David Morrison—Musician

The Glimmer Blinkken—Rudi Proves It

2012-01-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

The Glimmer Blinkken

Rudi Proves It

Off Minor, Dubuque, IA, Oct. 2011

Ben Eagle: vocal, guitar

Elizabeth Roberts: keyboard

Bob Bucko, Jr.: saxophone

Jon Eagle: drums

David Morrison: bass

A Ukulele Tune at Monk's Kaffee Pub

2011-09-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

This was recorded at Controlled Chaos, the open mic I help host every week at Monk's Kaffee Pub in Dubuque. It's an old Bigamy Sisters number, off the album Tigris Embassy, which never was released.

Tales From the Rat Palace and Other Ruix Writings

2011-09-08T00:57:00.000-07:00

Rather than reproduce them here, I think I'll just post links to my columns for ruix, Dubuque's underground music & arts monthly. Here are the first four in my monthly Tales From the Rat Palace series:

Illustration by Ivonne Simmonds

And here are a couple of miscellaneous pieces:

Review: Toy, by David Bowie

Profile: Zane Merritt: What the Hell is an Ethude?

Illustration by Katie Duffy

One thing that's especially nice about writing for ruix is having my pieces beautifully illustrated by Dubuque artists like Katie Duffy and Ivonne Simmonds.

The Rat Palace End-Of-Summer Roundup

2011-08-31T02:21:00.000-07:00

As usual, I've got several irons in the fire here at the Rat Palace. I'll try to shape this tangle of projects, some under sail, some still speculative, into a coherent report.

We're coming into the home stretch on the Legal Fingers album, which is going to be a killer swath of who-gives-a-fuck rock & roll. I tried a few new techniques in my quest to get the best, biggest sound I could out of a power trio: splitting the guitar and running it through two different amps for a fat stereo sound, putting mics on both the tweeter and woofer on the bass amp, plus running a direct signal, for a bass sound big enough to be worhty of Handsome Dave Hanson. I'm liking the results so far. When it comes time to mix and master, I'll be doing a lot of listening to the best-sounding rock albums I can find. I'll post links here when the tracks are done.

I also recorded an album of avant-garde electric guitar/trumpet duets by Zane Merritt and Ben Drury. That was a blast, a fun change of pace from the usual process of meticulously assembling a multitrack recording. I just set up the mics, turned on the recorder and those guys were off and outta there, playing a bunch of wackitude that was a pleasure to behold. They're going to call the album Cactopus, which I think is hilarious. Despite its extreme noncommerciality, I hope it gets a real release, 'cause I dig it.

Work still continues, of course, on my magnum opus pop collaboration with Bob Bucko, Jr., The Elegant Gesture of the Drowned, but we've pushed back touring plans until the spring. We want the album to be the best we can make it, and if it's taking a little longer than we thought, that's okay. I'm very excited about the contributions of some of my favorite musicians. Jon Eagle laid down some slamming drum tracks, alma sub rosa's Kristina will be sweetening the mix with her exquisite voice, my friend Matt Walkin (of Leeds, England's Johnson House) laid down some elegant bass lines, and trumpeter Ben Drury will bring a little jazz into the mix.

The Glimmer Blinkken is making headway on its debut album, a quirky dance party festooned with musical oddities of peculiar splendour. I'm pleased to be laying down the bass lines and shepherding the album along in between fishing outings,.

Speaking of alma sub rosa, I'm waysupervery stoked to be laying down bass tracks tracks alongside the supple and yet kickass beats of the mighty Tim Connelly for ASR's sophomore album.

I've been talking to a couple of other acts about doing some sessions and between the Glimmer Blinkken, alma sub rosa and the different permutations of my solo act, I have a number of gigs coming up in the next few weeks.

Welcome to my world. Here at the Rat Palace, there is Chaos and there is Order and one cannot always tell the one from the other. I have a column to write for ruix, like, um, yesterday, and I need to scoop up Reg & Brewster and get them back into their cage before they chew through any mic cables, so I think that's enough for now.

