Jump to content


Please subscribe to MPN’s YouTube Channel!

Dr Mike Metlay

MPN Advisory Board
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,374

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by Dr Mike Metlay

  1. Dr Mike Metlay

    Ain't Nobody Got Time For That

    By Dr Mike Metlay,


    General
    Recently, Benn Jordan, the well-liked if sometimes controversial YouTuber, announced that he was never doing another review video. His reason was simple: the environment was so toxic, and he was being attacked in so many ways, that it was simply no fun to do any more... and why should he do something for no benefit and no profit if it wasn't fun?
     
    I dropped a note in the comments section for that video. What I ended up publishing was just a few lines – basically agreeing with him that focusing on an enriching process was key to enjoying the trip from Point A to Point B, and parenthetically thanking him for having a copy of my book clearly visible over his shoulder in the video.
     
    But as is common for me, those few lines were actually left after I wrote a very long piece, reread it, realized that the Comments section of a YouTube video was no place for it, and cut it all out to use elsewhere. It sat open on my desktop for several days, and I added to it instead of doing real work... and now I think I'd better get it out there before it ripens to the point where it draws flies.
     
    ***
     
    Looking back from 2023, I've got more years behind me than ahead of me now, and I am grateful that I got to spend over 20 of those years in the Editorial offices of a well-respected music technology magazine that was printed on real paper and purchased for real money. I wrote dozens of product reviews and edited hundreds more, and for every one of them, I knew I would be held accountable for fair and accurate reporting – both by the readers and by the manufacturers who didn't buy ads in the magazine.
     
    Wait, what? The ones who didn't buy ads? Yes! For every company that did buy ads, we reviewed products from a dozen others in every issue. Maybe they were too small to afford ads as yet. Maybe they used to buy ads and stopped. Maybe they were interested in doing it someday. Maybe they would never do it at all. But every single one of them got accountability and fact check certification, every time. 
     
    If there were legitimate problems with how a review was researched or carried out, they knew we'd make things right before we went to press. If there were legitimate issues with the product, they knew we'd call them on it, but that we'd be clear and diplomatic about it. It didn't matter if we never saw a dollar of ad revenue from them: they knew we would treat them fairly, openly, and with respect. That was a foregone conclusion for companies that bought ads, but it was true of everyone – even for companies that hated a review enough to pull their advertising to "punish" us.
     
    Our reputation was our bond, built up over decades of hard work – and that was how it had to be, when every word we wrote cost money to print and more money to buy and read. It took weeks to do properly, but that was OK, because it took weeks to assemble and publish an issue of a magazine. While January was on the newsstands, February was already on press, March was being assembled, and most importantly, reviews scheduled for April, May, and June were all out for fact check. 
     
    I remember asking for four weeks to review a very new and in-demand piece of gear, and having the agency representing the manufacturer say, "Four WEEKS? All the other magazines got a unit on Monday and turned around reviews by Friday!"
     
    "And let's see how those other reviews read versus ours," was my response.
     
    I don't like to think of myself as a vindictive guy, but I did get a chuckle from the reviews that came out two months before ours, all of which were superficial, mostly composed of marketing language from the product releases, and sometimes glaringly in error.
     
    I did it right and I made my authors do it right. It was necessary to do it right because print was forever – but it was possible to do it right because print didn't demand turnover in a matter of days or even hours.
     
    I'm grateful that I had that opportunity to build up that reputation for myself over all those years, because when I look at how things are done these days, I despair. I just fucking despair.
     
    For every really solid source of online information, well researched and accountable and trustworthy, there are literally hundreds of others that are total garbage. Everywhere you look, there's confirmation bias, siloing, faulty review procedures, errors in reporting (and basic logic!), and underlying it all, driving it all, is an audience ravenous for content but unable to process it effectively – unable to recognize content that is biased, incompletely researched, or just plain wrong, as long as it adheres to the opinions people have already. Or at least stokes people up for a good fight.
     
    That doesn't matter in the end, though. What does matter is more clicks, more hits, more impressions, more subscribers, more likes, more shares – everything else has to get shoved to the side, including pretty much every aspect of a quality review. With its ever-accelerating rush to stay relevant before the next guy takes away your views, this infernal machine chews up and spits out journalists with the potential to make a real difference; it just grinds them down until they realize that it's quit or die.
     
