My Concept Band

[NOTE: Getting to the point will take a while, so if you just want to know what my concept band idea is, skip to the last couple of paragraphs.]

When I was 13, I wrote a pissed-off fan letter to Downbeat Magazine that was mistakenly accepted as a review of what has become a classic modern jazz record. The magazine paid me $25 and included a Downbeat press pass with the check. I should have saved both. In one of my early attempts at running away from home, I saved up my newspaper route money, bought a bus ticket to Kansas City, and spent a day and two nights exploring the jazz clubs around 18th and 12th Streets. I lucked out and got to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet (one of my heroes at the time), a Stan Getz group, and a lot of local talent (or folks I didn’t know at the time). There was a lot of music going on those nights and nobody even asked if I was old enough to be where I was. There were other kids in some of the clubs, but most appeared to be working as dishwashers or busboys. There was no amplification of any sort, other than an occasional small guitar amp, of instruments or vocals in any of those clubs and I was never unable to hear the music.

A few years later, I was in a rock band that was mostly known for being loud. The guy who ran the band was the only son of the family who owned the Little Rock, AK airport, at the time the largest privately-owned airport in the US (at least, according to the band leader). He bought Fender Dual Showman amps for . . . everything. We were a 4-piece band (guitar, keyboard, bass, and drums) with 6 Dual Showman amps on stage and at least 8 Fender cabinets with either a 15” or a couple of 12” speakers in each box. The band lasted for two summers, with a version or ten that carried on, occasionally, into the 90’s. During the school months, I was in a half-dozen more local bands, which were also pretty damn loud. For a bit, I was done by 1967.

I moved to Dallas, TX for one of the state’s many bogus for-profit technical schools. The state was famous back then for that kind of crap, too. For me, it was an opportunity to see many of the soul bands and singers I’d idolized and imitated in my own bands. One stand-out performance was an Atlantic soul review at the State Fair auditorium. Sam and Dave were the headliners and the PA system was a pair of Shure Vocalmaster columns. I’d guess the auditorium held at least 1,000 people and the audience was rocking. Still, the band sounded great and the vocals were absolutely audible with less electric and acoustic power in the sound system than the average duo brings to a piano bar today.

Skip forward to 1982.

I had been in bands and performing acoustically since I was 15, but I’d given up performing a few years earlier to focus on my recording studio and live sound business. One of the last recording sessions I did was pf a local jazz group live in a popular nightclub. To reduce acoustic complications and improve the sound quality of the recording, I’d decided to use my studio’s JBL 4311 monitors as the FOH speaker system. The club held about 100 people and the band, in their last performance before leaving town, packed the club. Not only did the studio monitors and a 120W amp do the job well, but during breaks the many musicians in the audience came up to me to ask where the FOH mains were. The speaker system was so small they didn’t identify the speakers as the sound source.

Since those years, I’ve worked for a pro sound amplification company, QSC Audio Products, in a variety of engineering positions, freelanced as a recording engineer, live sound tech and FOH or monitor engineer, and spent 13 years as an instructor at a music technology college. Mostly, I’ve seen amplification equipment and audiences abused by the technology and general purpose ignorance. Performers are almost always too loud, audiences compensate by being even louder, and nobody from the performers to the audience is paying any attention to 99% of what’s happening on stage. What I learned from 55 years of being on every position possible during a music performance is that volume is not anyone’s friend. If your audience is going to listen, they will be quiet and listen. If you suck or they are assholes or imbeciles, they will out-shout any PA system made. So, there is no point in amplification beyond the acoustic output of a decent acoustic guitar or upright bass or a reasonably well-projected human voice.

With that in mind and the fact that I am no longer inclined to believe that anyone not laundering money for a cartel or mobster is in music for the money, my music group concept is one that would be as close to pure acoustic music as possible. For example, I would like to play bass in this group and I don’t own an upright bass, but I do own a homemade electric bass that I love to play and a Roland’s 20W Bass Cube with a “squeeze” button that limits the amp’s output to the right volume for playing with acoustic instruments. With a little taste and some listening skills, an electronic keyboard could fit into this concept, along with any other acoustic instrument. In fact, the more the merrier. All vocals will be sans-microphone or PA. We’ll just have to sing louder than the acoustic instruments, which is the effect recording engineers are going for regardless of the instrumentation. (You didn’t really think Robert Plant sang louder than Jimmy Page’s Marshall, did you?)