On The Spot, All Stripped Down

2011-07-17T23:17:00.000-07:00

As we move into the final stage of recording The Elegant Gesture of the Drowned, my collaboration with Bob Bucko, Jr., several of the songs are at the point where they're mostly finished but sometimes feels like they need... something. But what?

One way to take the measure of a song is to strip it down to its essence. If it works with just a guitar and a voice, it's a keeper. That's what I've done here, with On The Spot, a song Bob & I wrote together. The album version is fairly epic but I wanted to see how it stood up in skeletal form. I'm hoping that this version will help me ascertain what is essential to the song, what needs to be in the foreground, what can be jettisoned.

Multitrack recording is a process of constant recalibration. You zoom in to the details, zoom out to the overall effect... you can get whiplash and lose your way. That's why it can be helpful to get back to basics. The chords, the melody, the words, the rhythm... those are the crucial components. The rest is just window dressing.

All Kinds Of Wrong Is Available at Bandcamp.com

2011-07-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

I really like the way bandcamp.com is structured. It's flexible in terms of whether and how much you want to charge for your albums and/or tracks, it allows for the listener to choose the audio format they like and it's easy to organize your catalog. I hope their revenue model proves feasible.

I'm in the process of using it to make all my recordings available. I just uploaded my 2006 collaboration with Jeromy Barber: All Kinds Of Wrong. You can download it for free, or pay any amount you like.

We were living in Nacogdoches, Texas at the time, which is not a real hub for snarky surrealist songwriters. (I'm not saying people weren't good to us there... they were.) I think we made good use of our location in this little promotional film. It's got all our friends in it and lots of east Texas local color.

Gig Tonight at Monk's

2011-07-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 9:00 I'll be opening for pezzettino at Monk's Kaffee Pub. This will be the last time for a long time that I will perform solo with the acoustic guitar. I'll be performing Landlocked in its entirety and selling the last few copies.

Landlocked, btw, is now available as a download at bandcamp, for whatever price you care to pay, or at no cost.

TALES FROM THE RAT PALACE #1

2011-06-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

(Note, this is the first of my monthly columns for ruix, Dubuque's music/art/lit 'zine.)

Within these hallowed, moldy halls, you will find useful and unvarnished information pertaining to the lifestyle and philosophy of a musician scraping out an existence in this age of Everything Is Magically Free. We’ll talk about performing, recording, business, cheap food and, of course, rats—who are way smart and have a lot to teach us, like how to eat like a king in Manhattan on a musician’s budget.

THIS MONTH’S RECORDING CONCEPT: STUDIO HYGIENE

I’m old enough to remember spending hundreds of dollars just on reels of tape, so it’s a financial and technical relief that recording technology has come so far down in price and is now so kick ass that anyone with the skill can record a masterpiece in their barn for a couple hundred bucks. Despite the numbing cultural overproduction it has engendered, it’s a beautiful thing. Eager musicians, however, tend to ignore the “with the skill” part of recording their watermark album, and while recording is not particle physics, it ain’t making nachos, either. There is a lot to learn, and it requires the sort of orderly, methodical thought which is uncharacteristic of musicians, who tend to live in a pulsing stream of feelings, impressions, urges, riffs, and rambling conversations that carry them over a waterfall of cheap beer onto the rocks of underachievement, usually ending up with dental problems and a rich catalog of unfortunate intimacies.

How then can we introduce some focus into the recording process? One of my guiding principles is STUDIO HYGIENE. Let’s start with a very simple practice: organize your stuff. In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Life is relentless!” The first thing we must do to beat back the tide of entropy is to have our gear organized, to know where everything is, to even know what we have so we won’t buy another one we don’t need. As we strive to write and record a song that even our parents will have to admit is fiendishly catchy, or just fiendish, there is a force of darkness that hampers us, that drags us down. In the recording studio and on the stage, that force has an unmistakable signature. It is . . . the BLACK SPAGHETTI.

Reg, official corporate mascot of the Rat Palace, contemplates the evil Black Spaghetti.