    That's why Benn Jordan quit. He was tired of being doxxed, of receiving death threats (including some directed to his physical address), of having his feeds hacked, and of constantly being insulted and misrepresented for doing what was supposed to be informative, helpful, and above all, fun.
     
    That's why I (largely) quit. These days, there are only two places where I write reviews: print magazines whose creators I know and respect, and MPN GearLabs. In both cases, I can work at my own pace, deliver my results, handle criticisms in a rational way, and uphold my standards... which are a damn sight higher than those of a lot of the influencers out there.
     
    I'm particularly fond of GearLab, because if someone questions my work (either in a spirit of desire to learn more or in a spirit of challenge), I can re-examine what I've written and answer them in kind. If someone's polite and cogent, I can give them a polite and cogent answer, including correcting errors I might have made. If someone wants to be a piece of shit, I can wipe them off my shoe and flush them. And in the end, hopefully people learn something worthwhile, before we move on to the next bit of enlightenment in a darkening world.
     
    ***
     
    I've got no idea if you'll ever read this, Benn, but if you do, know this: you fought the good fight, you got kicked around for it, and you walked away rather than get kicked any more.
     
    You could be chided for that if you were backing down on something like equal rights, environmental stewardship, religious freedom, or social equity... but for writing reviews of synth gear? PsshhhhhhyeahRIGHT.
     
    Go back to having fun making music, man – and if we ever get a chance to meet in person, I'll happily buy you a couple of drinks and we can sit around and swap stories about how deservedly forgettable some people are. 
     
    mike

     
  2. Dr Mike Metlay

    The Synthesizer, Solo

    By Dr Mike Metlay,


    The Point of Contact
    That's not a misprint. I am not talking about the synthesizer solo, that mainstay of so many genres that can take the form of everything from eloquent expression to playful banter to outright wankery.
     
    I am talking about the synthesizer, solo. As in, one synthesizer, played on its own, with no other instruments, no overdubs, no multitracking, no sequencing, no MIDI, nothing. Just that one synth.
     
    Has it been done? Yes, a few times that I'm aware of. The classic example is of course "Alaska", that tour de force on the Yamaha CS-80 delivered so powerfully by Eddie Jobson. Another, somewhat less-known, is "Earth Man", Anthony Phillips' "Polymoog improvisation attempting to shatter all in its path". I'm sure there are others, but they don't spring to mind immediately. If you can think of any, let me know.
     
    Why is this something I'm thinking about at the moment?
     
    Third: it's a commentary (a nice euphemism for "attack") on Poindexters who think that a digital emulation of a real instrument is "obviously fake" because you can hear subtle differences when A/B testing them against the real thing solo. To which I reply, when the hell would something like that ever happen? Stop referring to the very reasonable observation that the difference would be completely buried in a mix as a "copout". Even if you don't say it out loud, you shouldn't even think it; worrying about stuff like that only gets in the way of your creativity.
     
    Time for the first of probably many times in this blog that I'll state one of my most important musical credos: "If it sounds good, it is good." 
     
    Second: it's a commentary (not really an attack this time) on what people really mean when they talk about a particular keyboard being a "do it all" device. What they really mean is that that keyboard contains multiple different sounds, usually including drums or sample loops, as well as an effects rack, a multitrack sequencer to play it all, and maybe other gubbins like audio inputs for live recording or sampling. It's a device that does it all by putting multiple devices inside the same chassis, which on some level isn't quite the same thing. Creating on it isn't an immediate thing; you go through lots of iterations to make a complete arrangement on it. It doesn't present entire compositions live in real time.
     
    That observation gets closer to the heart of the matter...
     
    First: the idea of a single synthesizer doing everything in real time is fascinating to me. What instrument can realistically stand on its own on a naked stage or in an empty tracking room? What would that entail?
     
    I would argue that you'd at least have a shot at getting there if your instrument combines two things: an engaging sonic character that won't bore or weary an audience, and a level of real-time expressiveness that allows the player to get the most out of it. This definition holds for the two keyboards most famous for being able to carry an entire song on their own: the piano and the organ (the latter particularly in a worship setting)... as well as many non-keyboard instruments like the guitar or violin.
     
