize the audience to the music as they are listening to it. It makes something new and different feel familiar and comfortable, which is important when you are trying to fulfill Eicher’s idea that an /engineer or producer’s “role is to capture the music he likes, to present it to those who don't know it yet.” It’s an attempt to reduce the alienation listeners feel when they are exposed to new ideas and sounds. It also works, somewhat, when you are trying to convince a band or musician that your way of presenting their music to listeners has validity.

Cool Snarky Puppy Stuff

In case I haven't made this clear, Snarky Puppy is my current favorite recording act. Someday, I hope to see them live and I really hope to make them my favorite live act. These are just a few of my favorite performances from this amazing band. At the least, listen to these pieces with decent headphones. SP goes to incredible lengths to produce high fidelity recordings. They deserve the respect of a decent reproduction system, at the least.

Bullshit Arguments

A TapeOp Magazine opinion piece recently presented the dumbest anti-ABX argument I’ve heard to date; and I’ve heard a lot of really stupid arguments against ABX comparisons. Allen Farmelo's article title pretty much says it all, “The Problem with A-B'ing and Why Neil Young is Right about Sound Quality.” Because I’m a nice guy and it’s early in the morning, I’m not going to spend any time whacking away at the fact that there are so many old, deaf, mediocre rockers who imagine they possess golden ears. Neil Young, probably the single most prolific creator of awful sounding records in human history, is close to the last guy on the planet who should be promoting high resolution audio. Nuts, I went there anyway. So much for being a nice quy. 

However, the bullshit argument here is, “. . . we hear people talk about how one can't make out the difference between a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV file (assumedly a difference similar to the one Neil Young feels is worth fighting for).  Admittedly a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV are relatively close enough in resolution that many people will not be able to pick them out in an A-B test.

“But, we don't live with music like that.  If your'e [sic] anything like me, you listen to a lot of music in a lot of styles and - over the course of, say, a month - perhaps you've absorbed well over a hundred listening hours across many different albums on a few different playback systems.”

It gets better.

To “prove” his point, he uses what he imagines to be an analogy, “For example, when I started living with my partner I introduced her to what I call ‘good coffee.’  At first she kind of shrugged it off as my snobbery at work, and she couldn't really taste the difference.  But then, after months of drinking the good stuff, she found herself to be a bit of a coffee snob, too.  She could taste the difference because she had, simply, spent time with the good stuff.  The coffee revealed itself to her, slowly and subtly.  Her palate developed.  And the thing about good coffee is that it holds more detail, nuance and, therefore, interest.

“But it takes a while to become aware of that depth and complexity.  Had she done a flip-flip-flip A-B and made her choice to only drink the cheaper stuff because, ‘you know, they're basically the same,’ she'd have missed an opportunity to develop her palate.”

Farmelo is avoiding the simple test that would at least prove his coffee snob argument; now that she has developed “her palate” can she tell the difference when she does a “flip-flip-flip A-B?” If she can’t, you’re still full of shit. Likewise, way back in 2004 the Boston Audio Society performed a simple, repeatable ABX test of ancient 44.1kHz/16-bit technology and a 96kHz/24-bit source and, so far, no high-res audio equipment or recording professional or company has found a way to prove this test was incomplete or inaccurate. Humans love their delusions. One of the most inane arguments I’ve heard from an “audio professional” was the statement “I know what I know and I hear what I hear.” Totally incomplete. Doofus should have said, “I know what I think and I know what I think I hear.” It’s a useless statement, but accurate. 

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t take the fruitcakes and goofballs who call themselves “audio engineers” seriously, but this terror of reality and the limitations of their own hearing is high on the list. No, I don’t take sanitation engineers seriously either; they are just old fashioned, hard-working garbage men (or women).

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.

Use ‘em if You Got ‘em?

I recently did FOH and monitors for a rock band in a small (250 seat), historic, municipal auditorium. It was a four-piece group: two guitars, bass, and drums along with three vocals. I’d never worked that room before, which meant a lot of new things for me to figure out. It would be my first time out with the Behringer X32 digital mixer along with a few other firsts. One of the reasons I took the job was that the director of the facility is a big proponent of low volume shows and there had been some discussions about keeping it small and quiet from past show experiences. The room acoustics weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible either. The auditorium’s equipment was decent and so, it turned out, was the band.

