Demanding Attention or Earning It?

One of the two best jobs I had in my 50 year working life was the 8 1/2 years I worked for QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa, California. I started as an engineer and left a manager and the ownership, especially Pat Quilter and John Andrews, were always not just supportive but good friends. The company I started with in 1983 wasn’t at all the same place when I left, but it was still a pretty good place to work and the products we made were always something I felt proud to be associated with. At least all of that was true until one of my last escape trips to San Francisco. The products didn’t change, but my perception of what amplification and our products were doing to music, musicians, and the audience shifted dramatically over a short period of time.

There used to be a lot of music on the streets of San Francisco, before the place turned into a bankers’ paradise and hell for everyone else. I would ride my motorcycle up PCH to San Francisco, snag a room at a motel on Fulton Street across from Golden Gate Park and a couple of blocks from the ocean, lock up the bike, and take the bus downtown to wander the streets near the pier or take the Bart to Berkeley and hunt for music and street entertainment. I was never disappointed or at a loss for something to look at and listen to on those trips. On that last trip, Fisherman’s Warf was brimming with entertainment. Walking along Embarcadero was like being in the middle of a festival; comedians, magicians, con artists (“I bet $5 I can tell you where you got your shoes.”, and musicians on every corner, part of almost every storefront. The street talent was intimidating. None of it was amplified and all of it was audible. I stood in a small crowd and listened to a guitarist who could have been Michael Hedges, his technique and style was that striking and original, until he took a break. I suspect his tip jar haul that morning was at least $200, it was overflowing with $10 and $20 bills. A little further down the street, there were at least 50 people clustered around a comedian whose routine was pretty much a hip take on Don Rickles and no one escaped un-insulted. I heard classical violin, bluegrass banjo and acoustic guitar duets, a solo singer unaccompanied by anything other than the applause of her audience, a sax trio, and a kid who duplicated Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solos as perfectly as humanly possible. By the time I found the Bart for Berkeley, I was down almost $100 well-spent entertainment dollars.

Downtown Berkeley was a different story. There were still entertainers and great street food vendors, as before, but everyone was amplified. Right off of the Bart, I was assaulted by a loud three-piece blues band producing more noise and distortion than music, even though it was sort of obvious that the players were talented. Instead of attracting a crowd of listeners, the band’s cacophony acted like a cop telling people “Move along, nothing to see/hear here.” The less attention they attracted, the louder they got, and the more alone they were. It didn’t get better on the street. There must have been a dozen amplified acts in two blocks of Shattuck Avenue and they were all competing with each other for attention and irritation factor. There were no crowds of people around any of them. There were a couple of non-amplified performers, but they were drowned out by the electronic “enhancement” of their entertainment neighbors. My prime motivation for going to Berkeley was always a food cart near the Bart station that served the most astounding shrimp-stuffed rice flower confections. I stocked up, hiked over to the UofC Berkeley campus and found a quiet spot to eat.

Afterwards, walking around the campus grounds, I was back in unamplified territory. The University of California campus is, in my opinion, one of the wonders of the world. The place houses the best engineering, chemistry, science, journalism, creative writing, and music departments in the known universe and the campus is beautiful. My alma mater, then Cal State Long Beach, is a beautiful campus and I spent hundreds of hours enjoying those gardens and buildings, but Berkeley is a level above that. As you might expect and I definitely hoped, it wasn’t hard to find students producing amazing music there and that helped gird me for the noise gauntlet I’d have to pass through on my way back to the Bart.

Back at home, in Huntington Beach, a few days later I was stuck revisiting that experience: entertainment vs noise production, attracting attention vs demanding it. Our company, QSC Audio, at the time only made power amplifiers¹. Our whole mission was to increase the volume of any damn signal to the point of pain and beyond. In concert after concert, bar after bar, and even a few neighborhood parties, I witnessed the abuse, misuse, and needlessness of most audio amplification; almost all amplification, in fact. As much as I liked the company and the people I worked with, the products seemed to me to have no other purpose than to destroy music and music appreciation. The more powerful our amplifiers became, the worse the music they amplified sounded. It wasn’t, of course, the fault of the amplification, but it was because there is no qualifications required to use the stuff. Any damn moron with a few thousand dollars can buy a PA system and turn music into deafening noise.

Other than making money, I could not see the point in our corporate existence. Up to that moment, I’d felt like we were part of the music business and making a contribution to music. Afterwards, not so much. That might have been the moment when I realized that I need some sort of “mission” in my life to be happy, but I’m not that bright. It took 10 wasted years in medical devices flailing about looking for a purpose in a purposeless industry, severe burnout, and the good luck to have met Michael McKern, a man to whom “mission” is a core principle, to clue me into the concept.

Now, watching even folk musicians at local farmers’ markets drag their bullshit battery-powered Roland or Fishman rigs out to try and demand the attention they feel they so richly deserve or seeing bands like Snarky Puppy, who should know better based on their semi-live album sound quality, let ego overwhelm any attempt at sound quality and a musical experience is just painful. It is a painful reminded that I spent a good bit of my life enabling this garbage and nothing I do can atone for it. The fact is, if your music is worth listening to, it will be heard. Yeah, some deaf assholes will bitch “I can’t hear you,” but sacrificing the quality of your performance for deaf people won’t fix their problem and it will drive away people who give a damn.

¹ We’d experimented with some “brass and fern bar” products, QSC Series 2, that included line inputs, phono inputs, and a mic pre for announcement purposes. The products stunk and the market was gone before we managed to deliver an unwanted product. One of our CEO’s brilliant ideas that should have been ignored until he went back to pestering secretaries.

The Question isn’t “Can I Tell?” but “Do I Care?”