    In other words, you're looking at an instrument that responds with nuance to the physical actions of the player with a range of sounds that are arresting to the ear ("pleasing" is a tricky adjective, and "good" way more so). Are there any out there? I'd love to know your thoughts and potential candidates for such a thing.
     
    It's not fair for me to simply put the question out there with no opinion of my own, so let me lay down a couple of examples. Aside from historical candidates like the CS-80 and Polymoog, what else? Are there modern options?
     
    I think one would be the Ashun Sound Machines Hydrasynth. The Deluxe has a nice big keyboard (and lets you do splits and layers, which we can argue about over beers as to whether it's cheating), but even the smaller models have so much nuance available to them, and such a rich variety of sounds, I think that I could be quite content with one as my desert island (or empty stage) instrument.
     
    The other would be the Nonlinear Labs C15, which when it was first released proudly did away with MIDI and stated that if you wanted to get sound out of it, you had to play it. I think it's an amazing machine in that regard – certainly well beyond my meager keyboard chops to take to its limits. It has a particular character that interacts beautifully with the player's hands on the keys and feet on multiple pedals, and it's highly expressive and beautiful as a result.
     
    And then, of course, we have the Expressive E Osmose, which is still making its impact felt in the world as more and more get into players' hands. It's being heralded as a sea-change in how players interact with their synthesizers, and it will be fascinating to see where it goes after the initial flush of "next big thing" goes away and we're left with people actually playing it on a regular basis.
     
    This all comes around again, of course, to my main interest: how people interact with musical instruments. I would posit that if any electronic instrument had at hand a wide variety of musically useful expressive possibilities, then it would be well on its way toward being something you could truly play for an audience – solo.
     
    What do y'all think?
     
    mike
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  3. Dr Mike Metlay

    The Piece That Won't Fit

    By Dr Mike Metlay,


    The Point of Contact
    Mashing up some quotes from The Prisoner and the Principia Discordia with a bit of my own blather: of all the Pieces That Won't Fit in the world, the most frustrating one is the individual human being. A person cannot be neatly pigeonholed, generalized, categorized, stamped, filed, indexed, or summarized.
     
    Unlike computer punch cards (remember those?), people don't come with a warning not to fold, spindle, or mutilate – which is a pity when you think about it, because that is exactly what the world does to creative people. They're folded into neat little packages that always pop open and fall off the shelf. They’re spindled – or worse, they spindle themselves – on the words of people whose opinions are as plentiful as dog dirt and usually about as valuable. And they’re mutilated by all the little cuts and scrapes and poundings that the world uses to try to force them into places where they won't fit.
     
    It's never been easy to be a creative person in our world; as time goes on, we exchange one set of limitations for another. A century ago, if you wrote a piece for orchestra, you would never get to hear it unless you had the cash and the connections to get an orchestra to play it. Today, you can use machinery to make the sounds of as many people as you want, but you're trying to be heard among millions of people with the exact same resources that you have. The end result is the same: music is created that may go unheard.
     
    And that's even before you run up against the gatekeepers of this era or the ones that came before: royal censors, religious censors, pub patrons, music publishers, theater impresarios, stage backers, disc jockeys, record companies, A&R personnel, radio networks, television networks, cable networks, download services, streaming services, promoters, publicists, influencers... every single one of them deciding for you whether you will succeed or fail, depending on how your music will or won't help them get rich or famous.
     
    This is, in a word, sucky. So the question is: what are you going to do about it?
     
    I don't claim to have any global answers, but perhaps if I explain where I come from in respect to this problem, you'll see elements that mirror your own struggles and might prove useful when dealing with them. Or, to paraphrase Martin Buber: only that inside you that is me can hear what I am saying to you. (Ooooh, heav-VEE.)
     
