What Are You Going to Do with It?

Since COVID shut us down locally, some friends and I have been “getting together” to play music  online regularly for about 4 1/2 years. It began when a couple of us, who had been getting together once a week at the local music store for a few hours of round-the-circle music, wanted to keep something like that going while the world was shutdown. We started out fumbling around with Zoom and the other online meeting platforms, but they are all half-duplex (like cell phones) and that is pretty hopeless for music. Eventually, one of us found Jamkazam and we used that for two years. Weirdly, when Jamkazam started charging for the service in January of 2021 the program and support went to hell. We paid for it for a year, as a group, but eventually quit fighting and moved over to Sonobus, which is still free as of now. Both platforms allowed us to record our music and we shared the duties of organizing the performances/takes into recording sessions. Sonobus turned out to be massively better for recording purposes than Jamkazam.

Now, almost 4 1/2 years later, we have managed to record sixteen original songs written by one-to-three of our group and twenty-five covers. A while back, I took to putting all of our stuff on the USB sticks that provide the background music in our two vehicles and I’ve had a great time showing off what we’ve done to friends, family, and other victims who happen to find themselves in my car. I put one of the first songs I’d written and we’d recorded on YouTube and, mostly, re-discovered how much I hate video editing in the process:

In a fit of ego and silliness, I put about half of my compositions and productions up on Distrokid last year and made about $8 in streaming “income” from a $10 initial fee. I did my annual purge of credit card re-enlistments and I’ve been getting Distrokid warnings (“UPDATE: Your music is at risk of being deleted”) on a weekly basis since that initial subscription ran out. A friend who is much more committed to promoting his music said I actually did “pretty well,” but for most of us bothering with streaming distribution is obviously more about ego than anything else. All I have to do is look in the mirror and my ego is busted to bits. I am old. The normal Distrokid price is $20/year and that’s just silly and Distrokid is the cheapest way I’ve found to get nearly universal music streaming distribution.

About 40 years ago, after 15 years of being all sorts of bands and blowing my wad on owning a sound company and recording studio, a friend (Mike) called me with an “exciting opportunity” to be lead guitarist for a band he was assembling. Mike’s band had serious promotion, gigs lined up, and financial backing. I was well into my career as an electronics engineer, about half-way through my zillion-year attempt to get a college degree, and had just moved my family to Omaha, Nebraska. I was burned out from beating my head against the local and semi-national music scene and in a bad mode.

“So, what you’re asking is do I want to leave my family for several weeks while we woodshed somewhere putting together a line-up, spend a bunch of money on equipment I just got through selling, drive a few hundred miles every night for six months, every night haul a ton of equipment up or down stairs to the gig, set everything up in an hour or so, maybe cram down a bar burger before the show, play music I don’t like for three hours for a crowd I won’t like, tear everything down and haul it up or down stairs, load the trailer, probably sleep in the van half the time on the way to the next gig, and take my shif driving about the time I finally start to fall asleep? All that to, maybe, clear $5,000?” I pretty much delivered that soliloquy in one breath without thinking.

Mike was quiet for a bit. “You could have just said ‘no.’”

“Sorry, Mike. I probably didn’t know that would be the answer until I was about half-way through that rant. But, yeah, no. I’m good. I hope your blow ‘em away and have a great tour, Mike. Thanks for thinking of me.” We signed off pretty quickly and I didn’t hear from Mike again until several years later when he was in a similar situation with a band in Denver. That band wanted to record two of my songs—”Down on the Beach” and “I’m Gonna Quit”—without paying me anything for the publication rights. I passed on that “opportunity for exposure,” too.

Other than as a technician, I was pretty much done with the music business by 50. I was a technology instructor at a music college for 13 years, but if students were looking for an encouraging word about making a living in music they went to someone else. When a friend listened to one of our latest recordings, he asked “So what are you going to do with all that material?”

“Listen to it, enjoy the memories, share it with friends and family.”

“You don’t want to try to sell it? Put it on the Internet? Maybe put a band together and play this stuff for an audience?”