In pro audio, audiophile, and just general listener discussions, we often get heavily involved and invested in the miniscule things we can and the things we imagine we can hear. When I was teaching the McNally Smith College “Recording Theory” course, I spent some time on digital and analog recording technology including digital compression algorithms and the history of their development. You shouldn’t be surprised to know there were a fair number of committed vinyl analog fanatics among 50-120 young music technology students and you might use that as evidence that young ears supposedly being more discriminating would pick the “higher fidelity” analog technologies. Jumping to that conclusion would be better evidence that the jumper is biased and doesn’t know kids very well. Critical thinking and discrimination are skills that are developed, not something we’re blessed with as children and lose as we become older, cynical, less sensitive, and lazy. (Although all of those things do seem to be a part of growing older for many people.)

  In this class, I played a variety of analog and digital musical signals, demonstrating dynamic range, signal-to-noise, harmonic and transient (slew rate) distortion, and a few other concepts that are important to audio professionals. One of the early takeaways for many of us is disappointment in our lack of ability to accurately pick out some pretty dramatic signal flaws in excellent critical listening environments. One of the class assignments was to setup a listening test (A/B, A/B/X, etc) and document the experience as accurately and honestly as possible. Not an easy thing to do, I know. However, many students came away from that assignment with a lot more questions than answers regarding their own hearing, the analog vs digital arguments, digital audio compression, and all of the other related issues in this debate. Which was the point in the assignment.

I, too, have had a lot of questions regarding all of these issues for the last 40-some years, beginning with the compromises and systemic defects I discovered in phonograph RIAA pre-emphasis/de-emphasis when I built my “Musicians Preamp” product in the 70s and the analog tape recording limitations and compromises I wrestled with for almost 40 years of my audio engineering career. Now that I’m 70+ years old and am quite certain that my hearing is compromised and will only get worse with age, I am seriously questioning even my own opinions and dogma regarding what I am capable of hearing in recorded music. I mean I question what I hear all the time. Even more, I wonder how much I even care about the miniscule differences.  

In Glyn Johns’ bio, Sound Man, he commented regarding some work he did at Ocean Way in the late 90’s, “the few remaining studios that had stayed true to the acoustics for which they were originally designed in the late fifties, not succumbing to the commercial pressure of having SSL consoles and Hidley acoustic designs, both of which have been responsible for systematically reducing the quality of recorded sound like some invidious cancer." I am more than with him on the SSL consoles and while I’m not sure if I’ve been exposed to any Hidley rooms, I agree that most studio designs are intended to be as neutral and boring as possible to compensate for the lack of engineering skills that is common today. You can’t screw up the mic or instrument placement if every spot in the room is the same as every other spot.

Compare Johns’ statement to the more typical old guy’s whine about digital recordings: this one was in the June issue of Tapeop Magazine, “The reason I’m contacting you is what I’m hearing in many 'digitally remastered' CDs, and even records cut from them. Which is… nothing. No air around the instruments, like a picture done with tempera paints. Listening on a reasonable stereo sound system, the image collapses front to back. I started to pay attention to this after a conversation with a friend about how, even with the hiss, cassettes have more life than the digitally remastered CDs." This guy (Peter Engel) is old enough to be able to brag about having worked with Steven Temmer at Gotham Audio, so he is at least my age if not a decade older. (Never listen to the fidelity opinions of old farts, that is the first rule of any critical listening discussion.) Of course this guy imagines he is comparing apples to apples by discussing remastered CDs that he can compare to his vintage vinyl collection, but even that is tainted by the acoustic design of the mastering facility which is in no way similar (usually massively improved) to 1970s mastering engineering facilities. </engepeter@gmail.com>

The “problem,” if there is one, is that we like what we’re used to; especially when we can identify that the sound source is the one we’re used to. Whatever artifacts and distortions that are present in compressed digital audio are what most of us are listening to now: through streaming audio, DVD and Blueray videos, our car and home stereos, our phones and other portable audio devices. It is, obviously, easy to identify a record in playback. Even an old fart can hear the pops, crackles, hiss, and weird panning limitations of a cut record. You can’t practically A/B/X test vinyl against any fair digital reproduction thanks to all of those anomalies and distortions.

A younger-than-me friend is a fanatic about his CD collection conversions. Every CD he buys is converted to a 44.1k/16bit AIFF file and stored on a huge hard drive and played through a 90’s Nokia phone that he is convinced has “great converters.” Years ago he tried compressing a CD and let Apple’s iTunes do the job. The default iTunes MP3 format was/is 128kbit/sec and even an old guy can hear vocal sibilance distortion and cymbal harshness in that format. However, his attempt appear to be mostly to “prove” that MP3 compression was audibly defective and he accomplished that goal. When he in my home, we are as often as not listening to an MP3 version of whatever I’m demonstrating and if he knows he’s listening to an MP3 he “hears the artifacts,” but when he doesn’t know the source he either assumes it is an MP3 and gets snooty or when he assumes he’s listening to multitrack mixdown he does not notice anything anomalous or irritating. My takeaway from that is that it’s more about what he sees or thinks he sees than what he hears.

However, I have decided the real issue for me at this point in my life is “do I care?” I do not. Since reducing my several-hundred CD collection to 320kbit/sec MP3s and copying the collection to a trio of USB sticks that I have plugged into my studio computer, my office computer, and our home entertainment computer, I listen to my music collection almost infinitely more than I have in the past decade. Like all of those terrible young people, I am picking convenience and playback variety over purity. Your mileage may vary.

Quitting While the Quitting Is Good (or tolerable)

Giving up playing music and giving up playing for an audience or public consumption are not the same thing. You can absolutely do the first while never ever doing the second. A couple of years ago, my failing vision helped me decide to give up motorcycling after more than 50 years on a bike, but I did not give up bicycling. I wrote a little about that decision, more than once, in my Geezer with A Grudge blog, but most recently in in an essay titled “What Really Signals the End?” That decision is a bigger deal for a motorcyclist than for a musician, at least a hobby musician. “Getting killed” on stage is a minor event compared to the same idea on the highway. It is, however, a humiliating event that I’d like to avoid. For my motorcycling benchmark, I drew a line in the asphalt and wrote about it in “Creating A Baseline.” More than 55 years ago, I identified the same moment for my life as a performing musician.