    A long time ago, I was sure that I was going to carve out a niche for myself in the world of electronic music. What that niche was, changed over time. At first I thought I would head up a band and get known like some of my idols at the time. Then I thought that I would make music as a soloist and create music based on my unique life experiences, like some of my idols at the time. Then I thought I'd create my own little tiny label and put out CDs from a selection of unknown but worthwhile artists, like some of my idols at the time, and also create tracks for existing little tiny labels, like some other of my idols at the time. "At the time" went from 1981 to roughly 2002, which is about the time that I figured out that aiming for a niche was getting me nowhere. However...
     
    All the while I was doing this (and failing spectacularly every time, by the way), I was doing a lot more important stuff under the surface that I never even thought about at the time. I was honing my craft. I was building up a skill set that put me in a good place to get a session rolling in a studio… or edit a magazine. I was leveraging my mind’s strengths to turn me into an authority on certain topics, one that people came to respect. I was developing people skills. I was coming to understand what I genuinely valued. I was getting past the music of particular idols and starting, vaguely, to understand what they did that made me idolize them – in other words, I sought out that within them that was me and began to nurture it.
     
    The process was organic and glacially slow. It took four decades and it's still going on now. I often took a step forward and two steps back amidst my slow progress. I gained knowledge, then discernment, and I am holding out hope that I might get somewhere near Wisdom toward the end.
     
    Most importantly, and this is where I return to the topic at hand, I learned a few things over the years with respect to being a Piece That Won’t Fit.
     
    Number One: someone can only try to make you Fit if you let them. Many successful people choose to let this happen. They get their interesting sharp edges and pointy bits filed off to make them smooth and safe. They set aside the things they want to do in favor of things that will make them rich and successful, which usually also involves lining the pockets of everyone making them fit long before they ever see a penny of profit themselves. They give up being dangerous and become boring. And you know what? 99% of the time, they still never get what they want. Or what they think they want.
     
    Number Two: it’s the journey, not the destination, which is a cliché that nobody pays attention to unless it’s reworded in a way that cuts deep. So allow me to offer you the words of guitarist and author Steve Rapson:
     
    “Years of deprivation and sacrifice to reach a place equals years of deprivation and sacrifice.”
     
    Ouch. I mean, ouch.
     
    He went on to say, ”The place is never enough compensation… Go ask anyone who is in the place you want to be.” In other words, getting somewhere and having fun along the way is way better than getting somewhere and being miserable along the way. It just is.
     
    Number Three: at any given moment in your journey, you have arrived at a destination but there’s more of a journey ahead of you. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, but it’s also the last day of your life so far. Look around and ask yourself: am I headed in the right direction? Should I change course? Should I care?
     
    That last one is the tough part. Should you care about your musical journey’s current direction, where you’ve been and where you’re going? And if so, how?
     
    I think that the idea is that there is only today, that yesterday is nothing but regret and tomorrow is nothing but anxiety, is a load of crap. Sure, the only time you can waste is today, but no matter what the rainbows-and-unicorns types might say, you’re not a brand new person in a brand new world every time you wake up. You know where you’ve been and you know where you’re going. Use that.
     
    Most particularly, ask yourself: “Do I still have a hold of the stuff that makes me not Fit? And is that a good thing or not?” This is where the mere act of trying to get people to listen to you starts to wear you down… so it’s vital to keep a close eye on yourself, ill-Fitting bits and all.
     
    Where am I right now? My 40 years of wandering have led me to a place where I love what I create, and I have chosen to take joy from that rather than complain about how I can’t make a living at it.
     
    I face a hard truth: that practically nobody can make a living playing music any more, certainly not enough to support a family. To some folks, this is crushing. To me, it’s irrelevant. I have an audience – a tiny one, that is loyal and supportive and spread out worldwide. I receive thanks for what I play, and a bit of spending money, but the thanks bring me a lot more joy than the money does.
     
    I have found my own sound. There are elements of my idols in it, but also things that are mine, and one or two of those seem to be unusual enough to attract people’s attention in a good way. My sound has evolved, and it will evolve, and I am happy with where it is today. (But not content. Never content.)
     
    I have been told in many ways over the years by many people that I am a Piece That Won’t Fit… but along the way, I’ve collected a bunch of other such Pieces, and discovered that I fit together with them. And that’s just plain glorious.
     
