My Life in Surf Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Declining Market or Just Laziness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stuff We Collect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product Review: Positive Grid Spark Mini

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acoustic Guitar String Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You Can’t Hear What I’m Hearing”

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

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

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

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

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

I Hated Steve Martin

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

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

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

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

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

Theory vs. Experience: Diffraction

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

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

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

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

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

From Whence It All Began

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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