Another One Bites the Dust

Les Paul died today, of "complications of pneumonia." He died at White Plains Hospital surrounded by his friends and family. He had been ill since 2006, although he still made it to his regular nightclub gigs. He was 94. A gentle, thoughtful, friendly man who had a knack for invention and tinkering, Les Paul will be missed by music lovers everywhere.

I met and spoke with Les Paul at a NAMM show in the early 1980s. He was playing at the Gibson booth with his friends, Tommy Tedesco, Howard Roberts, and Herb Ellis. Howard died in 1992. Tommy died in 1997. Herb is 88, but he's still at it. Those three guitarists were the motivation, education, and inspiration for my own guitar playing, such as it is. Roberts and Tedesco jumped the stage and vanished without even acknowleging the audience. Ellis moved off with some friends and guitar dealers, doing his bit to promote Gibson's Epiphone division. Les stayed at his stool and talked with anyone who wanted to say "hello." He was a very friendly, gentle man and he made an impression with me that will stick for life. That experience and others made the NAMM show my all time favorite trade show.

Drinking Apple's Kool-Aid

In 1999, Apple released OS 10.0 (in market-eese, OS X). I acquired my first Mac in 2000 and it came with OS X 10.1. The reason I dipped into Apple's user-hostile world was because I had been unable to find a reliable Windows-based nonlinear video editor. I'd tried several, including several versions of Adobe's Premier, and every attempt was met with frustration, failure, and non-functional features. Hell, Adobe promised that Premier would be able to communicate with Firewire DV video cameras across three versions of the program. Each time, Adobe came up with another excuse and another useless program. 

Finally, I accepted that Final Cut v3.0 was the best option available and started campaigning to have someone else buy a Mac for me. In the end, a television station I worked for bought me a G4 and the State of Minnesota bought my software as part of an audio project I did for the DPS and the station. Over the next eight months, I dove into Final Cut and OS X and became something of a fan of my new system; right up until my OS support guy installed OS X v10.3.6 and I lost eight months of work. He'd done everything the way Apple designed it, but something about the way the old system had been installed was incompatible with the new OS and that caused the backup system to be incompatible with either the old OS of the new OS and every bit of my work was lost. He was embarrassed. I was pissed off. Between the two of us, I was in worse shape. 

For almost two years, my G4 sat mostly idle in my basement while I was stuck working in the station's dinky, crappy-sounding edit rooms and wrestling with my school's Pro Tools/Mac stations and all of their buggy features. I was inspired, during all of this funtime, to discover for myself why so few virus authors bother with writing bugs for the Mac: "why bother, Apple will write one and build so many into the next version of OS X." In fact, watching Apple users convulsively reboot programs and their computers every few moments is a weird demonstration of human denial. "I never have to reboot my Mac," users will tell me while they wait for their Mac to reboot. It's freakin' weird, at the least. 

Windows users are less deluded, I think. Most of us hate Microsoft, generally, and Bill Gates, personally. We're aware of the system's many problems, the likelihood that a Russian virus author can steal our identities and personal fortune every time we buy a book on Amazon.com, the fact that only an idiot would upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 until the OS has seen at least one significant Service Pack (to use Microsquash's odd designation for "massive bug fix"), and we realize that backing up our data on multiple storage systems is barely protection against the inevitable death of everything we own on magnetic storage media. I can't remember ever hearing a Microsoft user rant about Bill Gate's magical powers of marketing wizardry, even though Microsoft operating system and Office owns around 93% of the personal computer market. 

Steve Jobs, with his paltry 3-5% of that same market is regularly worshiped by Apple's Kool-Aid'ers as "a marketing wizard." This is the same "wizard" who needed a $150 million "investment" from Microsoft and a dramatic upgrade in Office for the Mac in 1997 to save Apple from vanishing into Osborne/Atari/Compaq history. Of course, Microsoft was worried about becoming a monopoly and getting the AT&T Breakup treatment from the Justice Department. Microsoft was not worried about serious competition from the computer "for the rest of us." 

When I bought my Mac, the only bits of software I installed on the machine were Cubase 3.0 and Pro Tools v6.4. The school where I teach is a Mac-centric place and I needed to know how to use the software the school used if I wanted to work there. Cubase runs on both Windows and Macs, but it runs a lot more reliably on Windows. Pro Tools also runs on both systems, but that older version was remarkably similar to a virus installation on Windows while running fairly reliably on a Mac. ("Fairly reliable" means not as reliably as location recording requires, but better than a total disaster.) A company, later purchased by Adobe, made a program called "CoolEdit Pro" and that was the most reliable recording program I'd used at that time. Cakewalk's Sonar had the kind of features that programs like Logic and Pro Tools v8.0 have now, but it was also insanely, frustratingly unreliable. 