Mostly because the previous house engineer had a show “scene” from the last year’s show, I sort of went with his stage setup. I mic’d both guitar amps and ran a DI from the bass. I setup two overhead mics and a kick mic on the kit, abandoning the previous session’s snare and tom mics. In the end, I used about 16 channels for the 4-piece band. We did a quick sound check, first with the FOH system for me followed by ringing out the monitors. The guitar player at far stage right complained that he couldn’t hear the bass (who was setup far stage left) and I ran up the bass in his monitor to the point it was cancelling the output from the bass player’s amp and overwhelming the FOH bass output. He still couldn’t hear it, so I dialed it back to where it interfered less with the FOH sound. He was the old guy in the group and the loudest amp on stage, so I made the assumption that he was stereotypically R&R deaf. It’s also possible that there was a LF phase-cancellation problem on the stage.

The facility manager complained about the volume during the sound check and I got the bass player and lead guitarist to dial it back a bit. The rhythm guitarist made a show of fake adjusting his amp, but it was obvious that he didn’t intend to comply with the venue’s volume limits. I didn’t bring an SPL meter because I assumed the venue had one, based on the fact that there is a loudness restriction there. I’d guess the show was somewhere between the low and mid-90dBSPL territory.

I started the show with instrument volumes very low to see where the players would go once they got into the performance. Pretty quickly, I pulled the rhythm guitar, bass, and kit out of the mix. I tried to mix the lead guitar signal, up during solos and down the rest of the time, but his signal was mostly so distorted (It was a Neil Young cover band after all.) that my addition to the distortion fog only served to screw up the rest of the mix. That was really demonstrated during a song where he solo’d without his distortion pedals and the guitar lept out of the mix all by itself. That clue’d me into the fact that, if I wanted to hear his solo guitar I needed to band-limit it drastically. I low-passed the lead guitar at about 3kHz and high-passed it at 300Hz, which gave me a signal that I could work with.

In the end, I found myself with faders up on three vocal mics, a DI’d acoustic guitar, and everything else fully attenuated or close to it. I had one moment, about 30 seconds long, where I brought the kit up noticably and I flailed away for most of the first set trying to figure out how to get the lead guitar prominently into the mix. I should have taken a picture of the console: two-to-three faders up and the rest all the way out. All that equipment, all that processing power, and no real need for me to be there for most of the show.

If I’d have just setup up three mics and one DI, I’d have had more sound than the room and audience needed. Even from the monitor standpoint, no one asked for drums in their monitors. The drummer wanted a little lead guitar and bass in his mix. I already talked about the rhythm guitarist’s problems. The end result, from front of house, of the monitor mix was that the bass was constantly overpowering the rest of the band; even though I didn’t put any of the bass in the FOH mix. I nagged the bass player to turn down during the break and he claimed that he didn’t change anything from the sound check. In retrospect, I should have believed him because I was what changed when I tried to make the drummer and rhythm guitarist happy with bass blast in their monitors.

It’s a serious temptation to use ‘em if you got ‘em. You spent all that time and energy setting up mics and running cables for no good reason other than the wild hope that you might actually get to mix a show. In my case, 12 of the 16 lines and mics I’d run were unnecessary. I suspect if I did this on a regular basis, I’d be inclined to give myself more faders to play with just out of boredom. The volume would creep up, the sound quality would disintegrate, but I’d be occupied. It’s something to keep in mind if mixing live sound is going to be your life. You are often unnecessary.

Another Brick Falls Out of the Wall

In late 1991, I left my job at QSC Audio Products and my 9 year career with that company for what turned out to be one of the dumbest career and relocation moves I could have possibly made. My tolerance for high density overpopulation and the Southern California pace had played out. A couple of QSC’s direct competitors had been trying to recruit me for a year or so and one company that was in a slightly different audio market made me an offer I decided not to refuse. That resulted in the shortest period of employment in my 55 year career; 30 days. The manufacturing leg and my office for my new employer were in Elkhart, Indiana and the headquarters were in Chicago. No decisions could be made without several meetings in the Chicago office and most decisions were undermined by the office politics that took place after I had returned to Elkhart. After what seemed like an infinite number of pointless meetings and product and production decision reversals and constantly shrinking mismanagement expectations and commitments, I began to suspect my employment with the company was a mistake. So, I expressed a little of my frustration to the CEO, “I’m surprised a $50M company has so many more financial limitations than a $25M company (my previous employer).”

He said, “What makes you think we’re a $50M company?”

“That’s what you had told me in the cover letter that came with your employment offer.”

“I guess that proves you can’t believe everything you read.”

I thought about that conversation on the way back to Elkhart, collected my test equipment and personal belongings from my office that evening, and wrote a letter of resignation that night. The next day I started shipping resumes to everyone I thought might be interested in my skills and experience, including both of those companies that had been interested before I moved to Indiana.