Starting when I was 13, I made regular attempts to get the hell out of Dodge (Dodge City, Kansas) by running away, hiding in some really disgusting places, and (eventually) getting summer jobs with local farmers and using those spring harvest jobs as a cover for going on tour with a band. By the time I was 16, I’d rented a trailer in a south Dodge trailer park that I shared with a series of friends and co-workers. 

The first of those roommates was the guitarist and co-songwriter from one of my first bands, Ed. We played in a band that had no regular 3rd and 4th members and worked on a road construction crew rebuilding a section of US283 between Dodge and Minneola for the first month of the 1964 spring. Ed was a lot smarter than me and he went back to school pretty quickly after a few weeks of that miserable job. I stuck it out for another month until my band, the Tracers, went back on summer tour. By that time, I was almost crippled from having my boots sealed with asphalt slurry 10 hours a day. Just before Ed evacuated the highway construction business, we’d somehow learned about a guy in Minneola who had an old Gibson acoustic guitar for sale. After work one evening, we’d setup an appointment to look at the guitar and at least I was excited about the possibility of owning my first decent acoustic guitar.

This was 1964 and my memory of what happened yesterday is pretty shaky. So, if Ed or anyone reads this and remembers the story completely differently, they are probably right. However, I took away this experience and this very strong feeling about how it relates to my own life as a musician (such as it and I are).

We arrived together at this fairly ramshackle house in a very ramshackle small western Kansas town. None of that was eventful or out-of-the-ordinary for either of us. Western Kansas was well into the economic and cultural decline that it now wallows in; oblivious to how hilarious and pitiful it seems to the rest of the world. The guitar owner was an “ancient” (probably younger than I am today), scrawny Levon Helm-looking guy who grudgingly invited us into his hoard-packed hovel. We were there for a guitar, not conversation, but the old guy took advantage of a captive audience and told us stories we had no interest in and, eventually, brought out the guitar. Instead of handing it over to the prospective buyers, he proceeded to claw away at the guitar and . . . sing. As you’d expect, it was awful. Most likely, he was caterwauling Hank Williams or some such hillbilly crap in fine fashion, but to me (maybe also to Ed) he was not just sucking the interest out of me toward his guitar but giving me way too much of a look at my own likely geezerhood. 

At 16, I don’t think I had any real concept of my own mortality and old-age decay before that moment. But I have had a pretty clear view of the possibilities since. After what seemed like at least an hour of a Vogon poetry quality performance, I had lost all interest in his guitar and I don’t remember even touching it, let alone playing it. I just wanted out of that house and away from the painful and humiliating noises that old guy was generating. In fact, I didn’t seriously look at another acoustic guitar until I was 20, married, and stumbled into a great buy on a 60’s Gibson J-45 in a Dallas, Texas pawn shop.

The lifetime lesson I took away from that experience was “I don’t ever want to be that guy.” During my studio managing and, later, maintenance years, I did not self-identify as any sort of musician because everyone I came in contact with was infinitely better than I would ever be. After I quit playing in bands, in the late-70s, I quit singing and forgot the lyrics to almost every song I’d performed for the previous 15 years. By the time we closed the studio/sound company in the early 80s, I was done with playing guitar, too. 

After a very brief period of working on jingles with a keyboard playing friend in Omaha, I’d ceased identifying as any sort of “musician.” When someone would ask, I’d say “I own a few guitars, but I don’t play them anymore. I’m not a musician.” For the next 40 years, with a few momentary intervals of jamming with friends in odd places, my guitars were just pieces of art on the wall (or in a closet). For an ice-breaker in my record lab tests at McNally Smith College, I’d fumble at playing guitar as a sound source; which usually relaxed my students’ with the thought “I can’t be worse than that.” Between 1978 and 2015, I sold at least 50 guitars originally to generate money for recording studio equipment in Nebraska and, much later, to pay off my Little Canada, Minnesota mortgage. When we moved to Red Wing, I had recently purchased a Composite Acoustics Cargo travel guitar to replace my godawful Martin Backpacker with which I’d tortured my wife as we were stuck in New Mexico with a dead VW-Winnebago camper. Other than her and those abused MSCM students, I hadn’t played for any sort of audience since the 1970s.

When we moved to Red Wing, we ended up often frequenting the local used bookstore, Fair Trade Books, that was being managed by a local kid, Josh Schaefer, a songwriter, performer, and hustler extraordinaire. Every time I was in the store, Josh would bug me to play in the store’s open mic. He could not have been either nicer about it or more insistent. I mean EVERY TIME I saw him it was “When are you going to bring us a song?” Initially, my internal answer was always “never gonna happen.” Eventually, a song latched on to me: Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers,” struck me as words that described my life. For the first time in at least 40 years, I was playing enough that I not only memorized the chords and lyrics to a song, but felt comfortable enough in a group of very special people that I almost felt like performing it. I’m certain that I sucked, but the Fair Trade audience was the most tolerant, accepting, and fun audience I’d ever experienced and I felt . . . unembarrassed by my performance. Over the next couple of years, I became a regular at the Fair Trade Books open mic until that event ended. By then, I had met a few local musicians, done some recording for a few of them and had moved on to open mic situations at local restaurants and bars. Yeah, I know, “open mics are for losers and amateurs” and I’m fine with that. I have no interest in either playing a full set or focusing my performance on entertaining anyone but myself and my wife and, ideally, a few friends.

