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?”

Although I still see this cliché in classifieds, I’d like to think that musicians searching for opportunities and positions are a little more discerning these days, and wouldn’t fall for the “major label interest” hook—at least to the exclusion of any other compensation or benefit. Why? Because there is no “major label interest.” This is primarily because the majors aren’t majors anymore, and the surviving recording companies simply don’t have the resources to cultivate a band from obscurity to stardom the way they once did.

You’ll have a better chance at winning the lottery than capturing the handful of slots available to burgeoning bands who play local clubs now but hope for a “major label” miracle to break them into the big time. More than likely, a record company will catch you halfway up the ladder of success, when an offer presents more of a dilemma than a bonanza.

So what should aspiring career musicians do in the meantime? In a phrase: Create your own reality. Bands these days should behave more like self-sufficient entrepreneurs than cogs in a machine. They should plan on doing everything themselves, from demo and master recording to press kit production to gig booking and event promotion to merch sales and music distribution. And the good news is, now they can.

With all the tools now available for the above-listed tasks—for virtually every aspect of building a music career and distribution network—it’s never been more accessible, affordable, or possible. Music technology pundits like to point out that digital recording democratized the recording process by making it possible for anyone to create master-quality recordings using the plethora of affordable gear. But that truism can be applied across the entire record business, where inexpensive and available technology exists all the way up the chain. For example, for about $1,500 you can buy a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera that’s more than capable of shooting top-quality publication-ready photos and high-resolution/high-definition videos. Programs like WordPress enable you to produce slick-looking websites with no special programming skills. And services like iTunes, CD Baby, TuneCore, and ReverbNation let you sell your music directly to the public—right alongside The Beatles, Beyonce, and Bieber. And promotion? Two words: Facebook and YouTube.

All of this means that you don’t have to wait for a sugar daddy, sponsor, or benevolent A&R person to get started in your personal empire building. You can start using any of these resources yourself today, and on any level of engagement. If you’re a good prose writer, take on the production of your band’s press kit, and learn the desktop-publishing programs provided in Adobe Creative Suite to produce the press releases, brochures, one-sheets, and publicity photos (both prints and high-res jpegs) of your band. The musically technical folks among you can marshal a DAW, an interface, and a couple of decent microphones to create your recordings. Perhaps a friend of the band can explore the website and social networking mechanisms. Any volunteer who contributes to the cause will be getting valuable experience in the process—experience that comes in handy as the processes are scaled up as the budget affords and the needs demand.

Perhaps the best part of having a hand in all aspects of the business is that you understand how everything works, and you get to be in control. Once you can afford to outsource any aspect of the business, the knowledge accrued from your early efforts ensures that you’ll always retain a basic understanding of the process. Understanding is the key to making informed decisions—even while actual technology outgrows your immediate ken.

So start getting involved in your own destiny. When making music a career, you need to touch, contribute to, and be engaged in all aspects of the business, not just with how well you play your axe. When I was much younger, I told a friend who was an intellectual property lawyer that I was only interested in the music, or the “creative” part of the business. Here’s how he responded: “Aw, that’s adorable. C’mon, grow up! The music takes care of itself; it is what it is. But the business part? Now, that’s where things really get creative.”

Recently, I found musically useful material in three common, everyday, and seemingly non-musical objects: a child’s whistle (the wooden Thomas the Tank Engine train whistle), the tea kettle on my stove, and the wind chimes that do their thing just outside my front door. Unlike, say, a doorbell, which uses a very definite musical device (singing out the melodic interval of a descending major second), these three devices don’t emphasize their musical origins. But they definitely draw on music to bring about their psychologically desired effects, however different those may be.

Anyone Can Whistle

The toy whistle sounds just like a steam-powered train whistle it’s emulating, especially when I enhanced it with a little reverb (hear it here: TrainWhistle.mp3). When I first heard this, I thought, “This is a child’s toy?! I’d use it in a film score in a heartbeat!” But upon closer inspection, it’s just a straight-up Cm7b5 chord (C Eb Gb Bb). I recognized the chord-quality immediately, and then (surreptitiously wresting the whistle from the vise-like grip of my sleeping nephew) checked the individual valves by blowing through them one at a time. Not only were the intervals perfectly in tune with the equal temperament scale, the pitches were referenced to A440. This can’t be an accident. Yet when you hear it in context (that is, from the mouth of a child sitting amongst toy trains), you don’t think music, you simply think, “Wow, how realistic that whistle is!”

Polly, Put the Kettle On

The tea kettle also emits a whistle, but not to evoke an image of “the real thing.” Instead, its job is to loudly call attention to itself and let you know the water’s boiling. And how do you best do that, if you’re a kettle? By cooing out a harmonious perfect 5th? Not bloody likely. Rather, the tea kettle screeches out the most annoying interval possible: a minor second (hear it here: TeaKettle.mp3). This is music’s equivalent to a crying baby: You can’t ignore it. A minor second, from a musical perspective, is dissonant and harmonically active. It makes a spectacle of itself in any situation, whether musical or not. The tea kettle’s designer may have been an acoustician, a musician, or both.