Music-wise, I’d like to break out of the usual suspects of Beatles, Stones, Eagles, etc. and do a lot more modern music; maybe stuff from this century? A few jazz standards and some off-beat stuff from the past would be ok, but too much of that and we’re back to being just like everyone else. Let’s be honest. We’re not in this to remind our audience that they are old. We’re supposed to be entertaining and surprising. If you can find a way to surprise anyone with “Poncho and Lefty,” “Tequila Sunrise,” or “Let It Be,” I’ll be amazed.

Pearls before Swine

In the late-70’s I was playing out my string with a show band I’d led for about three years. Everybody was moving on. The bass player’s wife had their first kid and another was on the way and he needed to focus on his career (mechanical engineering). The drummer wanted to work a lot more, since he was a low-paid Nebraska high school teacher, and he’d found a 5-day-a-week supper club band he wanted to join. The first to leave, our keyboard player, had snagged a scholarship at Juilliard.and he was leaving for school in another month. I had started working with a kid who I’d eventually end up partnering with in the Wirebender studio and live sound. We all wanted it to end and we all had good reasons. We stayed friends and occasionally hung out after the last gig, but that was the end of our musical relationships.

When this band was a 4-piece, we covered most of the Top 40 and filled in spaces with originals and blues oddities and we played for money. We’d fired our management company a few months earlier, but the agency still wanted us to work some of the last scheduled gigs. We owned the band name, so it was either us or find someone else to sell the customer on. The 3-piece version was a lot more bluesy and original than the band the customers thought they were getting. There weren’t many complaints, but I suspect our rate would have gone down if we’d have done a 2nd round with that personnel and repretiour.

One of the last gigs we did was in a southeastern Nebraska town that had an actual 1920’s ballroom with a vintage 30’ foot bar and a round stage slightly off-centered in the room, toward the bar. The audience had room to maneuver behind the stage, between the bar and the stage, and there was a large dance floor (people used to dance, believe it!) to the front and side of the stage. There was a runway, about 5’ wide, that ran about15’ from the stage into the middle of the dance floor. There was a slight downward slope on the ramp, high at the stage and low at the end of the ramp, but it was still a 3’ drop from the end of the ramp to the dance floor. I setup the mains, six (we had eight) Altec Lansing 1207A columns, behind and to the side of the band and ran the show from a 12-channel board on a mic stand near my guitar amp. No monitors, we could all hear the mains and ourselves well enough that we didn’t need more crap to haul up and down staircases. I only used one small condenser on the drums, the three vocal mics were all RE18s, the bass went direct ino the board from the bass player’s amp, keys also went direct, and I had a Beyer M500 on my guitar amp; a modified 1956 Fender Harvard. The room held about 350 people and we always packed it. We were doing one of our last 4-piece gigs, so we pretty much went full-out.

In deference to the large turnout and the money we were getting paid, we pretty much played our old lineup with slightly more originals and less blues. The crowd was into it, the dance floor was constantly full, people were screaming their heads off at the oddest times, and the band was rockin’. Because I am a Townshend freak and we did “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” During the synth middle-break where the guitar comes crashing in and we added a short solo and I’d slide on my knees down the ramp while I played the solo; mildly Townshend-style. I didn’t realize that Pete used knee pads under those coveralls, so my style hurt more than his. On the way toward the ramp, the bass player turned into me and clipped the top of my guitar hard enough to break two tuners and take the whole guitar out of tune. As I slid down that ramp, I discovered nothing on my instrument was in any sort of European-shape of tune. So, I did the only thing a lead guitarist can do under any non-ideal conditions: I played as fast as my fingers would move and stayed as high on the neck as possible to mask the complete dysfunction of my guitar. I cut the slide and the solo short and twiddled trills, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and did pick-slide sound effects until we could end the song.

