Monthly Archives: June 2025

Product Review: The Manhasset Music Stand

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Manhasset. The name itself comes from primordial America. It’s like something chanted out of Whitman. I could attempt to provide a potted history of the Manhasset corporation, but you’ve got Wikipedia, and besides, that stuff is boring. 

Suffice to say, if you’ve been in a school concert band program within the past 50 years, you have encountered the Manhasset. It is the black metal music stand of your dreams and/or nightmares, timeless, perfected, the music stand in its ideal form, the standard by which all others are measured. It’s the Nike of music stands. It’s so ubiquitous and quietly functional that you’ve probably not even noticed the name, an aboriginal utterance quietly embossed on its surface. 

I have owned two Manhassets in my life. The first was somehow lifted from the school bandhall and followed me through life until shortly after the pandemic, when it lost its ability to maintain its rigor when telescoped out. It especially lost the ability to hold the thick three-ring binders I preferred at that point in my semi-pro, AA-ball type music side career. I rescued this ambiguously stolen object from my parents house when I moved back home and started to cart it around to gigs. Up until its failure due to age, it succeeded at its primary task, though it was a beast to transport. This mostly comes from its heavy metal construction. It’s not a single piece of molded metal but it presents that way. The tripartite base is particularly claw-like and dangerous to car interiors, unprotected ankles, and smaller petlife. It doesn’t collapse. It doesn’t have a case. It’s a belligerent metal sculpture. You have to adapt to it. 

But because of its somewhat destructive presence in my car, I started down the consumerist road of collapsible or foldable or otherwise more easily transportable music stands. This is one of Satan’s rabbit holes. If the Manhasset is the music stand perfected, all of the more easily transportable music stands are essentially garbage, if we define garbage as that which fails at its primary task and also quickly breaks. One might actually be grateful for the quick and easy breakage of these stands given how terrible they are, but still, frustrating. 

The worst offender here is the kind where the platform that ostensibly holds the sheet music itself folds up like a kind of fan. The construction is flimsy. What gives out before anything is the gripability of the various wing nuts. I have been told that I am a bit too aggressive with my bolt/nut/pickle jar tightening. This comes from being the child of a drummer, where the Grip of Death is the one true path. But even if I’m being rather gentle, they just don’t hold up to any serious tightening over time. And then there is the music platform itself, which somehow fails at holding single sheets of music as well as binders or anything with any kind of heft. Plus if you sneeze in their direction the whole thing comes crashing down. I’ve seen child-made Lego contraptions with more structural integrity than these things. 

After going through more than one, each time getting more and more robust in my purchases, I have settled on a two-part music stand, where the music sheet platform itself is one solid piece of detachable metal. This allows the base itself to be a larger metal tube tripod to support that weight. It’s more robust all around, and so far I have not broken it. But it barely satisfies my transportation needs. True, since the base is a foldable tripod I’m not sending dachshunds to the pet ER anymore, but now it’s the metal platter, like an alien TV tray, lying in wait to maim. I’ve got a scar still on my ankle from a midnight tumble. Also, as the platter falls it doesn’t just dent but seems to sharpen, so I’m inadvertently creating a kind of postmodern, primitive weapon. The shield that cuts. 

I got a second Manhasset to keep at the house. There’s nothing as satisfying as its quiet mastery of the simple act of holding sheet music where you can read it. It’s as good as the old one, though I do notice that the metal is not as heavy. It’s somehow less dense. I’ve heard people complain (okay, old dudes) that the metal used today in products is not the same quality as “old metal.” I usually disregard this. Obviously there is some metaphorical narcissism happening. Plus I don’t really care. If the metal has changed, there’s probably a reason. For instance, they don’t finish guitars with nitrocellulose lacquer anymore. The guitar companies use polyurethane. Of course all the old dudes like the old way, because it looks cooler, it ages in ways we like, and the wood sounds better. It — ahem — breathes better. Is this last part BS? Probably. Unverifiable nostalgia, the worst kind. I’m not trying to be that way with respect to Manhasset metal, but it does feel different, less grandfatherly strong, more like millennial strong. But it works. And nothing quite stays the same, despite our wishes. Perhaps this means it wouldn’t tear up the inside of my car as aggressively, but I’m not willing to try it out. I’ll keep my modern sculpture inside the house, thank you. 