However (and the whole point of this essay), I also do not want to either torture anyone like Ed and I were tortured 55 years ago in Minneola or unknowingly humiliate myself with any sort of audience. I have asked my wife, repeatedly, to pay attention to both her reaction and any audience reaction to my “performance.” I need her help with that, because by necessity I don’t pay any attention to the audience when I am performing, unless there are other musicians on the stage I am mentally isolated. Fortunately and unfortunately, all of the people I play with are incredibly generous and incredibly tolerant people. I suspect they might not tell me if I accidentally shit on their foot. 

I have stopped doing all sorts of things that I once loved doing because of age and the associate disabilities that come with being ancient. I no longer play racquetball, basketball, race motocross and cross-country motorcycles. I'm done with adventure motorcycle touring. I rarely mess with electronic repair and design and even some of the detail guitar repair and building skills I recently learned are already things I used to do. I’m becoming “skilled” at moving on to things that I can do. Sooner or later, I’ll have to make the same decision about singing and playing guitar. I’d appreciate it if you helped let me know when that moment arrives.

Apple is a Cult

A friend received a fairly new Apple MacBook Air as a gift from his daughter. He wanted to have a light, compact computer audio setup for travel and Jamkazam use. The Air is pretty much an Internet browser of a computer, what Dell once called a “Netbook”: no CD/DVD player, no HDMI port, no Ethernet connector, and three USB 3 ports and a Thunderbolt port to address the outside world. So, if you want to do anything useful with the Air, you need to buy stuff to attach to it which will more than make up for the bit of space the skinny but incapable Air saved you in your luggage and will make the computer a lot more fragile and less dependable in your travels. Not that Apple computers have any sort of reputation for durability or reliability. Cult products don’t have to do much other than prop up the fragile egos of the cult members with useless crap like style, marketing, and trendy colors.

So, my friend asked me to help him setup his MacBook Air for mobile internet audio use. He already had a perfectly good (excellent, even) USB C adapter with USB C, HDMI, Ethernet, and USB A ports that we’d used on a Microsoft Surface tablet for this application and we thought connecting that to the Air would be a no-brainer. Wrong. No matter what we tried, it didn’t exist although it worked fine on my Dell laptop. So, I bought a dedicated USB Ethernet Adapter and . . . same problem and it also worked on my Dell laptop and my Mac Pro 3,1. So, some “Google research” later and I learned that the Air can only use the official Apple USB to Ethernet adapter, which obviously costs 3-5x as much as a generic adapter. No surprise there. And there are hundreds/thousands of complaints from people trying to get non-Apple USB—to-Ethernet adapters to work on a MacBook Air.

There are “solutions,” but a SMC reset (one of many OSX glitches Apple culters are happy to call “normal computer operation”) and various other typical Apple glitches will blow up the adapter driver “solution.” The problem is that Apple in its usual customer-hostile manner only included the driver for their own $30 adapter in their BIOS and left writing the code for the rest of the world’s $8-15 adapters to the Chinese manufacturers and the job of finding a non-virus laden driver to their customers/victims. Of course, there are no Apple stores in Red Wing, so it will be a bit before I get this thing working on this cult machine.

Way back in the dark ages of the 80s, I experienced one of my first head-scratcher Apple cult moments when another friend was stuck with a dead keyboard for his new Mac 128k machine and we discovered that only Apple keyboards could be used on that mostly-incompetent “for the rest of us” machine and that they cost 2-5x what a good keyboard for a real computer cost. After that, I started watching my employer’s (QSC Audio Products) marketing budget for computer equipment and saw that it was several times the engineering budget and all they did with that money was email and awful graphics. We were buying HP dedicated CAD/CAM equipment in Engineering and it was still cheaper than the culters’ gear.

Jobs just made Menken’s observation into a company mission, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer.” That doesn’t take genius, but a little sociopathy doesn’t hurt. However, my McBook Air friend did pay the right price for his laptop; it was a corporate discard from his daughter’s company and she gave it to him for free. As for Jobs’ mythical genius, like his reincarnated cult leader Elon Musk, he mastered the Harvard Business School rule without having to waste 4-8 years on a degree, “Pull credit up and push blame down.”

Product Review: TC Helicon Play Acoustic

The TC Helicon "Play Acoustic combines all the things you need to make a live acoustic performance shine: lavish vocal sounds, perfect backing harmonies, best-selling guitar effects, and unique processing that makes your six-string sing – in perfect harmony with your voice." Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it? Some of those claims are even true, if only somewhat useable. Four years ago, I wrestled with the decision for a vocal and acoustic guitar performance rig I’d be using most often in jam sessions, local open mics, and recording.

After a lifetime as a techie, I wanted to work on other skills, mostly vocal and guitar performance. With that in mind, a big part of what I was looking for was ease of use because I didn’t want to be wasting my time fooling with bells and whistles when want I wanted to work on was my performance chops. Four years ago, I decided on the TC Helicon Perform-VG for its simplicity and versatility, knowing that the Perform series of products were all downscaled versions of the Play Acoustic, Play Electric, and VoiceLive devices. With the Perform-VG, I have many of the Play Acoustic features without much of the flexibility. That is the downside. The upside is that I was up and running almost instantly with the VG and wasted most of an afternoon trying to figure out how to adjust a vocal compressor and set the harmonies for the Play Acoustic.

A critical look at the back connector panel of the Play Acoustic illustrates two critical flaws of the Play Acoustic: 1) no guitar thru connector, 2) no vocal out signal path (both guitar and voice are stereo mixed to the two XLR output connectors. There is an “AUX” input, for bringing in external analog audio, a “Pedal” connector for either the Switch3 or Switch6 function selection foot switches, an 1/8” stereo headphone jack, and a mini-USB connector that supposedly supports "Stereo audio input and output via USB is also supported at 16 bit resolution with 44.1 or 48 kHz sample rate." I wrote “supposedly” regarding that USB recording function because there are mountains of reports on-line of users giving up on the Play Acoustic’s digital recording capability due to lousy driver support. That wasn’t going to be something I would care about, so it had no real effect on my opinion or this review.