Within a few days, I had lined up interviews with a Bose design site in Michigan, a medical device company in Denver, Sony in San Diego, Underwriter’s Laboratory in Chicago, Audio Precision in Oregon, and Crown Audio in Elkhart, Indiana. I didn’t leave California with a lot of resources and quitting my new job on such short order meant Unemployment Insurance wasn’t an option, so time was fairly critical. I did phone and in-person interviews with UL, Bose, the Denver medical device company, and Crown by the end of my first full unemployed week. Crown called to setup a second interview for the end of the next week. Early that week, I received firm offers from the medical device company and Bose and both companies wanted a decision from me on fairly short order. For mostly personal reasons, I decided to accept the Denver offer on Thursday. I have liked Denver and loved Colorado since I was a kid. I was a little lonely and a good friend (who I would be working with) offered to put me up in his home for as long as I wanted to stay. Finally, the opportunity to work in an entirely new-to-me industry was an interesting challenge. Partially out of curiosity, I went back to Crown on Friday for the 2^nd interview.

The Manufacturing Engineering Manager, whose name I have long forgotten, brought me into a fairly large corporate meeting room that was lined with poster paper full of relationships, responsibilities, activities, anticipated results and achievements, and likely advancement possibilities. Crown’s management had put more effort into my possible employment with the company than the management all of my previous 25 years of work. What followed was an interesting interview with a half-dozen managers and another half-dozen people I’d be working with or who would be working for me. I was a little more blunt and honest in my answers to their questions, since I was pretty committed to the Colorado offer I’d already conditionally accepted and to getting the hell out of Indiana (a generally low income state that could be the poster child for economical inequality). I hadn’t yet received the written details to the Colorado offer and the formal offer, so I could still change my mind without too much guilt and I could discuss the possible Crown job without feeling like I was wasting their time.

On Monday, the Denver job offer arrived in the mail with a Wednesday decision deadline. I hung on to it until a little before the end of the work day Wednesday and called to accept that job. My new employer sent a moving van for my stuff the next day and I was on the road to Denver Thursday evening. Friday night, I was camping in southern Illinois and called my wife in California to check in. She said someone from Crown had called and really wanted to talk to me, leaving a home number. It wasn’t that late, so I called the number and discovered that Crown had tried to contact me in my Elkhart apartment that afternoon to make a very generous offer of employment. I had to tell him I was “taken” and wouldn’t be coming back to Indiana any time soon. He sounded disappointed, but I had warned them my decision was time-sensitive and that there were lots of factors that would determine my next career move.

I left Indiana in mid-November and didn’t have to be at my new job until January 2 and my new employer had provided me with a signing bonus and moving allowance so I wasn’t even in much of a hurry to get to Denver. The friend I’d be staying would be available to receive the moving van, so even making sure my stuff arrived intact wasn’t pressing. I took a full month to get from Indiana to Denver and, other than a little recording engineering and occasionally music equipment repair business, I was out of audio for the next decade. I never forgot the impression Crown made with me, though. I honestly felt like I’d been working in a poorly equipped garage at QSC for the previous 9 years, Crown felt that much more substantial and organized than we’d been while I thought we were their most serious competitors.

So, when I read that Crown had been absorbed in 2000 by the music business’ brain-drain conglomerate, Harmon, I was both disappointed and glad I’d passed on the Crown job. Honestly, other than Crown there wasn’t much about Indiana that appealed to me. I might not have lasted long there. Harmon was purchased by Samsung Electronics last November and the writing was on the wall for Elkhart before that depressing news. This month, when I read that Crown was closing the Indiana facility doors for good and only 115 jobs were affected, I have to admit I felt more than a little sadness. When I interviewed with Crown, I’d guess the facility employed at least 500 people. More importantly, there were a lot of decent, hard-working, competent people making and designing Crown products in 1991 and I hate to think that their efforts were wasted.

At one time, Crown was the only target in our sights at QSC. They were the industry leaders and everyone else was at our level or below. Go back to the late 1960’s and Crown’s DC300 solid state power amp was the only serious pro power amplifier game in town. Crown was an innovative, trustworthy, and decent American company and there is nothing good to say about the death of that sort of business. There aren’t many left and as the US continues to de-evolve into a minor 3^rd world industrial power there will be a whole lot fewer in our future.