The Black Spaghetti is not your friend. It eats Signal Paths. It trips you up and makes you spill beer into the bells of saxophones. It keeps you from knowing why things make the wrong noise, or why they don’t make a noise at all. Although it grows like kudzu wherever musicians congregate, you must not give in to it. Do you know how to coil a cable? It’s not easy to explain but I can tell you what not to do. Don’t fold your arm into a “V” and wrench it tightly around your elbow. You coil a cord into a circle and you do it gently. The best way I have heard it described is, “Let it go the way it wants to go.” And yes, you need some velcro cable ties. Don’t go tightening it into a figure eight with a little belt at the middle. Cables are made of wire filaments. Be nice to the little metal wires, because they carry the electrical impulses that speakers convert into the stuff we call music.

Studio Hygiene is a principle we can apply not only to the materials, but to the process of recording. One example is pitch. Those awesome words to your song, did you know that they correspond to notes that can be played on any melodic instrument? Let’s say you’re in the recording studio and you’re singing in the headphones with your eyes closed, really getting into it, and when you take the cans off, you notice that your bandmates look kinda less than blown away. You know the look: evasive and squirmy. Or, at least, I know that look.

Barring catastrophic halitosis, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re having pitch problems. One way to improve your pitch is to know what note you’re supposedly singing. Can you play the melody of your song on an instrument, any instrument? Not the chords, the melody. Just learning to do that will improve your awareness of the notes as you sing them.

In short, studio hygiene is about being conscious of what we are doing, doing it efficiently and doing it accurately. It has nothing to do with inspiration and it in no way squelches your muse. Singing the right note, getting rid of that annoying ground buzz in your amp, not stripping out the threads on mic stands by cra-a-a-a-nking them while they are tightened; none of these things will impair your creative process. But they will help you when it comes time to document it.

THIS MONTH’S MOMENT OF MUSICAL SPLENDOR: KONRAD @ CONTROLLED CHAOS

A lot of strange and glorious things happen at Controlled Chaos, the open mic that Ben Eagle & I host every Wednesday at Monk’s. As an unrepentant beatnik, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it’s a way-out scene, daddio. Unfortunately, we’ve recently had to revert to 21 & up because we don’t have the staff to babysit all the minors who were hanging out in the parking lot and on the steps with suspicious backpacks and pop bottles, which is a quick way to lose your liquor license and tank your scene. It was only a few ruffians who loused it up for the rest of the kids, so I want to spotlight a younger player who added a lot to the proceedings.

Yes, it is very dark in the basement at Monk's.

Konrad Peddicord came down almost every week, toting an array of djembes, miscellaneous hand drums, and, always, a positive attitude. Sometimes he played by himself, sometimes with friends, but he was always willing to jam with anybody. I played with him lots of times and he was always fun, looking for the groove in the madness, finding the flow. I’ve heard his playing get better and better over the last year or so. He plays new beats, and I can tell he’s been practicing.

Last week he came with his friend Keith Kemler. Together they’re called Jambi Jam. Keith plays mostly guitar but sometimes he plays didgeridoo, which I think goes well with Konrad’s tribal beats. You can check out a clip of Jambi Jam playing at Controlled Chaos on May 25, on youtube. Find him on facebook and see where he’s playing. Tell him David sent you.

THIS MONTH’S BITCHIN’ RAMEN: NONG SHIM SHIN RAMYUN NOODLE SOUP (GOURMET SPICY)

As any musician will tell you, ramen is the staff of life. Here’s the deal: your Nissin, your Top Ramen, your Maruchan? All the ones you get at the white-people grocery store? They’re not happening, man. Those are like the Hootie and the Blowfish of ramen. Yes, they’re six for a dollar, but they’re still not worth it. There’s a whole world of ramen out there. You want to go where the people whose people who invented ramen get their ramen. And it ain’t Hy-Vee. In Dubuque, it’s the Asian grocery, next door to the Asian Gourmet, on 11th St., across from the downtown library.