At the same time, I knew several professional studios that had no intention of upgrading to future versions of Mac OS or Pro Tools because they were satisfied with their functioning systems and watched with amazement at the rest of us who upgraded and lost all function with the various random, user-useless OS and program upgrades. I wrote an article at about that time that posed the question, "every software company in the industry went broke and vanished tomorrow, who would that inconvenience?" I'm still waiting for an answer. 

Around that same time, Microsoft was lamenting the fact that a majority of its business users were not only slow to adapt XP, but many were chugging along with Windows for Workgroups v3.11 and hadn 't even considered Win95 or 98 as a worthwhile "upgrade." My latest bitch about the Mac is the every-edition pointless change of mind about the ideal disk format. OS 9 recommended "Mac OS Standard"for backwards compatibility and "Mac OS Standard" (HFS) for forward compatibility. OS X 10.0-10.2 recommended Mac OS Extended because of the "advantage" of built-in disk optimization. 10.3 recommendations were "Mac OS Standard (plain old HFS) is no longer a disk format option, only HFS+ (with or without journaling) and UFS." About half of the 10.4 "updates" were catastrophic viruses that could cause all manner of lost information, but Apple still recommended HFS+ formatting. OS 10.5 absolutely forbids installation of the OS on any disk that is HFS formatted and requires the user to reformat the drive for OS installation. With all of this yanking around, not a single user benefit was derived for moving from one non-standard system to the next. It's just Apple's way of reminding us that we're suckers for drinking their Kool-Aid. 

With every pointless, feature-less, system-slowing Apple OS upgrade comes the obsolescence of most of our programs, plug-ins, and the opportunity for massive file loss and storage system damage; all the characteristics of a virus infection. You gotta love that. Yet, Apple fanatics view each of these likely catastrophes as the "coming of the savior." I have to wonder if the primary requirement for being an Apple customer is having a memory shorter than a working-class Republican Party member? Every marketing con-artist in the history of humanity has been looking for customers like this--wealthy, gullible, and forgetful--and Apple has found a way to make this clan identify, personally, with their products. The only other brand I know of with such committed customers is Harley Davidson. 

Come to think of it, those two companies have a lot in common. Think about it. The longer I own Apple products, the less I like them. Apple’s bug-filled, over-priced, mid-tech, low-reliability, planned-obsolescent products are the epitome of everything that is wrong with modern technology. No other company has gone so far providing so little value, outside of ENRON or Citibank. Even those companies finally lost credibility when their management and “products” were found to be worthless. When Apple’s products fail to provide the promised value, Apple comes out with the next generation of crap and their shortsighted fanatical Kool-Aid drinkers dive into the punch bowl as if they’d developed a taste for technical cyanide.

Little Feat at the Fitz (October 24th, 2008)

I wrote this a while back and didn't have enough interest in the finished product to find a home for it. So, I'm moving the file to this blog and off of my hard drive.

Little Feat at the Fitz (October 24th, 2008)

Back in my cover band musician days, Little Feat was one of the bands I most liked covering. Little Feat’s songs were rhythmic, infectious, melodic, and fun to play. If a musician had jam-band inclinations, the music suited that style. If you were more inclined toward quick and clean three-minute pop tunes, that worked, too. When guitarist-singer-songwriter Lowell George overdosed and died, I stopped paying attention to Little Feat, but after a brief period of unsuccessful solo careers, the remaining members returned to the band and have been touring and recording ever since (Bill Payne released a solo CD in 2005 and Little Feat’s last studio CD was Down Upon the Suwannee River in 2003). They aren't the same band and they haven't shown the level of innovation that George inspired since their prime time days, but they aren't bad.

The band consists of Paul Barrere: lead and backing vocals, guitar; Sam Clayton: percussion, backing vocals; Kenny Gradney: bass; Richie Hayward: drums, backing vocals; Shaun Murphy: lead and backing vocals, percussion; Bill Payne: keyboards, lead and backing vocals; Fred Tackett: guitar, mandolin, trumpet, backing vocals.

Paul Barrere still dredges up the same kind of vocal energy that made him famous in the golden years of Little Feat. Shaun Murphy is pretty good in her backup vocal capacity, but here Broadway-style lead singing excursions are a poor match to the limited talents of whoever was running the Fitzgerald's FOH mix. There were moments of “my mother-in-law's voice” often inspiring deeper penetration of my hearing protection. At least a couple of times, I hut myself trying to get the damn earplugs jammed deep enough to provide a sufficient audible shelter when Murphy's voice screeched over the top of the mix. Billy Payne was in limited voice that night. He could sing, but he didn't sound much like Billy Payne. Maybe that too was the fault of the FOH mix.

