Well, fear not. Those same behaviorists who tell us we’re nothing more than human drum loops also say that there are ways to avoid falling into repetitive ruts. There’s even software in development that will soon be able to monitor our work and warn us when it’s happening. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little unsettled at the prospect of some black box telling me: “Alert! When soloing in a medium-shuffle 12-bar blues in A, there is a 97.4% probability you will play a C on the downbeat of bar 5. Consider D, A, or F# instead?”

First, let’s look at the scientific interpretation of copying yourself, and why we do it in the first place. Ron Kellogg, a professor at Saint Louis University, tells us that earlier patterns in your behavior “prime” you to repeat them when solving similar problems. Natural enough, and who wants to reinvent the wheel for every simple problem calling for a quick solution? But this works against finding new or different solutions–ones that may be better than the one generated automatically.

The ability to produce a new response can be simple under some conditions. For example, if you write in drafts, you don’t need to do anything differently for your first attempts. Bang it out using placeholders, nonsense lyrics, filler melodies, licks, anything that gets you out of a jam and allows you to move forward.

But on subsequent revisions, know that your first attempts will almost certainly contain canned answers to creative problems. Therefore, you must be extra careful when revising to not only produce what is best for the situation at hand (whether a lyric, melody, or chord), but what is not something pulled intact your bag of licks. That could just mean slowing down a bit and casting a really skeptical eye on your own work. In other words, don’t just take your word for it.

On the other hand, some situations don’t allow for the “draft and revision” approach, notably improvising. In this elusive art, you don’t get a chance to revise. Your initial statement is your final one—left in perpetuity in the listener’s ear or the digital data of a recording hard disk. Becoming more creative before the musical statement even leaves your body is a much tougher nut to crack. But it can be done. Often you have to employ outside tools or coaching rather than just taking your own honest assessment.

One recent discovery I made was an approach to jazz improvising by the great saxophonist George Garzone. He came up with an improvising aid called the “Triadic Chromatic” method. Take any triad—say, C major. Play it in any inversion, like root position (C, E, G). Once you play the last note, go to any chromatic neighbor, which in this case is F# or Ab. From there, you must play another triad, but not in the inversion that came before—in this case, root position (which would exclude F# major or Ab major). So if you go to F#, your choices are D major (where F# is the 3rd) or B major (where F# is the 5th). That’s major-triad linking through chromatic connection. After you can link major triads together comfortably, you move onto minor triads, then diminished, then augmented. From there you mix qualities: major + minor + major + diminished, etc. It’s a great way to think non melodically, but it also gets you out of your own head. That’s the most important lesson. So when you go back to your regular improvising, you have increased the colors on your palette for expressing yourself.

You can find similar exercises for melody, lyrics, and harmonies. If you’re really conscientious about adding to your creative palette, you can do it. One color at a time, if necessary. Just remember to give the paintbrush to Ringo. Or give Ringo the paintbrush.

—Jon Chappell

Jon Chappell is a guitarist and the Senior Editor of Harmony Central. He has contributed numerous musical pieces to film and TV, including Northern Exposure, Walker, Texas Ranger, All My Children, and the feature film Bleeding Hearts, directed by actor-dancer Gregory Hines. He is the author of The Recording Guitarist: A Guide for Home and Studio (Hal Leonard), Essential Scales & Modes (Backbeat Books), and Build Your Own PC Recording Studio (McGraw-Hill), and has written six books in the popular For Dummies series (Wiley Publishing).

The most recent abduction-worthy film that must not be missed nor go un-evangelized is the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which chronicles the life and career of the musician known as Rodriguez. A singer-guitarist from Detroit in the early 1970s, Rodriguez is the most talented songwriter you’ve never heard of. He recorded two albums, which tanked, and then was largely forgotten by the American public, even though he was championed by major-league producers Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey (The Temptations, Diana Ross, George Clinton). Respected critics at the time compared him to Bob Dylan.

But in South Africa, it was an entirely different story. Rodriguez was huge—bigger than Elvis, say the journalists and music producers interviewed in the film. In this closed but large and well-educated society, Rodriguez’s songs inspired a whole youth culture rising up against an oppressive government and its apartheid policies. As one South African journalist put it, “If you came of age in South Africa in the ’70s, you owned at least these three albums: Bridge Over Troubled Water, Abbey Road, and Cold Fact by Rodriguez.”