The days of wine and roses

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In general I find the “Days” that cycle through the calendar to be overwrought, commercialized, too much but not enough. Along with occasions for commerce and brunch, they seem to be occasions for disappointment. If you love someone, nothing you do on Valentine’s Day will ever be commensurate with that love. Likewise, if you appreciate your mother or your father, no amount of cards ever does them justice. Perhaps the notion of doing justice, that kind of rigorous accounting, is a foolish idea. I shouldn’t be so literal. It’s the gesture that’s important. It’s a synecdoche for all that gratitude, a gesture toward their storm of support and devotion, roiling constantly over the plains. 

For the record, I do still give and receive cards and flowers, etc. I am not that much of a bummer. I’m just working through some ideas. 

Parenthood is one of those totalizing experiences that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve entered it, and even then it’s mystifying. All my pre-parenthood thoughts on what it must be like seem inadequate for the actual lived experience, its mixture of obligation and emotion. The grip and slog of it, Raymond Carver called it. “Slog” is a little harsh and doesn’t apply universally, except for perhaps daily school lunch prep. I imagine that parenthood is like war; you don’t know what it’s like, and how you’ll handle it, until you’re actually in it. I say this as someone who has never served in war, would likely draft dodge as fast as humanly possible, and failing this, get shot within a half an hour of combat. Welcome home, kids!

There are two pertinent parenthood related statements that I think are useful to keep in mind. The first is from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series, here rendered in project-appropriate all caps: 

FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE

I didn’t read this statement until I was already a father of several years, and I was chastened. It’s one of those statements I’ve thought of Sharpieing onto my forearm for daily reference. 

My internet friend Tom MacWright has created a site where you can download these Truisms to use as iPhone backgrounds. Plus, it’s a great resource to scroll through Holzer’s series of provocative statements. 

The second statement was something I overheard. I don’t remember the source. “What all parents want for their children is safety and happiness — in that order.”

I repeat this to my children often. I don’t mean to imply that all parent/child conflict springs from this chronology, but it’s surely the source of most of it. 

Finally, you’re a parent every day. It’s nice to have a day of rest and relaxation, of communal appreciation, but the condition is permanent. There are no days off. That’s what makes it so difficult, so different. What constitutes actual good parenting or bad parenting is too diffuse and complicated to think about here, and besides, everyone’s family is different. What strikes some people as charmingly eccentric might strike me as threateningly unstable. In between the peaks and valleys, the manias and doldrums, is the glue of the mundane, footsteps through the hall, how one comes into the house after work, the emotional temperature of the soccer commute, humming in the kitchen, the homework of domesticity. Like glue, it’s invisible when dry, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, holding everything together. I feel — at least today I feel — that this glue is what truly defines parenthood, in both directions, coming and going.

That’s the other bit about becoming a parent: you step into the river.

Are these statements a kind of advice? I’m afraid so. I am a father after all. If you talk with me long enough, even if you’re a grown-up stranger, I’ll nudge a plate of vegetables in your direction and check the reliability of your seatbelt. See, once you cross over, there’s no going back. 

How to use a microphone

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First, speak into the microphone. Don’t speak in the general neighborhood of the microphone. Get up on that thing. Eat the microphone. It is not a snake. Yes, true, there is a phenomenon called the “proximity effect” so that when you get closer to the microphone there is more bass to whatever is going into the microphone, but this is higher math and not our concern. Perhaps it’s because I sound like a tin can when I talk/sing, but I always enjoy the proximity effect. I need it. I relish it. But still, if this is something you’re worried about, then you’re a more advanced student. Proceed to the honors class and let us know how you did on that AP exam at the end of the year. 

The reason that you want to get up on that thing is because it’s a lot easier to amplify a strong signal. It’s a matter of how strong the signal is going in, how high the gain is set on the microphone, and how loud the volume is leaving the mains. I realize I am mixing some terms here so I will try to clarify. The signal here is your voice, duh. Gain is a concept I don’t fully understand, still at this late date, but the best way I know how to describe it is the hotness of the front end. How hot the mic is, basically. The trick is to use as much gain as you can stand before feedback, a term we will address momentarily. Volume is just volume, but the sound coming out the back end, or the true end, or the speakers pointed to the audience. These are your “mains” in your public address system. And that leads me to . . . 

Figure out where the sound is coming out. There is going to be at least one place where the sound of your voice comes out, the primary speaker or speakers that point at the audience, those mains mentioned above. It helps to know where the sound is coming out because you need to listen to your voice as it’s amplified, because it’s going to change. It’s going to sound different at the other end of the portal. One key lesson is that whenever you amplify an acoustic phenomenon, its attributes change. Sorry. It’s a pain but this is reality. An acoustic guitar is a good example. Amplify it how you will, a magnetic soundhole pickup, a piezo bridgeplate transducer, a Neumann KM84 at the neck joint, it’s not going to sound the same out front. It might sound better! But probably not. Sure, there are people on the internet who have the solution, which they will sell you or at least lecture you about in the comments. More power to them. I am going to grant their expertise, but they ain’t on my gig and are of little use to me when the sweat hits. 