As the YouTube research demonstrated, TC Helicon’s harmonizer is terrific and the Play Acoustic has an powerful and well-designed collection of harmony, chorus, reverb, and other effects for the voice channel. Many of the effects come from TC Electronic’s wonderful array of professional recording plugins and special effects devices. Only a portion of the Play Acoustic’s vocal harmony capability is available on the Perform-VG. The Perform-VG can, however, separate the vocal output from the guitar for both live performance mixing and recording purposes. I can’t even imagine what went through the designers’ heads when they decided that capability wasn’t necessary for the Play Acoustic.

I’m not much for spending time wrestling with layered menus, either on my cars or my electronic devices. I really hate throwback software; been there, lived that. We are in an age of powerful, user-intuitive and friendly software and there is no excuse for any piece of digital electronic hardware forcing users to program a device through a crappy interface. That is exactly what you will have to do with the Play Acoustic, though. This incredibly ancient looking (and performing) piece of software is TC Helicon’s VoiceSupport 2 software as it looks on both Mac and Windows 10 machines. The software is pretty much Windows Explorer or Apple Finder for a few TC Helicon products. For the rest, this is nothing more than the overly complicated, under-performing interface TC Helicon uses to deliver firmware updates. You can reorganize your patches, you can download patches from TC Helicon’s cloud, but you can not edit anything usful with VoiceSupport 2. None of this should be surprising, though. TC Helicon/Electronic was acquired by Behringer in 2015 and it is safe to assume nothing innovative will come from the TC products in the future. Behringer is as notorious as was Norlin for taking gold and smelting it into oxidized lead.

So, for me, as powerful and interesting as the Play Acoustic is, it just isn’t worth the programming hassle. I messed with it for a day and sent it back to Sweetwater. For now, I’m fine with my Perform-VG until Zoom, Line6, Yamaha, Roland/Boss, or some other competent company comes up with a significant improvement. If you like fiddling with firmware more than playing, the Play Acoustic might be exactly what you are looking for, though. It has a lot of features, sounds great, and is a durable package (except for the notoriously fragile scroll wheel) that could give years of service. Of course, you’ll spend half of those years trying to tweek the thing into something you like using.

When Technology Becomes “Fool Friendly”

Thirty years ago (early 1992), I had just started work at my first medical devices position. One of my coworkers was the company’s brand new  IT guy, Richard, and he and I got curious about the new “World Wide Web” at about the same time. I’d been on-line with email and user groups for some time, but HTML and the web was new to both of us. The company, Telectronics Pacing Systems, was just beginning to face some of the problems that would eventually get the company regulated into history for a collection of disastrous product and engineering decisions. At the time, we were still flyin’ high and looking toward a bright future. (Hard to remember there was a time like that in the USA, isn’t it?)

As we got further into HTML, UNIX, and SQL coding, we could see that the days of these skills could be numbered in the single digits. When we first started out, to send an email message via UNIX, you first had to write an email editor with which to write the message. I had just learned how to do that bit of coding when HP-Mail, DEC’s All-in-One, and other email “clients” plus browsers like Mosaic (Netscape) came along and made many of my brand new skills obsolete.

About then, Richard said, “When the internet becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.” What he meant was that for the time being the internet, before the WorldWideWeb, was pretty much a techie’s playground. Once browsers, email clients, and the rest of the crap that would come along to make the Internet accessible to “the common man/woman” the whole thing would turn into a clusterfuck of garbage, morons easily expressing their opinions, and lots of commerce. And he was right. That sequence of events has been true for many technical things: cars, motorcycles, synthesizers, personal computers, photography, audio and video recording and editing, and even engineering.

Jamkazam has been making fairly large strides toward creating an on-line place for musicians from all over the world to get together. The service just became fee-based, although you can experiment for a few hours each month for free. Recently, a new user went to the Facebook Jamkazam Jammers page to complain that she was unable to get “Jamkazam to work.” It turned out that she couldn’t get her Mac to work with her Presonus audio interface and, since her only reason for having an interface was to clutter up the Jamkazam fiber channels, her inability with her equipment was Jamkazam’s problem to solve. That is typical of my experience with the side-effects of dumbed-down technology. When the technology gets simple enough so that it “becomes easy for everyone to get into,” the quality, skills, commitment, and contributions of the people involved quickly drops to that common denominator. Now that on-line music is relatively simple (and getting more simple by the day), the people involved are less sophisticated, less talented, and way less capable of actually playing in a group.

There are at least a dozen groups on Facebook with clueless, talentless members claiming to be “music producers” and/or “recording engineers.” In today’s vernacular, I have no idea what a “producer” is or does. None of these people could swing a record deal if their lives and parents’ fortunes depended on it. They don’t know any actual musicians, so managing a recording date is hilariously out of their bailiwick. The first level border guard of recorded music used to be the entry fee: $100,000 14-track, 2” machines, half-million dollar consoles, multi-thousand dollar microphones, and million dollar acoustic spaces. Today, you can actually spend less than $500 and “make a record.” Most likely, that recording will suck on multiple levels, but YouTube won’t discriminate. Either will CD Baby, Tunecore, iMusician, Distrokid, or any of the other social media and on-line music distribution resources. You can be the absolute worst talent on the planet and still make a record and put it out there where people will have to step around it to avoid hearing it.

This is condition is sometimes described as the "tragedy of the commons." Wikipedia neatly defines this situation, "The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in economic science when individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action."  The long, but detailed, way of saying, “When the internet (or anything) becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.”

In manufacturing, quality and manufacturing engineers have a saying, “The only way to foolproof a system is to get the fools out of the system.” When it comes to systems like the internet, music, and art the fools rush in so fast and get so deep into the structure that there is no turning back.