And so begins a great detective story, masterfully spun by Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, about a South African journalist seeking to find out why such a major artist—a hero and an icon of pop culture—disappeared off the face of the earth.

The leads weren’t promising. Not only was there virtually no paper trail on him (and part of the fun is to watch the journalist, Craig Bartholomew, look for clues in lyrics and album notes), but at least two different rumors were circulating that Rodriguez—already known as a quirky performer who might turn his back on the audience while playing—had committed suicide on stage (one version had him shooting himself, the other described a grisly scene of self-immolation). Clearly he was dead; the only question remained how and when. Or was he in fact not dead and just locked up in a mental institution somewhere?

Searching for Sugar Man is not just an intriguing tale of an obscure musician who had a fleeting brush with fame and then fell into obscurity (or worse). It is a great film, complete with a compelling plot, a dramatic arc, and beautiful visual and musical production values. It is also a trenchant commentary on music and the music business, and a probing examination of an important period in history and pop music culture. The soundtrack that underpins the film is first-rate stuff, and you can clearly hear why Rodriguez was on track to be a star. He was not only a world-class songwriter, he was backed by the best music talent Detroit had to offer.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Sugar Man is the portrait of the artist himself. Rodriguez was the genuine article, we find out through the course of the film, and lived as an artist, placing his music above all. He may have been eccentric and misunderstood, but he maintained laser focus and level head when it came to creating music. His music continued to grow and thrive, even as his career went in the opposite direction.

Searching for Sugar Man is a triumph of a film and a vindication of the talent, character, and life story of a largely forgotten, but no less worthy, musician named Rodriguez. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this film will leave you with a sense of hope, either. See it and spread the word.

— Jon Chappell

First, a little background into how big timber works. Historically, companies would seek out a country with vast resources of ebony, and then move in and log until it was gone. Then these companies moved on to another country and logged its forests until that ebony disappeared. This had been the pattern for over 200 years in places like India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Congo, and Gabon. The ebony in these regions is now either non-existent or so scarce that it is illegal to log and export. For all intents and purposes, it’s gone.

This policy of total eradication doesn’t fuel the local economies, either. The cut trees are exported to rich countries that process the wood to make expensive objects—like high-end furniture and guitars. The value of these resources is realized only after they leave their country of origin. Besides underpaid societies, left behind are vast tracts of decimated rainforests, replaced by palm trees (for their oil, another global commodity) and cities. This, Bob Taylor recounts, is what you see from the air when flying over them. As far as the eye can see.

Take the case of Madagascar. It was the last great place to get ebony. Its species of ebony were particularly desirable: jet black, hard, perfectly smooth. But now the only big trees exist in national parks. And even these are being poached to the tune of 200 logs per day, destroying national refuges and protected areas. This all happens right under the eyes of governments and watchful environmental groups. Taylor doesn’t buy Madagascarian ebony because it can’t be legally sold or exported.

Then there is Cameroon. It’s the one place left in the world where ebony is still plentiful. Taylor Guitars never used Madagascarian ebony, but it has been building guitars with Cameroonian ebony for 25 years. So when Bob visited the operation during the due diligence stage prior to forming the new company, he talked to the workers. When he asked how things were going, the workers said not so good. Bob inquired further to find that they now have to hike as far as five miles into forests they could once log from the road. After searching, cutting, chopping, and hauling, the effort barely recovers the costs.

Well, why, in a forest of ebony trees, is it necessary to journey so far in? asked Bob. Because the ebony has to be A grade, was the response. It is the A grade that people want. You can’t log B grade wood; it’s one-fifth the value, and the factories won’t accept it. Bob asked what the problems with the B grade were. It turns out that there’s nothing structurally different about the wood. It’s all about color. B grade ebony is every bit as hard and smooth as A grade, it just has occasional gray spots and streaks of vanilla running through it. In other words, the difference is purely cosmetic.

But that’s not the worst of it. It turns out the only way you can differentiate A grade from B grade is to cut down the tree first and examine the stump. If the tree is B grade, it can’t be used, and so the effort is wasted, the felled tree just lies there on the forest floor to rot, and the logger moves on. Bob asked the next obvious question: How many trees do you have to cut down to yield an A-grade log? The loggers responded that a single load is about six tons, or two trees of A grade. In order to get those two trees, they must cut down an average of 20 trees.