    So when you wonder if the life of a Piece That Won’t Fit is worth pursuing, remember that you always have a choice. You can make yourself Fit and see where that takes you, or you can keep on refusing to Fit and see where that takes you.
     
    As for me, I’ve made my choice… to quote Tesco Vee: “Will you be part of the problem or part of the solution? Be part of the problem, and make ‘em squirm!”
  4. Dr Mike Metlay

    The Point of Contact

    By Dr Mike Metlay,


    The Point of Contact
    Hello and welcome! In this little corner of the music universe, I've set up a soapbox to stand on and speak with passersby about this, that, and especially the other thing. I hope you'll enjoy my ramblings and perhaps take away something from them. (Well, something more than "Yep, he's definitely playing pinochle with a Tarot deck.")
     
    I'd like to start off my table of nonsense with a little introduction to my absolute favorite music tech topic: what I call the Point of Contact. There are a whole lot of tools and toys that make up any recording studio or live performance rig, but the most fascinating, frustrating, surprising, maddening, inspiring, and utterly unique piece of gear in the whole shebang is always the human making the music – and how we connect the human to the rest of the rig is endlessly fascinating to me.
     
    I have a lot to say about the place of the human in the creative process – it's not going to be a topic I can cover completely in one blog entry, or a hundred. For now, let me start by positing that the Point of Contact, where humanity touches technology, is the single most interesting and rewarding part of what we do. I would further argue that in today's technological world, anything beyond that point of contact is worthless – worse than worthless! – if the Point of Contact doesn't connect the two sides effectively.
     
    People are wonderful because of the very things that make them so frustrating: you never really know what someone's going to do next until they do it, and when they do it, you're often left scratching your head as to why. The world of music tech is full of stories about artists fumbling their way around prototype synthesizers trying to make things work, surrounded by a team of engineers glancing nervously at each other and wondering why this person was totally missing the point of their genius design. Why? Because the design might be genius to an engineer, but apparently to this particular artist it's completely wrong-headed.
     
    In his interview for the book INSPIRE THE MUSIC, a 50-year history of the Roland Corporation, sound designer Eric Persing said of his initial work with Roland engineers: "As we started working together, they saw the wisdom in the idea that maybe engineers who don't know anything about music shouldn't be the ones making the sounds." Ya think?
     
    Admittedly, these weren't obvious lessons at the start. These days "gear designed by musicians for musicians" is a tired cliché, but you don't get something right until after you get it wrong a few times. (Well, aside from BOSS stompboxes. But I digress.)
     
    However, even if the designers are musicians, that's no guarantee of instant clarity of purpose. Quite the opposite, in fact. A musician/designer might design gear for other musicians who think like the designer does... but one musician's creative innovation is another musician's horrifying heresy. One wonders what Bartolomeo Cristofori would have thought as he listened to a prepared-piano piece by George Crumb... and I shall allow myself a moment's guilty pleasure of imagining Laurens Hammond at an Emerson Lake & Palmer concert, wondering why the organist was wearing knives, and what he was going to do with OH MY GOD SOMEBODY STOP HIM!
     
    The Point of Contact is affected by ergonomics, by the practicalities of design and construction, by the weight of history and tradition, and by the many other collisions between What Should Be and What Is. Entire books have been written on the subject: my first published work as a music educator was an article on this very topic in the MIT Computer Music Journal, and the first Bjooks title, PUSH TURN MOVE, was an extensive treatise on this idea from a design perspective. (It was the book I'd always wanted to write, but at least got to edit after somebody did it better than I ever could. Mange tak, Kim.)
     
    These days the tech present at the Point of Contact is not quite the only aspect of music technology that I find truly absorbing, but it's pretty close. So I'll be talking about it here – a lot – as well as the other side of the Point of Contact: the musician, who somehow keeps getting overlooked in pretty much everything people say about synthesis, despite the fact that people are far more interesting than synthesizers. (Well, most of them, anyway... remind me to introduce you guys to Poindexter someday soon.) Hence my frequent comment that I long ago gave up collecting synthesizers and now collect the people who play them.
     
    Welcome to my collection. Kick back, have a drink, try not to step on the dog, get ready to listen and be listened to... and let's have some fun.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
×
×
  • Create New...