Original Music: “I’m An American”

This is the first song I've actually "finished" in almost 50 years. Obviously, being fenced in during the COVID pandemic had a lot to do with it. More importantly, the contributions of four friends--Harold Goodman, Stuart Anderson, Scott Jarrett, and Michael McKern—practically forced me to move this song from a half-hearted folk song that I might play for friends hanging around our backyard on a summer evening to what it has turned into (whatever that is). I’m not sure there is a better outlet for something like this than YouTube. 

Parts of it were recorded in home studios: Michael McKern’s drums, Harold Goodman’s bass part, my vocals, acoustic and electric guitars). Some parts were recorded live through Jamkazam sessions: Scott’s keyboards and Stu’s steel guitar were pieced together, and synchronized, from several live recordings over a couple of months.  The percussion instruments and some other “instruments” are Apple Logic X effects from Logic’s “Drummer” feature.

The song was produced and mixed in Logic X (v10.3.2) by me at home in my funky upstairs spare bedroom/office on a 13-year-old Mac Pro 3,1 running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) through a MOTU UltraLite-mk3 interface, in case you are interested in that sort of thing. If nothing else it proves that I am not constrained by not owning state-of-the-art hardware or software, as good or bad as the outcome may be. I’m old, my gear is old, and it’s a race between me and the gear to see who plays out first. I expect the gear to win. The vocals were recorded with an AKG C141ULS, an RE18, and the acoustic guitar was my Composite Acoustics OX recorded both with the C414ULS and the guitar’s pickup, a Seymore Duncan Mag-Mic pickup (thanks for the recommendation, Brian). And that’s about all there is to say about that stuff.

The song is, obviously hopefully, about the dark, decadent times we live in and the very similar times I have experienced all through my 72 years. From my early years of duck-and-cover exercises in 1950’s Cold War Midwestern grade school classrooms to the Vietnam War that commenced as I became a teenager to the collection of endless wars and invasions the country has mindlessly and arrogantly engaged in since Reagan’s gangsters and the host of faux-conservative, Republicans and Democrats, who represent the 1% of the country who profit from wars, who profit from ecological devastation and neglect, who wallow in the spoils of economic inequality that defines this country, and the despicable people who are profit by lying to a gullible public that is too lazy to read a book, who won’t bother with understanding history, science, or technology, and who imagine that complaining about their government is in some way “participating” in democracy. As the song says, we’d rather be lied to than to have to raise up on our hind legs and do something to make the country and world a better place.

One of my favorite 1950’s science fiction authors, Theodore Sturgeon, said something like “90% of everything is crap.” Since my years protesting the Vietnam War, I have been convinced that Mr. Sturgeon was an optimist. I doubt that more than 1% of anything is more than shit. So, keep lying to us and we’ll keep believing it. We’re Americans and “nobody ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American consumer” (except Trump, of course, because he can’t even get that right).

The ReFlow Myth

During a theory class in my Guitar Repair and Construction class, we watched a vintage demonstration by Dan Earliwine. Dan is a woodworking wizard, but like most guitar repairmen he should leave the soldering to someone else. I think the video lasted about a half hour and I quit counting after Dan had executed at least twenty cold solder joints. The man simply can not use a soldering iron and feed solder at the same time. He’s not alone. The video reminded me of how little guitar manufacturers and repair techs know about solder, electrical circuits and components, metallurgy, chemistry, and mechanical engineering. Or maybe they know about this stuff but don’t care about it. From wall-to-wall cold solder joints to misused components, the electrical portion of what are otherwise works of craftsmanship and artistry are an embarrassment.

The primary problem is that many people do not understand how solder works. While solder “is essentially metallic glue used to join metal parts together,” as Earliwine says. it might be helpful to think of the soldering task more in terms of brazing or welding. Thinking of solder as “glue” negates needing to understand how the allow process works and makes it seem like you just have to pour on the “glue” to solder, which isn’t unlike how Earliwine solders.

The basic concept is that we are trying to use a metal alloy with a low melting temperature (tin-lead or tin-silver-copper) to produce a bond between two similar materials (usually copper, brass, or nickel). The lower right corner of the alloy type illustration (right) is, ideally, the result of a solder joint’s contact point. For this bond to ideally occur, the two materials to be soldered will be in direct contact as much as possible. A copper-to-solder-to-copper connection is not only weak (structurally) but is dubious electrically. What we’re going for is as much copper-to-copper as we can get. Lead is mediocre conductor, one of many reasons that industry’s leaving tin-lead solder is a good thing (outside of the obvious environmental reason). Lead oxide (and tin oxide, for that matter) is a mediocre semiconductor and, as such, introduces distortion and noise when it reacts differently to current flow in one direction vs. the opposite direction (aka AC, alternating current). So, the traditional guitar tech’s “solder bead” tactic is a terrible idea because the components are, often, not in contact with anything but solder. In manufacturing terms, we call this tactic “reflowing” and it is generally an undesirable practice. Reheating solder produces crystalizing effects that are mechanically undesirable, introduce nonlinear electrical properties, and make the solder brittle. Reflowing without additionally applied flux is a terrible idea, but much of the available tin-lead flux is extremely corrosive (RA stands for “rosin activated,” meaning the corrosive materials, salts, in the rosin are activated by heat). Reflowing is a lose-lose proposition.

The next thing guitar techs get really wrong is poor preparation for the work. First, all components need to be as clean as possible. Wires to be soldered should be new, bright and shiny copper or tinned. Metal parts, like the lids of potentiometers in a guitar’s controls, should be scrubbed clean of old flux and contaminates with a metal brush followed by sandpaper or Scotch-Brite™. After the parts are clean, they should be carefully tinned as quickly as possible to apply a fresh base of tin-lead or tin-silver to protect the newly cleaned or exposed surfaces. When you apply heat, apply as much as possible of the soldering iron tip surface to the largest component. In the case of an old fashioned metal potentiomenter cover, heat the cover and the wire will follow if it is in contact with the cover. If everything goes well, your solder will flow like water to both components and if you are very careful and steady the connection will cool and cure without any vibration or motion upsetting the connection. If it doesn’t go well, you either have to clean off the old solder and start over or add flux when you try to re-heat the connection. Reflowing solder always requires additional flux.