Twenty trees to produce two. Only one felled tree in ten can be used, and all because guitarists want perfectly black fingerboards. Since he was the owner of this new company, Bob was now responsible for this business model. It was his customers that were fueling this wasteful and destructive practice. So Bob made a decision.

The good news, as Bob says in the video, is that there is now ten times the ebony in the world we thought there was. The other news is that now guitarists will start to see fingerboards with a little variety in them—different colors and figurations, all from the natural ebony that grows in abundance and is sustainable. By using what nature provides, Bob points out, we are living within our resources and practicing responsible forestry. It is, after all, still ebony—as hard and with the same resonance and properties as the black stuff. As Bob says, “That’s the truth of the forest.”

I’m hoping that we see the day when an all-black fingerboard will be, like a full-length fur coat, recognized for what it is—a relic from another time. But for new guitars, ones that musicians purchase today and from now on, ones that we play daily, on stage, on the road, and in recording studios, let’s all start showing a little color in our fingerboards, shall we?

 —Jon Chappell

I have been amazed by what Spotify can do. My favorite anecdote is when I was driving to a concert where Larry Carlton was to be a guest artist. Two of the younger members in our vehicle didn’t know who Carlton was, so my friend said, “Here, listen to this.” And he called up Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.” Now, my friend didn’t have the song already in his smartphone. He didn’t have to download it. He launched Spotify and immediately found it. No purchase necessary (as would have been the case with iTunes and Amazon). Just music on demand. In a moving car. For these cases—summoning a specific title in an instant—Spotfiy can’t be beat.

But I’m not here to talk about Spotify. I’m here to talk about a service that doesn’t give you what you want. Well, at least not what you ask for … which is sometimes two different things. Hmm, I guess I’d better explain myself, because that seems to be necessary whenever Pandora comes up.

Pandora, which is fighting for survival among a crowded and fiercely competitive landscape of commercial media sellers, is largely misunderstood. This may be part of its problem. A typical conversation explaining how Pandora works goes like this:

Q: What’s Pandora?
A: It’s an online music-delivery service.

Q: Like iTunes or Amazon?
A: No, it uses a streaming model, and is more like a personalized radio experience.

Q: Like Spotify, Rhapsody, or Rdio?
A: No, because a) it’s completely free; and b) you can’t request a song directly. You enter a song title and get back songs that are very much like it.

Q: But not the song I asked for?
A: Right, but you wouldn’t use it for that purpose. And the recommended music is uncannily close in many ways. So you have to imagine situations where that works.

Q: You mean like when Amazon says, “Customers who bought X also bought Y”?
A: Not really, because it’s not based on what other people do or think or “like.” It’s based on data as defined by the Music Genome Project.

Q: So I can’t request a tune I want, but I can sort of predict what kind of music I’ll get back? What crazy business model justifies that?!
A: How about the entire history of commercial radio—both terrestrial and satellite—with radio stations that feature formats like Top 40, Americana, Classical, Jazz, Rock, Metal, Rap & Hip Hop, Oldies, Classic R&B, and Music of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, and “Now”? Except that with Pandora, each song you request acts like its own station with its own unique format criteria. Only with a lot more specificity—like, 400 times more.

Q: Wow! Does it … you know … work?
A: Fantastically so.

Pandora has been on the decline recently (in terms of the company’s valuation) because other competitive entities are on the upswing. But Pandora is unique, both in its technology and business model, and deserves to be understood, from both perspectives.

First, the biz talk. Because Pandora streams music in a “non-interactive” way, it’s regulated by federal laws, rather than licensing agreements with record companies, and so pays fixed and consistent royalty rates (as commercial radio does). This is not true of other on-demand services, such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix. Once a content provider (say, a cable TV channel) sees Netflix’s profits go up, it can renegotiate a higher fee. And guess who’s going to absorb that cost, dear consumer? Pandora, on the other hand, won’t change rates until federal legislation changes—a slower and more predictable process.

Now for the “creative technology” part. Pandora makes its selections based not on user reviews and other human-generated (and there potentially corruptible) sources, as Amazon does, but on data derived by the Music Genome Project, an open source standard of tagging music with up to 400 different attributes. Whether music can be defined and classified—let alone judged—according to attributes, rather than the emotional experience of hearing it, is an aesthetic debate for the ages. But in the meantime, Pandora works more often than it doesn’t. And more than that, it can surprise you with its selections. Consider that your favorite baseball players (and in fact, the best baseball players of all time) surprise you in a good way fewer than four times out of ten, but when they do, it brings you out of your seat. It takes just a few direct hits to forgive a lot of strikeouts.