The last time I bought 20 packages of ramen there, the aged gentleman who dozes behind the dusty counter roused himself from his twilight reverie long enough to give me meticulous instructions about cooking them. He said that I should boil them, then drain that water off and replace it with fresh water, because the preservatives are toxic, which is a bold statement to make about a product you’re selling. His wife, always endearingly cranky, clucked and harrumphed at us. “Don’t listen to him,” she said, shoving my bag at me. “He’s crazy! The FDA checks all that!”

Yeah, maybe.

Anyway, I hope so, because that’s too many cooking steps for me. I buy ramen so I won’t have to think too hard while I’m in that room with the refrigerator.

Nong Shim’s Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup (GOURMET SPICY) is both gourmet and spicy. This is so far beyond your typical minute-ramen that you’re in another noodleverse. If the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a Flying Ramen Monster, this might be the ramen He would choose to incarnate. The noodles taste like real noodles and the sauce is delicious, but it is spicy. And I mean Asian-spicy, not Old El Paso brand pretend-spicy. I did not drain it after boiling and so far have experienced no detectable nerve damage.

If you have any questions or comments, drop me a line below. See you next month: same rat time, same rat channel.

David Morrison is a musician in Dubuque, Iowa. He plays in lots of bands and runs Rat Palace Recording.

House of Snakes: Driftin' Blues

2011-04-02T23:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a track from my blues group:

House of Snakes: Driftin' Blues

Ben Eagle: guitar
David Morrison: drums & vocals
John Psaros: bass
Dave Young: harmonica

A Rat Palace production.

My Recording Philosophy

2011-03-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

My recording philosophy is pretty simple. I think the most important aspects of a recording are the sonic events it captures. The job of an engineer is to capture the sound as accurately and unobtrusively as possible with the equipment at hand. The role of a producer is to encourage the best performance, bearing in mind that many musicians are not used to hearing themselves with the detail the recording process can offer. In my low-budget studio I'm about equally producer and engineer.

My recipe for a successful recording is simple:

The instrument or voice sounds good.
The performance is good.
You use a decent mic and recording gear.
Levels (signal-to-noise ratio) is good; not too faint, no clipping.

And that's about it. If you've got all those elements in place, recording is easy. Of course, this simple list puts me in mind of a quote from Johann Sebastian Bach: "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

See, my goal is to capture the work of musicians. That makes me decidedly old-fashioned in today's music world. Most recording these days is dragging .wav files around with a mouse and running them through plug-ins.

You could say I look at recording as something like photographing artwork, whereas most recording these days is more like playing around in Photoshop. I think we're losing the distinction between collage and composition. I like playing in Photoshop as much as the next guy, but I don't think applying the fish eye lens to to the Mona Lisa makes me Michelangelo. I have tremendous respect for Brian Eno, who pioneered the use of the recording studio as an instrument, but most people playing with recording software are not Brian Eno.

But I digress. I was saying that when the performance is good, recording is not rocket science. Sure, you do need to know a little about the physics of sound and the technology used to capture it, but the relevant material is easier to grasp than say, college chemistry.

I just read an article about the recording of Donald Fagen's album Morph the Cat. Whether or not Donald Fagen is your cup of tea, everyone agrees that his albums are about as well-recorded as anything out there. (I like a lot less upper mids in my recordings than he favors, but that's just a matter of taste.) This article said they used very little EQ and compression. Not only that, they used one Shure SM57 on the snare and an AKG D112 on the kick... the same budget mic's I use. They have pre-amps, facny boards, ribbon mic's for the horns & other stuff I could never afford, but basically, they used the same simple approach I've described.

I haven't said much about mixing, which is a more subjective and complex process than recording, but my philosophy is the same. Here's a tip. Always record with flat EQ. Don't use compression unless there's no other way to keep from clipping or dropping out. When it's time to mix, do the whole thing flat. Only after you've got the best mix you can get, without using EQ, should you cut (not boost) moderately (no more than 6 db) here & there, as needed, not to color the sound but to individuate the sounds from each other. Boosting is a last resort. Ditto compression. You should never be able to detect the presence of compression; it's the most overused signal processing device these days—yes, even more than auto-tune—and it ruins many otherwise fine recordings. If your steak tastes good, don't put ketchup on it.