Money and Art

A few weeks ago, on summer evening, while I was enjoying a beautiful evening and ignoring a painfully loud and poorly mixed live music show at the outdoor performance theater in my hometown, I was again reminded of the connection between money and art. Mostly, I was reminded of how much money it takes to survive in the arts. Live music doesn’t require a lot of money, but musicians and venues will pick money over quality and talent every time. Concert riders are all about demanding a fair amount of money be spent to “earn” the right to suffer a collection of musicians’ egos. Venue budgets, especially publically financed venues, are all about building empires and bragging rights.

A feature of getting old is that everything reminds you of every other thing you’ve lived through. Listening to the mess of a mix that night reminded me of my first show in West Hollywood’s Roxy Theater. This is a bit of a convoluted memory, but most of mine are. Our band, Sum Fun, was scheduled to go on fairly early in the show and the house mixer was a little pissed that I wasn’t willing to let him do his usual damage to the band. There was no real sound check, since the audience was mostly there long before any of the bands showed up. The house FOH guy had removed the console’s labeling, with an eraser and fingernail polish remover, from every control on the console; as job security. I got through the show, but it wasn’t much fun. When we were loading out, after the last act played and the crowd went home, I saw the house sound guy climb into a new Mercedes and drive off. No way could he afford that on the pittance the Roxy paid him, but it is par for the course. You just have to assume that anyone who can afford to diddle with music for a living is either willing to live on the edge of catastrophe or is someone who has a pile of trust fund money as a security blanket. More often, these days, it’s the second case.

I’m not the only person thinking that rich kids are becoming the only people who can afford to be in the arts. Actual artists have been dropping out of the game for decades, leaving the field to those with trust funds and no real pressing need to create anything other than something to fill the time and ward off boredom. Making art is expensive, especially art that requires technology; like live sound. The problem with stuffing the arts with bored rich kids is that those kids are rarely particularly talented, motivated, or even interested in art. A typical artistic compromise is for an actual artist to marry someone with a paying gig. That “solution” has its own set of problems, of course.

Unfortunately, having money and having taste are rarely combined. Like that summer evening’s sonic disaster, the big bucks spent to acquire the necessary equipment to make the rider author happy did not result in a musical event. The combination did produce the usual boom-and-screech mess we used to call the “Peavey smile” theory of sonic madness. A combination of a speaker system with lots of 100-250Hz and the usual combination of harsh sounding horns and SM58’s that results in a 6-15dB peak at 3-6kHz often results in a kneejerk EQ response to supplement those characteristics with other non-musical frequencies. Most AM radios can do that job perfectly awfully, although you can usually understand the words on an AM radio.

I’m becoming convinced that the connection between money is negative. Artists are people who are driven to do something—things like play music, paint, sculpt, write, sing, dance, and even play sports—they will do those things with or without money; if they are artists. If they are just self-promoters, money is a requirement. That’s why you will often find some of the most amazing talent in the most obscure places; like small town open mic evenings. Likewise, characters like Kanye West or the vast and talentless array of posing, Auto-Tuned, lip-sync’ing metal and pop singers who, apparently, are swimming in money demonstrate no talent at all. Every time I hear someone claim some big money star is the “greatest [fill in the blank] ever,” I suspect that person doesn’t get out much.

I was reminded of this when a small Unitarian Universalist group my wife and I belonged to suddenly decided it need to “progress” beyond being a friendly group of like-minded people who got together to talk about life, the universe, and everything to an “organization” with salaries and financial committments from the members. Initially, the group was roughly formed around a retired UU minister who decided he wasn’t yet ready to retire because he still felt the need to “preach.” Some friends of his decided it would be ok to be an audience, so he wouldn’t feel like one of those crazy dudes on street corners in L.A. shouting about the Apocolypse or some such silly crap. After a few meetings, the retired minister decided he needed to be paid for talking to us. Minnesotans are notoriously passive-aggressive and while several people expressed disappointment that the group was morphing into something different than what they were hoping to build, most went along with the change. My wife and I decided that this wasn’t what we’d signed up for and we’re sort of drifting, community-wise. The problem with declaring that you “need to preach” (or play music or paint or dance or toss a football or catch one) is that your need does not inspire me to pull cash from my wallet. In fact, if you really need it, I just have to wait a bit and you’ll do it for free. [Just like anyone reading this blog realizes about my “need” to write. As a great American author once said, “I write for the same reason cows give milk.”]

The word “need” is often confused with “want.” The things we need are food, shelter, clothing, energy, medical care, and a very few other items in declining importance. Entertainment is a want item. We can not only live without entertainment, but we have no reason to do so since talent and inspiration lives all around us and is just waiting to find an audience. Maybe the whole idea of art for money is flawed at the core.