As musicians, we all know that the highest musical moments of our lives can happen unexpectedly. By putting ourselves in the path of “positive possibilities,” but not being completely prescriptive about it, we open ourselves up for the serendipity and happy accidents that music promises. That’s what happens when Miles and Trane got together. Or Omar Rodríguez-López and John Frusciante. And it’s probably happened to you with the radio. Perhaps you were listening to a station late at night, surfing the dial, and you came across a song or a band you didn’t know existed but then couldn’t live without.

Pandora has that effect. Being a Pandora user means endorsing a technology that, while not perfect, is free from the influence of the human hand—the same hand that manipulates for its owner’s profit. Spotify is great because it gives you what you want when you want it. But how are you going to learn if you experience only what you know? Pandora surprises and delights, and takes you to places you could not have found on your own. It rewards the listener with a pilgrim soul. And that is worth saving.

—Jon Chappell

So I got to thinking how I could apply my own musical skills in that way. Could I offer a useful service that someone would normally pay high prices for? (And I’m not talking about being hired as a performer.) On the gear front, I thought of an example right away: Several times I have donated the use of my portable P.A. and wireless microphone rig to events like the local street fair or Cub Scout pinewood derby contest. But recently I had to apply actual expertise, along with my equipment, for a task that would have cost a non-musician “civilian” an arm and leg in service fees.

My elderly neighbor had three vinyl albums he wanted converted to CDs. He loved the music on these decades-old records, but playing them on a turntable was no longer an option. We’ve known each other for years, so when he asked me if I knew of or could recommend a service that would transfer vinyl to CD, I told him I’d do the job myself for free. He was amazed that a “musician” (as opposed to a “lab,” I guess) could do this, and at first he declined the offer, saying he didn’t want to inconvenience me. (He also didn’t want me to think he was hinting for a favor, which I knew he wasn’t.) I reassured him it was no bother because the process was simple: you hook up a turntable to the computer, drop the needle, walk away, and let the whole side play. While recording the music, the software auto-senses the gaps and divides up the LP’s bands into corresponding digital files. Flip the LP, repeat for Side B, and you’re done. Then you just burn the auto-separated tracks to a CD—which takes less than 3 minutes.

 “It’s that easy?” he asked, incredulously.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s not like I have to monitor every step in real time or anything.”

I was telling the truth, because the software that comes with my Ion USB Turntable (a turntable that plugs directly into the computer for playback or digital recording of vinyl) does just that. But when I started the process, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy. For one thing, in a CD track, you want no time gap from the start of the track to the first note of music. Where you do want silence is at the end of the track—about 2 or 3 seconds’ worth. This ensures that you still hear a pause between tracks, but if you decide to select tracks out of sequence, the music plays instantly (which is what you want). The auto-sensing software wasn’t cutting it in that department.

The second problem was that, though the software captured the sound and converted it to CD-burnable 16-bit/44.1kHz wave files, the raw sound was pretty bad. It was crackly and lacked low end. I realized that through my restoration software (iZotope RX 2) and my various EQ plug-ins, I had more than enough resources to make the tracks sound much better if I simply ran them through my computer-based audio recorder and editor (called a DAW, for digital audio workstation). But then the automation options—along with the convenience—went out the window. This was now becoming “a job,” and not a “quickie, low-impact favor,” because of my own pesky standards.

No matter. I did the right thing and manually edited each track on my DAW, being selective and specific in the way I applied restoration strength, EQ, and volume normalizing (as long as I was doing these other things anyway). It took me a bit of time, but the results were far better than if I’d just “dropped the needle” (as I told my friend I would do).

For extra credit, I wanted to scan the album cover images and insert them in the jewel case covers, but realized that my 8.5″ x 11″ scanner bed wouldn’t accommodate a 12″ x 12″ album cover. By doing a little research, though, I found that my image-editing program (Adobe Photoshop) can stitch together separate scans of an image seamlessly, as long as there’s an overlapping region. The process is so simple that point-and-shoot cameras include this “stitching” feature internally, as “panorama” mode. It’s dead simple, quick (like, two keystrokes), and the results are completely undetectable. So in taking on a favor, I actually learned something new. As a bonus, I got to hear some unusual music: vintage Spanish bullfighting instrumentals and John Philip Sousa marches.