Sometimes mastering people will over-compress recordings by default because they figure most people want their stuff to sound like everybody else's stuff. If you have your recording mastered, do not let them add a bunch of EQ or any audible compression during mastering without checking it out. Tell them you want the compression to be transparent. Insist on A/B'ing your untreated mix vs. whatever they do to it. If you can hear the compression, make them dial it back. A properly compressed mixed should sound a little more "hot" or "live," not squashed.

Anyway, there's my little spiel about recording. If you choose to record at Rat Palace, you'll know where I'm coming from. If your music is heavily sample-based and you want to map everything in midi, run beat detective on the drums and pitch-correct everything, I'm probably not the guy for your project. But if you're excited about the music you're singing and playing and you want to capture that magic, I'd like to think I can be of help.

-Dave

Landlocked

2011-03-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

Last year I recorded a mostly acoustic album. Landlocked consisted of my original songs, some songs by friends and a couple of radically reworked traditional tunes.

I then immediately got involved in other projects and quit playing solo acoustic shows, 'cause I'm really good at follow-through like that. But all of a sudden I got bored with being a singer-songwriter with a guitar. I'm more interested in the things I'm doing now, all of which involve collaboration with interesting and talented people. It also probably didn't help that I chose to use a photo that made me look, as my friend John Hawkins said, "like a disgruntled drifter."

Anyway, my favorite track off this neglected stepchild of an album is a fairly radical reworking of the old English ballad Black is the Color (Of My True Love's Hair). Music school nerds may allow me the grandiosity of claiming that the introduction of a new melodic motif and the extended harmonic palette reflect my obsession with Benjamin Britten's folk song settings.

Black Is The Color (Of My True Love's Hair) (128kbps, 4.24 MB)

The album is available all over the innernets and the price varies widely. The cheapest place to get a physical CD is cdbaby. The best download site is bandcamp.com, where you can pay any amount you like and get the best-sounding files. You can also get it through iTunes, Napster and I don't know where all else. I'm sure it's out there for free but since I already have a copy I never listen to, I won't be hunting for it.

Wrapping Up The Kerosene Circuit Sessions

2011-02-25T16:35:00.000-08:00

Had the Kerosene Circuit boys over tonight (I guess Erin was working) to put the final tweaks on the mixes for their 6-song EP. I am very pleased with the sound we got and happy to have helped with their debut recording. I learned a few new things about complimentary EQ, mixing their awesome wall of guitars and trying to keep the drums snappy in a very mid-rangey environment.

Does this guy have any idea what he's doing?

They kindly said they don't mind if I share an mp3. I really like the arrangement of this song and I think I did a pretty good job of capturing and polishing it. They're sending it off to be mastered and I'm curious to hear what that will do to the sound.

Kerosene Circuit: Try As I May (128 kbps, 3.41 MB)

Preview from "The Elegant Gesture of the Drowned"

2011-02-21T17:48:00.000-08:00

As promised, here is a track from my upcoming release with Bob Bucko, Jr.

The Shallows (320kbps, 5.08 MB)

A Rat Palace Production.

From the Vault: Birthday Cake by the Clydes

2011-02-21T13:03:00.000-08:00

From 2005 to 2008 I lived in tiny Nacogdoches, Texas, where I learned an important lesson: there are insanely talented people in every nook and cranny of the world. Cue Rod Serling. A case in point...

I met Melinda Dock down at a Mexican restaurant where I went to open mic every week. (I met quite a few other people there, but I'll get to them in the future.) The first song I heard her sing was Skip James' Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, which scored big points in my book, but her own songs were tremendous, too.

As we got to know each other, I dragged her into my apartment/recording studio and we made a demo of some of her songs. I found her to be one of the most instinctively musical people I have ever met. She is, for example, the only person I have ever met who instantly grasped how audio compression worked and how to use it judiciously. As a singer, her pitch, timing and timbre were impeccable from the first take.