“Oh hell no! I’m happy that we managed to put up with each other for so long. I love putting on a set of headphones and recalling the feeling of playing with these guys over these past 4 years.” I told him about my experience with Distrokid. “There are a lot easier ways to lose $10 a year and more fun, too.

“And I definitely don’t want to be in a band ever again.” And I explained to him why, “Again, I can find easier ways to lose money than playing gigs. This is one of my hobbies and one that I enjoy. I’m not going to do anything to mess that up.” 

Making Your Own TC Helicon Perform and Play Acoustic 3 and 6 Switch Pedal Boxes

 Just for laughs, I decided to make my own version of the TC Helicon Switch 3 and Switch 6. First, because I'm cheap and have the "spare time" to do the research and assembly work and, second, because I wanted to fool around with "swirl painting."So, I did. 

What you see in these picture at left is the result. To highlight how cheap I really am, the 6-switch unit was made with the cover of  a gas water heater I had to replace this past winter. I made a nice looking wooden base for it, but you can only see the wood base when you are holding the switch box. The wood does add a decent amount of mass to the assembly, though, which helps to hold it in place on the floor. 

The 3-switch unit is a pretty simple and obvious device, except for the 3rd switch. As you can see from the schematic at right, the first two switches connect from ground/common to the ring or tip connector of the TRS jack. The third switch connects to both tip and ring through a pair of diodes (pay attention to the correct polarity) and to ground/common. It's not complicated wiring and the parts are cheap. 

I bought a pile (10) of cheap SPST momentary switches from Amazon and used them on both switch boxes. After almost a year of use, they are still working well. They are cheap plastic and I'm sure ham-footed use would break them and if you dawdle with the soldering iron you'll likely melt the plastic holding the solder tab. The switches must be momentary. If they aren't, you'll have to press the switch twice for each change action. That is NOT handy.

The six-switch unit is a little trickier than the three switch unit and requires some planning and assembly skills. Not many, though. Along with the  six SPST momentary switches, you'll need another TRS jack and seven 10k ohm resistors (anything, wattage-wise, will work). You can see I staggered my switches, mostly because I did not want a long switch box and because my TC Helicon PerformVG only has four harmony combinations that I am likely to use, so the two offset switches are for voice echo and guitar echo, which I almost never use. 
 
 I've included a second drawing for the six-switch unit, in case that layout makes more sense to you. They look different, but they are exactly the same circuit. The drawing at right might more resemble the physical layout of your assembly, which might make error-free assembly easier. I should note that I did not create any of the drawings included in this blog. I snagged them off of the internet, like you probably did when you found this essay. I should go back and find my sources, but that was about a year ago and I'm lazy. So, I didn't draw them, I apologize for not giving full credit where credit is due, and I used them and they work. In fact, the 3-switch unit works incredibly well on my Roland Cube Bass, too.

This is what my performance rig looks like, including a Bluetooth page-turner footswitch, a cheap Android 10" tablet for lyrics and chords, the TC Helicon PerformVG voice and guitar processor, and my trusty and beloved EV RE18 microphone. That and a powered speaker and I'm a louder-than-I-should-be busker or coffee house performer (should I ever want to be such a thing). With a set of in-ears, I can entertain myself for hours.

REVIEW: Shure E2c In-Ear Monitors

I'm slow to adapt to fashion and trends.  I've been wearing 2nd hand jeans since 1973 and I've passed through periods of trendiness and tackiness during that 30+  year interval without changing my habit.  It's not that I'm specially cantankerous, I just don't care what other people think.  Decades ago, SF writer Ted Sturgeon convinced me that "90% of everything is crap"; although I think Ted was an optimist.  The opinions of most folks are based on ignorance and the human herding instinct and I can't think of a reason in the world why anyone with half-a-brain would be interested.

All that said, I've viewed the iPod revolution with revulsion.  No, I'm not convinced that MP3 files are unlistenable.  In fact, I think as a consumer format MP3 files at low compression ratios are as good a format as consumers have had ever in history.  I do, however, dislike the hardware related to iPods.  The iPods, themselves, are disgusting pieces of audio crap, producing high levels of a variety of distortion components and low levels of unclipped output for the collection of really awful transducers typically connected to the output. 