My neighbor was delighted beyond expectation to get back not only the CDs, but artwork in the jewel cases, and neatly typed-up track listings (couldn’t scrimp on that last step). For my part, I was happy to have helped a friend who would have otherwise paid a lot if he’d simply “opened the yellow pages.” As a collateral benefit, I had honed my vinyl-restoration skills and picked up a nifty trick in transferring LP album art to CD jewel cases. And though I had undertaken this project as a favor, I realized I could now probably advertise my services on the open market. Because I think I just heard my brakes squealing.

—Jon Chappell

Their surnames, along with their contributions, made a lasting impression on the culture of popular music. I was fortunate enough to have met both men several times, and while my meetings were either too brief or too formal (at least from the perspective of a journalist on assignment who idolized his subjects), I took away valuable lessons from them each time. These often came as passing remarks from the great men, but their wisdom etched itself in my brain as indelibly as the sound of the three-finger roll and the EL34-driven stack.

I had first heard Earl Scruggs’s work the way most suburban kids do: in the blistering arpeggios that back the vocals on The Beverly Hillbillies TV show theme. Sometimes Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs would make guest appearances on the show as themselves. But even after being mesmerized by the banjo playing, I still didn’t even know that they were real people. After all, this was a show with characters like “Dash Riprock” and “Bolt Upright.” The appellations “Lester Flatt” and “Earl Scruggs” could well have been concocted by Hollywood screenwriters for these gentlemanly Appalachian pickers.

 But Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt were real, and could really, really play. And their true history was far more exciting and tumultuous than the subdued and reverential treatment they received as guest artists on a TV sitcom. Flatt and Scruggs started out as sidemen in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, the legendary band that, among other achievements, defined the classic bluegrass ensemble formula. In fact, the very word bluegrass was backformed from the name of Monroe’s band. While Monroe might have been the entrepreneur that named the genre, the most profoundly influential musician in the band would be Earl Scruggs. He codified a loose, folk-based fingerpicking style into the driving, syncopated, and irresistible form it is today, called “Scruggs-style.” You simply cannot play the five-string banjo in a bluegrass or folk-based band without first learning your Scruggs rolls and a few signature Scruggs licks. There have been many great stylistic additions and players that have come along, but Scruggs was first, he got it right, and he got it perfect. No one has, or can, improve on what Scruggs did for the banjo and bluegrass in the early 1940s.

Jim Marshall was poor and ailing for much of his youth. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at his biographical milestones cannot help conclude that Marshall was irrepressibly clever, industrious, hardworking, talented, and tough. His physical countenance was slight and he spent a large portion of his developmental years in a bodycast due to “tubercular bones.” But once the cast was off, we find the young Marshall, in almost breathless succession, going from working menial jobs to boxing to dancing to playing drums to fronting bands as a singer, dancer, and drummer. Too poor to afford a motorized conveyance, the busy and in-demand Marshall rigged up a trailer to his bicycle so he transport his drums to the gig. He opened a music shop and, as an adjunct to the workaday business of selling gear and giving drum lessons, he designed amps. One day Pete Townshend walked into the shop. (Marshall had known Townshend’s father, who was also a musician.) Townshend needed more volume from his amps than current makes and models could provide. Marshall took on the assignment. And the rest, as they say, is history.

 From a gear perspective, the three biggest names in rock and roll are Gibson, Fender, and Marshall. Orville and Leo are long gone, but Jim Marshall was still going into the office and making the trek to trade shows until just recently, when he was well into his 80s. He came up through life as a self-taught inventor and inveterate tinkerer, learning much of his technical knowledge from engineering books and with no formal education. He also didn’t play guitar. (In this way he was similar to Leo Fender, whose amps he was influenced by in the early years, before he found his voice.) But Marshall was a brilliantly intuitive, and he always listened to what people around him were saying. Throughout his life he would reiterate that his knack for listening was the key to his success: he listened to people—whether it was Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, Slash, his staff engineers, or his family. While Marshall had design help from Ken Bran and Dudley Craven in those early years, we remember Jim Marshall in the same way we do Steve Jobs (also the non-technical partner in a successful business relationship): because he was the visionary. He was able to prevail and sustain his business because he kept on listening, both to the wise counsel of his supporters as well as the tones that emanated from his namesake amplifiers. This ear-to-the-rail approach, with artists and his own conscience, is what earned him his place in history, as well as the affectionate moniker “the father of loud.”