As best I can recall, the following tunes made up the set: Hate To Lose Your Lovin', One Clear Moment > Jam > Just Another Sunday, Down On The Farm > Candyman > Down On The Farm, Don't Ya Just Know It, Fat Man In The Bathtub > Get Up Stand Up > Fat Man In The Bathtub, Willin' > Don't Bogart That Joint > Willin', This Land Is Your Land, Spanish Moon, On Your Way Down, Let It Roll, Dixie Chicken, Feats Don't Fail Me Now.

As usual, the FOH mix was overbearing at the beginning of the show; possibly because the fill muzak was so loud that the engineer was hearing-damaged before the show started. We had great 1st balcony seats, but the mix was intolerable in that location. So, we shifted to the 2nd balcony where it was worse. Eventually, we filtered down to the lower level and took up seats that had been vacated by deaf people who rushed the stage in hopes of finishing off their already traumatized hearing capacity. There wasn't a good fidelity seat in the house, so moving only changed the spectrum of upper-midrange distortion and grossly over-used subwoofer-ness.

As usual, I don't know what the FOH goofball was going for, but it wasn't anything that resembled a musical representation of this once-great band's discography. The Fitzgerald offers a decent selection of beer and mixed drinks. I suspect that partaking in large quantities of alcohol would have enhanced my appreciation of the aural mess. It night was a disappointment, though. I've worked and spectated several musical events in the Fitz that were incredible. The venue wasn't at fault and anyone who has attended a Prairie Home Companion Show knows how good the room can sound, in any seat. It was a great opportunity for a band once known for quality and innovation to show off some of those traits. Instead, I was reminded that the past should usually be left for memories and that I should never leave home without my industrial strength earplugs.

Killing Music Loudly

This blog (http://wirebenderaudio.blogspot.com/) is an experiment in communications, which I guess is true for all of this kind of self-aggrandizing, self-marketing drivel. However, what I'd really like to do with Wirebender Audio Rants is to discuss some aspects of professional audio in an open, honest venue (which is why Anonymous Users may post replies here) where we can say what we think without disturbing our professional standings. In other words, if you can't really hear the difference between a real 1176 and a virtual 1176, you can simply say that here, anonymously, and stand back and watch the fur fly. 

 Google only allows for 10 subscribers, I'm going to be varying the mail-out list for the blog, often. If you are interested in the subject and want to get into this discussion, please go to the blog address and sign on as one of the Wirebender "Ranters." 

The motivations for creating this blog came last night during the usual ear-punishment some call "live music." As I was being beaten into a coma by overbearing subwoofers, knife-like HF and midrange horns, and a mix that would make a deaf person cringe and an otherwise excellent Dinkytown club, I started thinking about what I would do to the inventor of the subwoofer if I could catch him in a dark alley. Sometimes, I think that same punishment ought to be dealt to all of the inventors of amplified music products, but that's another subject. If there are any classes of invention undeserving of patent protection, it would be weapons, medical devices and drugs, and high power musical amplification products. The first and the last because of their undeniable detriment to progress and the security of the planet and the middle . . . usually for the same reason. 

During my years at QSC Audio, I did hundreds of ABX tests on a variety of audio equipment and designs. In the future, I hope to do a whole lot more of the same when I get my new ABX tester built. One of the first things we discovered doing those tests was how fragile and unpredictable the human ear is. Since statistics demonstrates that a significant number of "true" results are necessary to prove a test, we quickly learned that the volume level of any test had to be kept low for accurate results. Pushing the level above 85-90dBSPL quickly turned the best ears into consistently indiscriminate tools. A testee who might have gone 10 for 10 at 85dBSPL would drop to 50% accuracy at 95dBSPL after only 5 attempts. My conclusion was that the hearing mechanism both fatigues and self-protects, causing a loss of accuracy in high volume conditions. 

Twenty years later, I find that my tolerance for grossly out-of-balance mixes is considerably lowered. Part of that lack of tolerance is because I know it will only get worse as the night goes on. A FOH engineer who might be reasonably conscientious about muting unused open mics at the beginning of the show will completely forget about those phase-distorting sources after 10 minutes of 125dBSPL noise exposure. 30 minutes into that kind of show, the subwoofers are dominating the sound field, punctuated by screeching upper mids. Any subtlety in the mix will be gone along with the FOH engineer’s hearing. The longer the FOH engineer has worked this way, career-wise, the less likely it will be that I can tolerate his work. As much as I love music, including pop music, it has become almost impossible for me to enjoy live performance because of the deafening (literally) SPL that live engineers think I need to experience. In 2008, I went to six live performances (outside of my school events) and enjoyed exactly one of those performances (including school events) because of excessive noise exposure. It would be interesting to know why FOH engineers think all music lovers need to be punished for the crime of submitting themselves to a show.