We took a break and I tuned up my back-up guitar. While I tuned the guitar, sitting on the edge of the stage, people crowded around me. I ignored them at first, but after a few moments I realize they were shouting at me but they weren’t mad. “That was the greatest guitar solo I’ve ever heard” and “Great guitar playing, man!” and and “Damn! That was incredible” and even nuttier stuff. It was not just tone-deaf guys, either. Twenty-or-so girls where in the pack squealing away like something good and true had happened. I, literally, didn’t spend a musical micro-second on that solo. Not one “note” was intended and I didn’t even waste much thought on what the rest of the band was doing. And nobody seemed to be laughing (other than the band guys) at my predicament?

As I was finishing up the work on my back-up guitar, in that moment I decided I’d had all of the “pearls before swine” experience I could stand for a lifetime. I spent hundreds, thousands of hours practicing my craft and all I had to do was wiggle my fingers fast and I’m “great?” I thought, “I quit. No more of this band-shit. I’m done.” When we played our last booked gig a few weeks later, that was it for me. Until a friend talked me into a gig doing his music in St. Paul in 2016, I hadn’t played in front of an audience since 1982. I did a lot of live sound tech work, some recording as a tech and as a guitarist, and lots of electrical audio design work, but for the next three decades I had no interest in being “a musician” for a live audience. To this day, there are a really limited number of places I’ll consider exposing myself to an audience. I’m not that fast anymore.

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.

Worshiping Tin-Lead and other Old Bits of Junk Technology

The following is a letter I sent to TapeOp Magazine regarding a silly end rant by John Baccigaluppi about how much he loves tin-lead solder and big iron audio electronic equipment. A year ago, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photography tour and I have stuck a video of that

While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure.

Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.

Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.

Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.

Peter Mayer and Live Music

Saturday night (9/14/2018), I was the sound tech at Zumbrota’s Crossings Gallery for a Peter Mayer show. I’ve been a fan of Peter’s since I first heard “Brand New Harley” at least a decade ago. I bought the CD that song was a part of and discovered other Mayer gems: “John’s Garden,” “Africa,” “Holy Now,” among many other great songs of Peter’s that I’ve discovered (for myself) since. Peter has a solid, dedicated following of fans across the country and, according to posts on his Facebook page, the world.

He earnes it. Not only does he put on a show that covers as much of his huge discography as you would hope and could expect, he puts so much of himself into the performance he has to wind himself up and, then, down again; before and after the show. The sound check is as much a ritual he uses to gear himself up for the performance as it is an opportunity to optimize the sound system.

There is an aspect of performing this kind of personal music in this kind of venue that feels like someone has stripped themself naked in front of you. An audience can sense that kind of intimacy and, if the performer is lucky and talented, the audience can feedback some of that energy and love to the performer closing the loop and creating an environment that is particularly special to music.

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.

Patience, Like It or Not

In a terrific article, "My Last Project With My Dad: Building My Own Coffin," David Giffels wrote, “He was humble in that way, aware that the task was king, and he its servant. On the dusty jamb of the workshop door was a yellowed card, in the shape of a dove, printed with a Bible quote, Romans 8:25—“’if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’ This was one of the best lessons he’d taught me there, without ever saying a word.”

I’ve written before about “service to the music” being the ideal to which I believe musicians should aspire. Musicians, on average, aspire to considerably lower goals: sex, drugs, and no more than 3 chords per song. Still, I’d like to think that there is still a place for well-crafted songs, well-arranged performances, and highly skilled performers who care about their audience. I know, dream on. All of those things are hard to find in the real world, but I believe they exist. I do.

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.

Did We Exist?

Several years ago, just before I retired, I took a quick pass through McNally SmithCollege of Music, to document some of the acoustic treatments my tenure there created. That is documented here, somewhere, I’m pretty sure. Yesterday, I visited the remains of the school to look at the items that will be auctioned off this week. The evidence of my existence and participation in that facility are vanishing quickly.

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).