Earl Scruggs and Jim Marshall were both 88 years old. They were graced with long lives, and lives well lived. And we are better for them. Thank you, gentlemen.

—Jon Chappell

The game goes something like this: On a piece of paper, write out three single-word requirements in a triangle along with a simple instruction, and hand it to the person assigning you the task (see illustration).

What’s fascinating about this clever little puzzle is that it really works if you go through all the combinations. It’s a revelation, in fact, to anyone who’s ever worked on a project with a deadline and a budget, from remodeling a bathroom to music production. (Take a moment to try it, and relate the word-pairs to situations in your own life.)

Consider that there are three possible circles (or pairs) you can draw. Each circle neatly and unequivocally precludes the third choice. If you’ve ever seen the results of a task where the requirements were Quick + Cheap—the all too common choice—you can clearly see that Good (i.e., quality work) was the odd man out.

The other two combinations work out as well. Let’s take Good + Cheap. I write music books as well as magazine articles on music. Books take a long time, and they have to include the best you’re capable of, because books are forever. But books don’t pay that well. (Unless you’re J. K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, but they can’t write fingerstyle blues instruction like I can.) However, 99 percent of all authors don’t get an advance they can live on. In other words, no publisher pays you enough to quit your job and write full time to produce a book in three months. So that’s where you sacrifice Quick. Sure enough, writing a book is made manageable if you take you a year (writing on evenings and weekends) instead of three months (quitting your day job). That’s how most books in the world get written—as an adjunct to the writer’s day job. The take-away is, if it has to be awesome (Good) and the change is chump (Cheap), it’s going to take a while (goodbye, Quick). Deal with that, Mr. Publisher. Are you planning on writing an album of original songs and playing most (or all) of the instruments yourself? Prepare to get intimately acquainted with the Good + Cheap rule, where Quick is nowhere on the radar.

Good + Quick is the third pair, and it equates to the rare scenario known as “Money is no object.” It’s why you fantasize about paying an army of contractors to remodel your bathroom in a week rather than trying to do it with your partner when both of you work. (That’s Good + Cheap, where Quick goes out the window—along with domestic bliss.) I pay to have my car’s oil changed by the local lube emporium, even though I can do, and have done, this myself countless times. (Regarding this little luxury, I sacrificed Cheap when I left my starving student days behind me.) In my musical work, it’s why I buy loop collections instead of programming my own, even though I have an extensive sample library. In life as well as groove-creation, you spend money to save time, and vice versa.

Yes, it’s painful when you can’t do your best musical work—either creating it or playing it—because the two-out-of-three rule won’t let you. But when you’re on a budget or a deadline (and often both), something just has to give. It most often comes in the form summed up in the famous quote by poet Paul Valery: “A work is never finished, merely abandoned.” That the Quick + Cheap model, because it’s part of the real, profit-driven world that sacrifices the ultimate in Good, which is Perfection.

Caring musicians will always have to let something go and call it done, even when they know that, with more time, they could make it better. Even if only marginally so. Even if only for their own ears. But reality always picks two out of three. For my editor friend once also uttered his truest maxim upon discovering I was laboring too long on an eleventh-hour improvement: “Let it go, man. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be right.” Ouch.

—Jon Chappell

The landlady eyes them warily. “Are you the police?”

“No, ma’am. We’re musicians,” says Elwood.

It’s a very funny moment, especially for musicians, because actor Dan Aykroyd delivers the line crisply and succinctly, as if this were not a non-sequitur, but coming from a place of even higher authority than if they were just cops. He might as well have said, “No ma’m. We’re the F.B.I.”

As musicians, we’re often looked to as the resident authority figure on all matters involving music, audio, or acoustics—even in areas where we may be a little out of our depth. For example, someone might ask you to recommend a home stereo system, about which you may know very little. But you can still answer thoughtfully. Think about how you would shop for a home stereo system. Certainly your approach would be different from someone who didn’t know music, gear, or audio at all. And you can relate that to help people sort out their own thoughts, even if you can’t tell school them on receiver brands or total harmonic distortion percentages.