The other place your voice could be coming out, depending on the circumstances, is through one or more of the monitors. These exist so that you can hear yourself better. A couple of my favs rather famously don’t use monitors (Leo Kottke, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings). You only need enough monitor to hear yourself. There is a whole internet cult out there of in-ear monitors — headphones, basically — but I treat these people like Scientologists. They are advanced and evangelical, and I am just a poor lapsed protestant from the south and thus sticking to the old-fashioned brimstone I understand. 

Have a soundcheck. If you’re giving a speech, you probably don’t have time for an actual sound check, so instead use a word or phrase. “Good evening” is a good one. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Don’t say, “Is this thing on?” Don’t be a goober. Don’t slap the mic. Don’t say “testing” if you aren’t literally doing a pre-show sound check test. Just say something innocuously introductory and if you can’t hear yourself or if people can’t hear you, it will become apparent. Adjust accordingly. See above re speaking into the mic. But the point is to listen to how you sound as an amplified voice. Taste that cake you’re baking. 

Stay behind the mains. General audio reinforcement ignorance and cheeseball preachers everywhere have convinced innocent everyday people that when speaking into a microphone they can walk anywhere they want with impunity. This is a mistake. That speaker is somewhere, and you need to know where it is. This is also brought about by the invention of the wireless and/or headset microphone. Like automatically dispensing paper towels in the airport, these seem like a good idea, but they don’t work. They just make a mess of everything. Stay behind the podium where you belong. Get your steps in some other way.

Understand feedback. It’s not something you get in your one-on-one. It’s not something you get from your therapist or your partner. I hate how “feedback” has gone from the audio sphere to the interpersonal relationship sphere because now no one knows what it actually is, so when the squealing starts everyone acts all surprised. Feedback is when the signal (your voice, that guitar chord, whatever) comes out of one of the speakers and gets back into the microphone. The portal forms a loop; the sound feeds back into the transducer. It’s when sound becomes postmodern, when it becomes recursive, when the mold starts growing on mold, and what it sounds like often is a high-pitched industrial keening and everyone in the audience immediately clutches their ears and assumes the tornado position. 

True, there are many different types of feedback and some can be musical, but I am not Hendrix and neither are you, and besides we’re talking about microphones, and feedback here is not your friend. When it feeds back it means you’re too loud. So the question is where are you too loud and what speaker is getting frisky with the microphones. This is why you only need your monitors loud enough so that you can hear yourself clearly, not so the grandparents three blocks away can hear you, and it’s why you need your mains to be in front of the microphones. 

Practice what you are going to say. My minimal but still valuable experience suggests that there is no such thing in life as improvisation; it’s all just accrued practice. If it’s difficult to speak extemporaneously to a small group of close friends, it’s even more so in a roomful of slightly inebriated strangers. Have a plan. Practice what you’re going to say. Remember that brevity is your friend. Everyone you’ve ever seen who talked into a microphone and sounded spontaneous and at ease practiced that speech beforehand. I realize it’s tedious, but it’s the only move that works. No amount of positive visualization will suffice. Actually say out loud what you plan to say later on the mic. Do it more than once. No one is born just knowing how to do a backflip. 

The other thing is that a microphone amplifies more than just the volume of your voice. Any hesitation, stutter, lisp, gargle, bungled word, mispronounced name, voice crack, vocal fry, tongue tie, sudden loss of vocabulary, spontaneous stormfront of uncertainty — any type of friction, like the smallest loose grains of spilt salt on a granite countertop, become magnified in that microphone. Plus your own voice sounds weird. Who is this hick overhead? It’s you, friend. 

People get weird on microphones. There is the kind of person, often drunk, who thinks they are god’s gift to microphones, and if they get on one during or after your gig, say a prayer and cut the power. These people often curse on the mic. It’s my conservative belief that unless you are a stand-up comedian doing a show where people have paid to hear you talk, don’t curse on the microphone. It’s not that I disagree with cursing, I enjoy a well-deployed profanity, it’s that it doesn’t work. It’s not usually effective as a means of emphasis. It’s like lighting a candle with a bazooka. But everyone attempts it now. Just last week I was playing a birthday party and some dude got on the mic to give a toast and out came the big ducks. Fellas, no one wants to hear you strain like that. 

And ladies, no one wants to hear you scream. Or, if you prefer, go wooo!