The “I’m Gonna Quit” Story

There is a long, semi-funny story behind that song and the first recording and THIRD recording. We were living in Fremont, Nebraska at the time. I’d been laid off of my 1^st engineering job and had taken a position as tech services manager for an Omaha office equipment company, servicing Burroughs Corporation word processors and IBM Selectric typewriters among other electric and electronic equipment. It was a miserable job with a terrible company, but there weren’t many tech jobs in 1976 Nebraska. A few days before the song’s birth the owner of the company told me I had to lay off 2-3 of my newest, most capable technicians because they were “overqualified” and he wanted the money for raises for a couple of his bimbo saleswomen. The tech service department was not only making the company money, for the first time in the company’s history, but our service was attracting IBM customers and the sales commissions on those machines was better than anything a car salesman could make. Today, I would assume he was screwing the sales bimbos, then I was a pretty innocent/gullible 28-year-old.

Another insane Republican had driven the US economy into the dirt and times were somewhere between terrible and disastrous. We “sold” our house at a $5,000 loss (on a $20,000 original purchase), although on paper it looked like we broke even; I paid the “buyers” $5,000 under the table to make their down payment. I had arranged an Omaha apartment for us to move to, but at the last minute (before any money changed hands) Elvy wasn’t going to go. She’d asked a friend in Scribner, Nebraska for help and he’d offered her (and us) a house he owned that needed a lot of work but was livable and he would pay for the work and materials. $80 a month rent, which was workable on Nebraska’s unemployment. One morning, I called the office company owner and said, “I was sick when I took this job, I’m better now and I quit.” No notice, no two weeks, nothing. I hadn’t worked there long enough to damage my Unemployment from my engineering job so I had nothing to lose.

Before we packed up our belongings and gave away everything that wasn’t going to fit in our new far-smaller home, two friends (Dan Tonjes and Mark Von Seggern) and I hit the basement “studio” for one last blast of our past and we recorded the twanging electric guitar part, vocal, bass (Dan), and drums (Mark) to my new song, “I’m Gonna Quit” on two of my Teac 3340’s four tracks (drums ALWAYS get tracked in stereo). After we were sort of settled in to the house in Scribner, I wanted to add a distorted guitar part and an extended percussion into and outro. Dan and/or Mark knew the Scribner school music instructor and “borrowed” a wheelbarrow full of school percussion instruments. We used the other two 3340 tracks on I don’t remember how many percussion players gathered from our friends in Scribner and my guitar part and I had a song and a recording. I still love that original recording, as rough as it is.

A decade later, a Nebraska friend and one of the guys (a drummer) who we used in the studio occasionally was in a band being fronted by Barry Fey’s company. I’d given him a cassette of my songs back in the 70s and he’d played it for the band and they wanted two of my songs: “Down on the Beach” and I’m Gonna Quit.” By “wanted” I mean they wanted me to give them the publishing rights and authorship in exchange for . . . nothing. I declined, but they recorded the two songs anyway and the band dissolved and nothing happened to the recordings after a lot of money was spent and the usual 80’s rock and roll silliness ensued.

When I moved to Denver in 1991, I looked up the lead singer of that band and she gave me a cassette copy of their take on my song. It was . . .entertaining, but I could see how the band didn’t take with audiences or promoters. Too much Pat Benatar, too late.

Through my following studio years, I always wanted to redo “I’m Gonna Quit” with a little more fidelity, but recreating the attitude, energy, random-ness and creativity of the performance and percussion section overwhelmed me. Sometime around 2002, Michael McKern and I gave it a shot with the original recording as our “click track,” we recorded his drums, the clean electric guitar parts, some background vocal ideas, and a decent acoustic guitar part to his 24-track MCI JH24 deck and bounced that to Pro Tools. And . . . nothing. I was still stuck without a way to pull off the percussion section and that was a gumption trap.

Jump to August 2020 and I’ve been playing music, on-line, through JamKazam, with four friends: Harold Goodman, Stu Anderson, and Scott Jarrett since March. We’re messing with original music and covers and they’ve irrationally designated me “vocalist” because no one else wants to sing, including Scott who is an infinitely better vocalist than me and about 1,000 times the musician. Michael has been dubbing drum parts to my original songs via Dropbox and, when I tell him I can’t get into finishing off “I’m Gonna Quit” because my attempts at doing a percussion part either with real instruments or Logic X’s loops or MIDI just sucked, Michael knocks out six tracks of the percussion instruments you will hear on the recording. Hesitantly, I offer up “I’m Gonna Quit” to Harold and we fool with it for a bit on line and he, as usual, asks “Should we record it?”

This was the first time I had sung the song since 1978, other than noodling around with ideas with Michael almost 20 years ago. The vocal you hear on this recording, for better or worse, is my first take at the song in August of this year. I’ve sung it with the group on JamKazam a dozen or more times, since, and tried to overdub it with a “better” microphone in my office/studio and I still like this take the best. I musta been really pissed off at something (probably Trump) that day. Harold’s bass line was the perfect foil for the busy percussion and guitars and Stuart’s steel guitar and Scott’s organ and the rest was my problem. My wife, Robbye, suggested industrial, work sounds to go with the percussion intro and outro and that pretty much filled in everything I thought was missing. I did keep a lot of my last vocal stuff from the times we recorded the song on JamKazam for the outro. All of that “I don’t need this” and “I’m gonna quit” and the rest after the last chorus was cut-and-pasted from every other take of the song.

This is the final, newest, bestest version of my song, “I’m Gonna Quit,” featuring my friends Michael McKern, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett. I can not express the obligation I feel toward all of them for making this happen. Not out of arrogance but out of personal history, I do love this song and I am really happy with this version. It is, finally, done.