In my untrained youth, I worked as a salesman at a stereo store, and would watch people come in, approach the wall of hi-fi amplifiers and immediately turn up the bass on whatever was playing at the time to “audition” the system. These tire-kickers would then simply stand at the receiver and start moving to the beat—as opposed to backing up, finding the sweet spot in the equilateral triangle formed by speakers and listener, and standing still for a careful listen. That’s how I could tell these people knew nothing about audio.

From that experience, I formulated my own plan on how I would forevermore audition audio systems. I would listen to them with their EQ settings flat; I would bring my own CDs of familiar and varied listening material; and I would always triangulate the sweet spot between myself and the speakers. Lo and behold, that’s how I evaluate audio gear to this day.

I never presumed to have specific technical expertise, just some basic musician-sense. But it came in handy recently when I attended a lecture a friend was giving at a local university. (The subject was screenwriting, and had nothing to do with music.) Once inside the lecture hall, I could see there was a problem up on the stage. Several people were gathered around a small portable sound system, looking worried. I approached the stage and asked if I could help.

“We can’t get the sound working,” said my friend, speaking for the group of presenters.

“I’m a musician,” I asserted. “Let me see what I can do.” And I hopped up onto the stage.

It was a simple matter to solve. They were using a wireless handheld mic whose receiver was plugged into a powered speaker. But they couldn’t figure out the relationship between the output of the receiver versus the volume on the powered speaker. The sound was either inaudible or feedback-squealing loud, and they were flustered. To me it was as natural as setting up a sound on my amp. I first turned both volumes all the way down. Then I cranked the speaker volume three-quarters of the way up and slowly brought up the output on the wireless receiver. The meter on the receiver looked good and the sound rang out clear and loud. I had my friend do a mic check, but her voice was softer than mine, so I momentarily took the mic from her and figured out how to boost the gain on the handheld transmitter. Now all the levels were good. Everyone smiled.

But I didn’t stop there. The powered speaker was on the floor, off the stage and behind a lectern. I lifted the speaker up, put it on the lectern itself, and moved the whole arrangement to the front edge of the stage so that the presenter wouldn’t pass the mic in front of the speaker, potentially creating feedback. I explained to the group that although it sounded good to us on stage, when the room filled up with people, this would guarantee a better sound for the house. Again, approving smiles all around.

Later, my friend commented that she thought I was “just a guitar player” and not an “audio genius.” I explained that all “mere guitar players” could do what I had done, and that “genius” was a strong word for my quick bit of stagecraft. And then she laughed, recalling the way I had said “I’m a musician” when I approached the stage.

“It was like you were saying, ‘Stand back, people, I’m a doctor!’” she said.

 “No ma’am. I’m a musician,” I thought to myself silently, while enjoying a laugh with my friend.

And so it seems inconceivable that the death of the CD is nigh, coming as it will in 2012, if reliable prognostications come to pass. Not even 30 years old, not even surviving its twenties into some kind of maturity. Optical storage for music consumption is now an obsolete notion, it seems. Sure, CD technology had its problems—chiefly that it was certainly never well-suited to portable use. You have to admit, seeing a yellow DiscMan in a holster and elastic strap around the arm of a jogger these days is about as likely as a Wham! or Culture Club song charting on the Top Ten. The size of the disc itself guaranteed a bulky housing so that the mechanism could play it back, and what about all those moving parts? These same limitations were also being felt in other linear-tape and disc-burning technologies too, most notably video recording. No wonder the MP3 player supplanted the CD player.

Yes, it’s true that if you considered just the mechanics, you might see how optical discs would eventually be replaced.

But there were other endearing aspects of the compact disc that shouldn’t necessarily be discarded so cavalierly.

Take, for example, album art and storage. While the CD definitely compromised on album art, there still existed an almost 5′x5′ area in which to attach a visual component to the audio in hand. And what about liner notes? These disappeared with the MP3 player. And having a zillion songs on a device with the form factor of a pack of sugarless gum doesn’t lend itself to the pleasures of the browsing experience, nor does it satisfy the folks who still liked to devote a good portion of their living room or bedroom as a listening sanctuary—a place where CDs lined one wall and the audio equipment lined another. There’s a certain thoughtfulness in preparing for a long car ride where you have to choose only as many CDs as you can comfortably carry in two hands. When you can always have everything you’ve ever owned on tap (literally, as in the touch of a finger), it takes the fun out of being a song programmer.

