David Michael Ross Interview

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MICHAEL ROSS FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

DM) Is your music more improvised or written?

DR) Almost everything is written, in the sense that I start with chordal arrangements, developed on acoustic guitar. The exception to this is "Islands of the Mind", which originated in the early '70's when I was experimenting with tape (delay) loops. Nowadays you can get the same effects, without noise, using a Lexicon Jamman. At that point, I plugged the output of a Korg mini-synth into a couple of tape decks and started tapping on the white keys.

Of course, anybody who's heard my music would know that I get into improvising. I like to generate structures, which I can overlay with "improv" stuff, like working hard and then taking a long vacation. I can criticize this, however, since my improvisation has mainly just been tonal. I'd hope to do more structural and rhythmic variations in the future.

DM) Do you ever improvise a song that you wish you had recorded and then try to duplicate it later?

DR) Very frequently, and I'm frustrated by the number of songs which have gone into oblivion because I can't remember them. Not usually chords, but rather the rhythmical structure. I've started recording ideas lately so that I don't forget.

DM) What technology do you use to make your music?

DR) "Midnight to Dawn" was recorded with an ADAT, an Alesis Quadrasynth, a Yamaha FX-500 and not much else. With "Guitaro," I added an Audiomedia III sound card, Quadraverb, BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer, Digitech vocalizer, J.L. Cooper Datasync and Nexus, 133 MHz PC, HP 6020i CD recorder, Alesis AI-1 and Boss GX-700 (guitar processor) and DR-5 (drums).

Since my last CD, I've acquired a 200 MHz PC with Jaz drive, a second ADAT, Korg 168RC Soundlink, and Lexicon Vortex. I've also written a program in Visual C++ to do some wave-file manipulation, and have created a few tracks with it. I hope I can use all the features I've put in: repeat a wave track's contents in a new file, as many times as desired, with varying tempo, amplitude and pan; concatenate two files in similar manner; and gate one monophonic channel as a function of another.

DM) How did you learn to use the equipment?

DR) Oh, I had played with recording equipment since 1963, and had a Teac 4-track recorder in the late '70's, a primitive rhythm box in the early '80's. A lot of my education is on a basic level. I was an Aviation Electronics technician in the Navy, I have a degree in Physics, and I also do technical number-crunching things with computers for pay. So I'm rather used to doing digital sampling and data transfer. I still haven't gotten proficient at MIDI, or synthesizing waveforms. My nephew Aaron, who has a release on DMR Diversions (as "Dr. Yo"), is much better at those aspects.

DM) Do you two work together?

DR) We communicate mainly via e-mail. Aaron advised me to do the MPEG CDs as HTML structures; designed the cover for "E=MP3", and his own album "The Alchemist's Dream." The cover for "Guitaro" could be considered a collaboration between Aaron, my brother and me. This all pretty much gets done as e-mail, with attachments of various sorts. I'd like to do some recording with Aaron, but it's pretty difficult since we live 300 miles apart. He thinks we're also somewhat musically separated, but I think we'll eventually record something together. I recently sent him a CD-ROM with some music in Session format, which he uses almost exclusively.

DM) What style of music would you classify yours as?

DR) I've reserved the right to diversify from the beginning. A lot of what I compose seems pretty retro, but then music with more than three chords, or brass arrangements, or with romantic inclinations, would have to sound a little retro. I'm working on a tune which seems like swing/jazz/rock. Then, my programmed music has a totally different sound, too. I have a piece by Haydn on "Guitaro", light pop music, garage rock, progressive rock, a Tex-Mex Sci-Fi humorous ballad, "All Around This World" (which was a Grateful Dead tune... they played it acoustic, I played it like old-time rock, with electric guitar, piano, and organ solo). I suppose I fit somewhere in the "pop" genre, since I don't play heavy music consistently and usually have fairly rigid chordarrangements.

DM) What's the story behind the "Browser Barbarians" CD?

DR) I was downloading a lot of MPEG-2 files from IUMA and starting to fill up my hard disk. About the same time, I acquired my CD recorder, so it was natural to offload all those files onto a CD-ROM. It also occurred to me that a lot of people would like to have a disc like that, and I was able to get 128 full-length songs on the CD-ROM. I started talking to Aaron about how to go about such a project. My first inclination was to write a C++ program to access the audio, but he correctly advised me to do an HTML structure on the CD. Next, I had to figure out how to do multi-session with CD audio on one session, HTML and MPEG-2 on the other. EZ-CD Pro will do this as an automatic process, but you get maximum (not total) readability of CD-ROM drives by leaving the audio session open, then close it as CD-ROM XA. There were a lot of things going on in parallel. My brother Gary in Kansas City took on the cover art, as well as the HTML construction, while I was getting people to contribute music, making MPEG-2 files, and juggling the CD/MPEG audio proportions. The final product had about 36 minutes of CD audio, and 3 1/2 hours of MPEG-2 audio. Everybody thought it was a great idea, but the sales have fallen flat. "Music & Computers" magazine did a feature on it, about 1/4 page, but they have since gone out of business. I surmise there is plenty of music on the 'Net to download for free, if you want that kind of music experience and can wait to download it. Also, even though there was some fine music on the disc, there were no "name" performers. I sent about 320 copies to radio stations around the U.S., but haven't received much in the way of feedback. "Browser" can be bought at CD Baby, and I'll send free copies to radio stations and reviewers. Since then, I've done two other MPEG CD compilations. The second was "Main Site", which was all instrumental music and contained Winamp/Macamp software for playing the MPEG-3 audio. "Main Site" also had about four hours of music total, but a greater amount of CD audio (about 56 minutes). The third MPEG CD is "E=MP3", with the '3' superscript. It's folk/pop/rock, mainly lighter music, but with some heavy music by the likes of Jeremy Morris, Pet the Pig! and New Jerusalem. There are over seven hours of music on it, 105 songs total. Finally, I'm working on a "Classical" MPEG CD, to be available in December 1998. It has some great Ridgecrest musicians, as well as other performers from the U.S. and Bulgaria. Sergio Cervetti, whose music appears in "Natural Born Killers", and also Angela Tosheva, an awesome Bulgarian pianist. I'm trying to get a piece to play on it, the first part of "Gymnopedie" by Erik Satie.

DM) Do you feel that this (MPEG CDs) will be the wave of the future?

DR) I think compressed music is here to stay, and that there are some definite limits as to what can be done compression-wise. Of course, the standard CD format is wonderful, but I'd think there will be some people doing similar MPEG CD projects, eventually. All I've done so far is do compilations. One of the contributors to "Browser", The Rub, was interested in doing an MPEG CD of their own. Of course, you have to have a LOT of material before this becomes meaningful. I have other ideas: books on CD (you could probably get ATLAS SHRUGGED on one with room to spare); entire festivals and concerts (I made a pitch to the Olympia Experimental Music Festival); and I'll be doing an MPEG CD with my name on it this winter, and it will contain some new recordings as well as different recordings of earlier releases; tons of cover tunes; and extended-length recordings of experimental music. It's too bad the Beatles didn't do their anthologies as MPEG CDs. They could have sold more copies, and saved the public money as well!