Dave & Mel—Austin, 2008

We played some shows and moved to Austin, where we hoped to form a band and all that, but life got in the way and now we live thousands of miles apart and I haven't heard from her in ages. The recordings we made never did find a home in the industry or garner Mel the attention I still believe she deserves. I haven't given up on those songs, though—they're at the top of my long list of projects to finish. My working title for the album is One Day Maybe.

Anyway, the track I'm uploading here doesn't feature Mel's singing. (I'm not releasing any of that stuff until I add the drums and have it properly mixed & mastered.) This is an instrumental number we developed together, a dreamy soundscape called Birthday Cake. It's good late-night music, a strange mood piece featuring some pretty out-there guitars.

Hope you dig it.

The Clydes: Birthday Cake (320 kbps, 9.47MB)

Melinda Dock: acoustic guitar.
David Morrison: electric guitars, bass
Arranged by Dock/Morrison
Engineering: Morrison
Mixing: Dock/Morrison
© 2007 Melinda Dock & David Morrison
Contact davidmorrisonmusic@gmail.com
A Rat Palace production.

--------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: Duh, I completely forgot we have a myspace account where you can hear Mel sing: myspace.com/theclydes

Current Projects

2011-02-20T21:57:00.001-08:00

So I've decided to keep this blog in order to have some paltry way of announcing whatever gigs or recording projects I've got going on. I've created a separate blog for Rat Palace Recording, my recording studio, where I record both paying clients and whatever group s I'm in at the moment.

Here's the rundown on my current activities:

Just finished recording Dubuque hard rockers Kerosene Circuit at Rat Palace. I'm proud of the work we did; their EP is going to be way smokin'.
I'm still co-hosting Controlled Chaos at Monk's Kaffee Pub every Wednesday night with Bob Bucko, Jr., and Ben Eagle, my bandmates from the Glimmer Blinkken. This is not your ordinary open mic—it's more of a playground for all kinds of crazy musicians—as you will see if you check out some of the wackitude on the youtube channel I created to document the happenings there, like for instance this jam with Elizabeth Roberts (keyboards), Ben Eagle (guitar & vocal), Ben Drury (trumpet), Zane Merritt (guitar) & yours truly (drums).

Alma Sub Rosa, wherein I play bass, is taking a break from gigging fro a few months while Kristina has a baby. In the meantime, we'll be recording the follow up to Lemon Pusher at Rat Palace. We had a great gig at the Lift in Dubuque on Feb. 12th and that sent us off onto our recording sabbatical in high spirits.
The Glimmer Blinkken (me: bass) will be playing out again starting in March. (I forget exacly when & where but I'll post it later.) We're burrowing deep into the Rat Palace, making a strange document that will surely please those who like their rock & roll refracted through psychedelic fairy tales.
Bob Bucko, Jr. & yours truly are about 2/3 of the way through Rat Palace sessions on an album I am very excited about. We have no working title for the act and we are only just beginning to assemble a group to play it when we get through, but I'm not worried about any of the details, because our musical collaboration has been so incredibly fertile. We should've done this long ago. We've played out a couple of times, notably at the Mill in Iowa City, where we had a great time and were warmly received, but we're focusing mostly on finishing up the album..
And, since I really need one more thing to do, I've formed a blues band, so I can play drums on the kind of classic blues I love so well. (Think 50's & 60's Junior Wells, Jimmy Reed-type stuff, not Blues Hammer.) House of Snakes is finishing up an EP (guess where) and I hope we'll be out shuffling the night away before too long.

I'm probably forgetting a couple of things, but what the hell, I blogged, dammit. I have to let the world know about all this cool stuff somehow.

Welcome To The Rat Palace

2011-02-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

This is Reg, the official mascot of Rat Palace Recording, contemplating the Black Spaghetti. He welcomes you to this blog, wherein pretty soon I will commence with writing about the various bands I'm recording and have done in the past.