Making a Living with the L1®

Making a Living With the L1 by Cliff Henricksen

Introduction

When I was a full-time musician playing in restaurants and clubs in the early 1970's, I and everyone else doing the same were making $50-$100 a night playing in bands, 4 or 5 piece. I also played in a rock and roll duo with a big PA, singing drummer who occasionally played left-hand Rhodes bass. It was a musical circus, sounded good and we made even more money than most individually. My musical colleagues all nod in agreement to this level of income figure. It is a very good indication that live music is dramatically devalued since 1972. This makes me very sad, and it is indeed a "sad situation".

Today, club gigs pay about the same and the better or perhaps more "connected" players (the ones with long-time local connections) might get $200. Party, wedding, bar mitzvah, corporate and the like gigs will pay more, but they always have. Such gigs require production rivalling big pop concerts (including costumes, sets and big sound systems), a wide variety of musical styles and typically require pro-level performers who often are required to travel extensively. On these shows, original music is basically out of the question. In general, it's rare that a musician in 2006 can make a respectable living simply by performing music in local venues. It seems that inflation has passed most musicians by, indicating that the services of musicians have declined steadily since the 1970's. Why would this be? Here are some possible reasons:

1. Musicians have played so loud that audiences have been bludgeoned into staying away, home, going to church, going to the movies or generally seeking more pleasant entertainment.
2. The proliferation of amplified musical equipment and instruments has expanded so greatly that there is an ever-growing community of musicians who will do anything to get a gig, including playing for free. And so, the market demand for performing musicians and performing bands is totally swamped by the growing availability of bands and players. This forces wages down.
3. Musical artists, like all artists, are generally not business-minded by nature. They don't think like business people for the most part because they mostly think about music, its composition and its performance. I forget the "right brain" and "left brain" explanation of this. And so, artists and musicians in general make bad business decisions, or simply accept the wages that are offered them.
4. Triple system amplification tends to make all bands sound similar, so that any artistic excellence is lost in sonic clutter created by this. Thus, a "great" band can't really demonstrate their excellence. The triple system tends to make all bandsj playing in small to medium venues sound alike and thus it seems to lump all bands as "mediochre" or "annoying" because of excessive levels presented.
5. Most musicians today seem to have other employment, because they can't support themselves playing. This contributes to wages going down.
6. The American Federation of Musicians was once a powerful force in helping musicians acheive an honorable wage. Today it is almost nonexistant, other than for very high-profile work such as Broadway plays, symphony orchestras and movie film score work. I may even be wrong about this.
7. Bands playing original compositions seem to be doomed to a life of scraping for gigs that pay nothing, unless they have some kind of recording that is distributed by legitimate means (a "record lable", whatever this means in 2006). Popular bands playing popular music will occasionally trick an audience by inserting their original into a set. But if it is announced ("...and here's one of our original tunes..."), the audience mostly gets glassy-eyed and bored.
8. Band "creating" (or attempting to create) original music have a zillion different "music composition" software packages to choose from, many with prefabricated song "templates" in common song formats, or with sampled drum (and other instrument) loops. And so, budding artists or complete bands will use these to "create" new songs by playing them and possibly shouting or screaming lyrics without melody. My opinion is that this is not only a severe limitation on songwriting, it tends to be not-songwriting. The great, enduring songs we all love and can sing to ourselves (from Bessy Smith to Sinatra, the Beatles, Pearl Jam, Outkast, ...), I believe, started with either a story to tell or with a melody, not with a fully-produced, full-production music track that you insert your-lyric-here into. My children, some of them musicians but all of them music lovers and appreciators, complain that modern music isn't melodic or satisfying in many ways. And so, they seem to prefer music from the '60's thru the '80's. I think that instant gratification afforded by instant-songwriting packages has imposed a severe restriction on new songwriters, including a deep spiritual one. New music is the lifeblood of the musical community. Not everyone can compose, or, better, not everyone does compose, but the musical community needs new music to stay inspired and fresh, including for their audiences. I think that modern musical technologies in the form of equipment and software has spawned an unprecedentedly large community of musicians who seem to enjoy instant "success" without "doing the work".

On the other hand, here are what I believe are facts about live music:

1. Humans need music, almost like they need oxygen. They will be very unhappy without it, in general.
2. Humans respond very positively and in a fundamental way to good, soulful and touching music played live by experts with excellent-sounding equipment. Every human knows good music and good sound quality. This is easily proven by the volume of sound recordings purcahsed every day worldwide. Therefore, excellent live music is probably very valuable to most humans. I belive it is seriously undervalued.
3. From personal experience, I know that the L1 system is the first commercially-available live music concept that allows musicians to "live in the mix" that they deliver to an audience. I know as a musician that it dramatically improves any ensemble's experience onstage and it contributes dramatically to improving ensemble performance and the regularity of it. I know that with this system and expert musicians, a superior performance is both encouraged and demanded and the sonic delivery of this performance is unprecedented in its excellence.

And so, now that the system has been available for over 3 years, I believe that its use should contribute to musicians' wages if they are willing to devote the time and effort to play in tune, play correctly and serve any audience with what they want. The L1 should set any ensemble apart from any others using conventional equipment. It should also separate those who can play from those who can't, simply by exposing every note that is played, for better or for worse. It is my belief that the use of the L1 system can be a catalyst in making live amplified music in the year 2006 and beyond far more valuable that it was in 1972. And so, it must follow that musicians' wages should surpass those of 1972, only in 2006 dollars (5x or 6x higher, plus). I believe all this from my personal experience with the system, both as a player onstage and as an audience member. These experiences have been unprecedented for me personally.

With all this as an introduction and background, I will herein begin exploration on how musicians can use the L1 in their musical lives to actually make an honorable living and wage.

The L1 system and its new "toolbox" for the professional musician

The following are new tools that the L1 system gives the musical artist, that they have never had before

1. The tone you craft everywhere

• When a musician crafts an airborn tone using instrument, ToneMatch preset and L1 system, a never-before available complete and totally new musical instrument is created. The human race has never before had such an instrument. This is not a marketing-and-sales statement from the Bose Corporation. It is a statement of, in my mind, profound fact, especially for any musician to consider. Here are some examples:
  • Human voice loses volume when the distance from the singer or speaker is increased. It is crisp (sibilants) in front of the head and dull in back of the head. Sound systems for voice (using microphones) have the same characteristics of volume change, plus the vocalist or talker can't hear what his audience is hearing. This is not as much a problem for a "speaker" who is simply delivering information to an audience, as it is to a vocalist who is delivering their heart and soul to an audience. The L1 system puts both vocalist and audience in the same soundfield. The tone and level delivered is very uniform. When the vocalist understands this and accepts it, a profound change takes place in the delivery of their performance. The realization that they can live in the delivery creates a bond and connection to the audience that simply was never possible before in the history of delivering vocal to an audience. It is empowering and deeply spiritual. And from this realization comes a change in the depth of the performance. The performer digs deep and connects to their audience like never before. It's true, it's real.
  • Acoustic guitars have a familar tone, a tone we as a species have lived with and loved for many centuries. A normal acoustic or "Spanish" guitar behaves exactly like human voice: its sound level falls off rapidly (inverse square of the distance) and its tone varies depending on where you are in the audience. Certainly, the player gets a totally different tone than anyone in the audience. When an acoustic guitar, or a guitar-like instrument whose electrical signal is, is played through the L1