Serious Music

Back in the late 70s, I signed up for a recording seminar at the University of Iowa. Believe it or not, Iowa City, IA had a very small recording program and decent studios (primarily for classical music and the college jazz band) in the 70s. The presenter was Stephen Temmer, who must have been in his early 50's when I met him but who seemed "ancient" to me at the time (I was in my late 20's.) Temmer died in 1992 at 64, which I would probably consider "young" today. 

Mr. Temmer later became an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, but at the time we met he was still President and owner of Gotham Audio Corporation, the only North American distributor for AKG, Neumann, Studer, EMT (plate reverbs), Lexicon, and many other things European. At the time of the course I took, Temmer was just beginning to market a collection of audio cables that he claimed were significant improvements over "ordinary wires" and we had some spirited discussions about that subject, too. 

I was at least as big an asshole then as I am now. During Temmer's introduction to the two-week-long, 8-10 hour/day course, he said something like, "We won't be discussing popular music recording in this class. Our topics will all be regarding the recording of 'serious music.'" 

I couldn't let that pass. Up my hand went and I said, "I didn't think music was a 'serious' thing. If it's not fun, it doesn't have much point does it?" I got a scowl and no reply. That was on Wednesday, the first day of class. For the next two days, Mr. Temmer pretty much ignored me. 

Luckily, the school's studio maintenance tech, Stephen Julstrom and I had hit it off pretty well, mostly talking about tape deck and console maintenance and design. The "in" with Mr. Julstrom, who was about my age (and who later became a design engineer with Shure Brothers in Chicago about the time I went to work for QSC Audio Products), provided me with some amazing opportunities including recording student classical performances and the college jazz orchestra (I still have a copy of that last one.). Unfortunately, one of the nights I'd volunteered to help Stephen record a student jazz group at a local coffee shop was the night the rest of the class went to see one of my lifelong heroes, Dizzy Gillespie, direct the UofI's big band. I've always regretted that and didn't get to see Gillespie until the early 90s in Long Beach with a small, mostly electric band. However, I got to play with some very expensive microphones that I'd only read about up to that moment and work in the college's great performance spaces using the school's very expensive equipment; although some of it was expensive, but not particularly high fidelity.

When the first weekend came, Steve Julstrom had invited Mr. Temmer and me out to his lakeside place for an afternoon barbecue. Because we were a one-vehicle family at the time, I'd taken the bus from Nebraska to Iowa City and Mr. Temmer offered to give me a ride to the lake. The school had rented a Cadillac for Mr. Temmer and I hadn't been in a new Caddy for several years. At the least, it would be a comfortable drive, even if we didn't talk much. I'd mentioned this experience in another Wirebender essay a couple of years ago, "That’s Not Serious, It’s Art." Who knows why, maybe to irritate me, maybe because it's how he always traveled by car, maybe he thought he was going to educate me, but Stephen fired up the stereo as we took off and found a classical station. When the orchestra started playing something I wish I could remember, Temmer began to wave his arms while he drove and sing along with a pretty decent voice. I watched him for a bit and about the time I started to smile at his performance, he looked at me and started laughing. We laughed together for a bit and had a great conversation about music being about "fun" and entertainment and a distraction from serious stuff and by the time we arrived at Julstrom's home we were more than acquaintances. 

The next day, Sunday, the Stephen's invited me to help record a piano-violin Bartok record with two of the school's faculty musicians and a collection of Temmer's Neumann microphones; new and historical (Including a Neumann omni that Temmer said was either "Hitler's microphone" or one like that used to record Hitler's speeches. It looked a lot like the one in this picture, as I remember. Temmer was an Austrian immigrant.) I also included several of the Audio Technica and Tascam microphones from my own collection in the recording and, later, we did a single-blind comparison of all the microphones used in this recording with the rest of the class. To Temmer's mild disappointment, the class overwhelmingly selected my Teac ME-120 condensers as their favorite in that test. The "Hitler mic" was pretty obviously lacking in high end response as the violin would often slide above the mic's capabilities far enough that it vanished in the mix. If nothing else, that proved that there are some limits to the vintage cache. 

For the next several years, any time I came upon a low-to-moderate cost microphone that I thought was either interesting or exceptional, I would write Stephen Temmer about it and, often, he'd ask to borrow it for a bit. I fell out of that habit a little before I moved to California in 1983, after my 2nd studio closed and I was convinced my life in music was all but finished. At the time, I was managing a manufacturing company building everything from high voltage inductance test equipment to the Arrakis Systems broadcast equipment. That might seem like I was still working in audio, but it didn't feel much like it. In my last few months in Omaha, massive personal turmoil pretty much squashed everything in my life but work and home. I'd been working with a friend, Mark Hartman, on jingles and pitches for commercial music, but that sort of withered away in those last months before I accepted the QSC job. 

Once in California, I was a regular member and occasional officer with the Orange County Audio Engineering Society (which no longer exists) and I bumped into Stephen at least once at the LA AES Show before he retired from and sold Gotham Audio in '85. A year or two later, I ran into him at Wes Dooley's AEA Micophones facility in Pasadena, when I was buying a couple Audio Precision test fixtures for the QSC assembly line. It still would be a few years before I started collecting and messing with microphones again, but I always clung to the idea that music wasn't a serious thing. If it's not fun for someone it's not music. I didn't see or hear from Stephen again and didn't know he'd died in 1992 until recently.

Note: Heidevolk and their one and only flash-in-the-pan semi-hit, Vulgaris Magistralis, are the poster children for my music is "fun" point. It's hard to tell from their other songs, but I can only hope these characters are posing as Viking assholes. Regardless, I love this song and it never fails to make me laugh when i hear it. I would just as soon not know anything more about the band or their opinions on "life, the universe, and everything." They might be "serous," but I think they are hilarious.