As a writer who often works in less than ideal environments, including my own kitchen where my wife feels an overwhelming desire to interrupt my work any time she passes through the room, I've been on a long search for a small, comfortable, and decent sounding headphone for years.  Every couple of years, I give up on my most recent awful compromise and try another miserable earphone product.  I've suffered a variety of Sony failures (excluding a wonderful set of ear buds that I managed to lose in 1991 and for which I have never again found a replacement), Koss ear buds of every variety, and some expensive in-hear monitors that will remain unnamed to protect the reputations of folks who should know better. 

This year (2008), I coughed up another $100 for a pair of Shure E2c in-ear monitors.  My first impression was pretty awful.  Not because of the phones, but because the instruction manuals came in every language but English.  I had to go on-line with www.shure.com to find instructions in a language I most understand.  What's that about? Is the English-speaking world really that insignificant? 

The E2c's are odd shaped.  Fitting them to your head and ears is not intuitive, at least it wasn't for me.  I think they best fit when the cable is run behind your head.  There is a cable sleeve that can be snugged to your neck, helping to hold the phones in place after they are fitted. The cable appears to be very heavy duty and the 2-year warranty is probably an indication of how durable the cable actually is; cables being the usual weak point in this kind of audio equipment.  To get these phones in place, you pretty much have to screw them into your skull.  If they are fitted slightly off center of the ear canal, a look in either direction will shift the image and, sometimes, mute one of the phones.  When you find the right sleeve, though, the seal is solid and independent of movement. 

I pretty much expected to hate these things as much as I've hated every other ear phone experiment of the sort, but I was disappointed/surprised/amazed on the first listening.  After wrestling with the smoother, more comfortable silicon ear sleeves, I settled on the stiff foam ear plugs and found a combination of positions and cable routing that worked for my ears.  Rolling the foam up like industrial foam ear plugs, I managed to insert the driver far enough into my ear canal to keep the phones in place and on-axis with my ear drum.  Once that engineering task was finished, I began to experiment with listening material.

Listening to 320kbps MP3 files through my laptop computer, using Microsoft's Media Player was unimpressive.  Almost awful, in fact.  Everything seemed harsh, brittle, and a lot edgier than I remembered.  If I had needed to make a decision about the E2c's at this point, I'd have said they are tinny, distorted, and harsh.  I didn't, however, so I moved on to better sound sources.  Moving the exact same files to my Sony CD/MP3 player, I found that those tunes sounded much more rich, more dynamic, and less flawed than on the PC.  I didn't expect that, so I went back to the original source files, 44kHz/16 bit CDs.  Everything I disliked about the MP3 files moved even further to the background and the imaging became sharp, pleasant, and more detailed.  The bass, however, needed some EQ to find a balance.  I decided to drive these sensitive, relatively high impedance units with my home system, which includes a Hafler FET power amplifier.  The phones produced an even more focused, more pleasant, tighter, and more detailed sound, which totally surprised me.  What this indicates is that the E2c's are accurate enough to reproduce relatively minor (compared to most ear buds) differences in sound sources.  That's an accuracy not often found in this kind of product.   

This EQ requirement I noticed with the CD player was partially true because I was able to listen comfortably at dramatically lower levels than I do with most phones.  The upside to this is that I have found myself wearing the Shures for hours without fatigue or loss of enjoyment.  My 58-year-old ears are becoming very sensitive to volume, so this has multiple advantages.  After a morning of writing and listening to music, I suffer no tinnitus effects and I've enjoyed hours of acoustic isolation and productivity. 

Headphones are incredibly personal.  The phones that I like, or love, can easily be the phones you hate.  I haven't yet decided that I "love" the E2c monitors.  I do like them for the moment and that is about the best thing I can ever say about this kind of equipment. 

2010 Update: While I still like the sound of the Shures, the reliability has been suspect. I'm going on my 3rd pair (all in warranty) of the E2c set I bought in 2008. Both failed sets failed the same way; attenuated output from the right earpiece. The cables are not damaged. There was no obvious wax in the ports, but the output suddenly dropped about 12-15dB only on the right side. Shure's warranty policy has been terrific, but the downtime is irritating.