But the worst part about losing the CD is that we as a consumer audience never really replaced it with any single lightning rod of superior fidelity, even if the mechanics of the medium begged for evolution. We have never come to grips with the whole audio fidelity issue. Though CDs became commercially available in the U.S. in 1983, their audio fidelity has improved not a whit since then. Can you imagine any other digital technology—processor speed, storage capacity, recordable medium material—not advancing for 29 years? It would be unthinkable.

So when we had the chance to improve on the technology, did we do it for audio good? We did not. We made our lives easier, but compromised on the issue quality by way of that dreaded affliction called “data compression.” Devices eventually caught up and can now play files with CD fidelity—and better—but does anyone know how or really bother with doing that? Where is the hue and cry for better audio? It’s not there. Other issues, like digital rights management and cloud-based storage are a distraction from the fundamental issue of raising our standard of audio-living.

In the CD, we had a physical touchstone that had its fidelity indelibly stamped into it. The twin specs of 44.1kHz and 16-bits were inseparable from the medium, and really good for the times—better than we’d experienced before. So as the mechanics improved, we should have seen that the audio improved—at least a little bit. We didn’t see it in the CD, and we didn’t see it in portable music players, which emphasized the “portable” over the “music.” What we need now is something—a physical object, an acronym, or even a couple of initials—that will standardize the higher-resolution audio and better fidelity that we’re capable of supporting. And should demand.

— Jon Chappell

I like to tell my students that, in addition to practicing their backsides off, the best way to be sure you ace the gig is to pay strict attention to the person who hired you. That might be the client directly, such as a clubowner or bride’s mother, or it might be the bandleader who in turn works for them. In other situations, it could be the session producer or the booking agency. In each case, the expectations might be slightly different, even if the music you’re playing is exactly the same.

By contrast, if the person who hired you is the bandleader, make sure you don’t start taking orders from the drummer (“Dude, that sounds awesome! Keep wailing through the singer’s next verse!”). Undercutting the musical leader’s authority is just as bad as not following it at all. For many musicians, this is never an issue: it’s obvious who’s calling the shots. But the more you play, the more different situations you’ll find yourself in, and sometimes the lines of authority are less well drawn.

For example, I recently played a gig where the drummer was the leader—the guy who called the tunes and gave the cues—although the lead singer schmoozed with the client and fronted the band. (They were a team, with these skills well delegated.) This created an interesting situation onstage, because at first it wasn’t obvious where to look. The normal thing is to look toward the front of the stage, but the singer offered no direction or support to the instrumentalists. That wasn’t his job, after all. But it created a sense of disorientation on the bandstand.

I like to think that if I wasn’t born brilliant, I am at least a quick study. It was obvious to me early on that the drummer was in total control: He delivered the onstage patter; he counted off the tunes; and he cued the stop–time sections, endings, and vamps with total aplomb. So I quickly adopted the technique of facing outward for most of the song while turning my head to the back of the stage when I sensed there was an “arrangement event.” It was clear the drummer appreciated the effort—and the eye contact. The bass player didn’t seem to grasp this—even after being told—looking to the singer for all his cues, and inevitably missing a stop–time cut or playing through an ending. I continued to work with this team, the bass player did not.

I have seen this sort of confusion in the studio too. Sometimes the boss is in the live room and sometimes she’s behind the glass. In one situation I was in, “the boss” was the songwriter trying to get rhythm tracks down for her demo. She sat in the control room with the engineer. I and the rest of the musicians were in the live room and knew her strengths and limitations well. Yet one musician continued to ask technical questions she couldn’t answer, using terms like “subdominant” (instead of “the F chord”), etc. Worse, when he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he turned to a fellow musician for support, when he should have simply rephrased the question and maintained that direct line of authority. He made her look bad, and so no one was surprised when he wasn’t at the next session.

This is just common sense: If your leader wants to talk about the A minor chord or A minor scale, don’t start spouting off about the submediant and Aeolian. The best producers I’ve worked with know how to adapt their approach to communicate with the boss first, and then with the musicians after a translation process. The lesson is this: Know who the boss is and work in their world. When it’s your gig you can tell everyone to play the Locrian mode over the fifth mode of the harmonic minor. But when it’s necessary, make sure you can also say, “Do you want me to strum the sad chord four times after the happy chord, or three?”