Wind Beneath My Chimes

Wind chimes have the opposite mission of a tea kettle: they want to provide soothing sounds, fueled not by angry, boiling steam, but by the gentle nudging of the wind. On my dog walks and any time I’m in a residential neighborhood, I always keep an ear out for wind chimes. Why? Because it’s a fun and challenging exercise to identify the collective quality of their clanging pipes. You don’t need perfect pitch to do this; you just have to be able to identify intervals delivered in a random sequence, because that’s how chimes play. (The wind never learned to play its scales from low to high as music students throughout history have.)

In my sampling, I have noticed that most wind chimes use the pentatonic major scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 6 in any major key) for the same reasons guitarists do: You can’t play a wrong note. Because a major pentatonic scale contains no half steps (provided by the 4th and the 7th of the major scale, which are missing in the pentatonic version), you never hear a minor second—a dissonant interval, and the same one played by my tea kettle. (Hmm. Are my wind chimes talking to my tea kettle? This “smart house” concept may be going further than they’re telling me!) Not all wind chimes use the pentatonic scale (though my next door neighbors’ do): the ones on my porch (heard here: WindChimes.mp3) play another soothing sequence: the whole-tone scale. This has been used to great, gauzy effect by Debussy—usually as a harp glissando—and it works on chimes because, again, it avoids the minor second interval. You may not be expecting such “harmonically educated” thought from a device that makes no claim to produce music (only “pleasant noise”), but careful musical thought is at the very core of its makeup.

It’s a fun exercise to use your musical chops when you don’t have an instrument in your hand, when your eardrums are getting a break from the ’buds, and when you’re not even listening to “actual music.” Music exists in life, and sorting it out keeps you thinking and helps you understand all the sounds in your environment. You just have to listen for clues and possibly apply a little musical deduction. Staying attentive to all the music that wafts and zips in and out of daily life keeps our ears oiled and our musical brains active.

— Jon Chappell

Take the whole notion of the Grammy Awards. Some people champion the idea of recognizing the year’s achievements in music with a primetime awards show. Some think it’s a big phony display of self-congratulatory pomp. Both camps still tune in to watch the proceedings anyway. And a survey of Grammy Award winners for any given year is a good check for gauging the musical tastes of the times.

But whether you’re happy with them as is or unhappy with them as is, this year the Grammy Awards introduced sweeping changes—and not the kind that will address any of the complaints of Grammy detractors. In 2012 NARAS (the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, a.k.a. the Recording Academy) has decided to reduce bloat by cutting significantly the number of Grammy Awards it gives out to artists and the projects that represent their collective work. In all, NARAS eliminated 31 categories, down to 78 from 109 in 2011. That’s more than a 28 percent reduction. Take a look at a side-by-side comparison of last year’s categories vs. this year’s here.

Okay, perhaps you can understand merging Best Regional Mexican and Best Tejano Album into a single category. But the complete erasure of Latin Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Hawaiian, Zydeco/Cajun, and Native American? These are important and distinct forms, whose specialization was warranted by a divergent artist and listener base. At least two involve an indigenous people’s music that America absorbed on its way to establishing its musical identity and success. We sure have a funny way of remembering our roots and showing our gratitude. And consider that one of our country’s best-known forms, blues, saw a category reduction by the combining of Traditional Blues with Contemporary Blues, forcing Joe Bonamassa to compete with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. I’d like to think that as diverse as those artists are—and their interpretations of the blues—that an American music awards show would have room for both. Just like they do for rock.

And since when is the number of Grammys a zero-sum game? In other words, how does eliminating or combining some categories serve to strengthen others, as if this were a closed system where the attentions of Native American Music will now directly transfer and benefit Americana? Americana carries a completely different connotation, one that includes the likes of Rosanne Cash, Ry Cooder, and Levon Helm. It makes absolutely no sense that voting NARAS members now have to choose between Native American music and Wilco when it comes time to hand out one award.

In a final irony, the Recording Academy announced that their 2012 Inductees into the Grammy Hall of Fame would include recordings by Big Bill Broonzy and Sergio Mendes. These two artists—a traditional country-ragtime blues guitar player and a progressive Latin jazz bandleader, respectively—would have been ineligible this year because their categories had just been cut.

 Don’t we have enough problems with a wounded economy and our arts education programs under siege without having organizations—allegedly on our own side—piling on to squeeze out the available award berths for artists? Let’s hope the Recording Academy will reconsider its decision. Billboard magazine reports that 23,00 signatures have been delivered to NARAS headquarters in protest of their action. If you too can make your voice heard, you’ll be in good company. Along with tens of thousands of petition signers, the list of supporters includes Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Palmieri, Bobby Sanabria, and Carlos Santana. Please join them in showing solidarity for the diverse categories that provide avenues of recognition for artists who otherwise wouldn’t “make the cut.” —Jon Chappell