Posts in General
Demo fail

Looks like I'm gonna fail on getting a demo out this month. The new web design kinda ate up my Brad Sucks time, but that's no excuse. I'll have to think of an appropriately humiliating punishment.

Wolfram|Alpha

I've been so-so about the Wolfram|Alpha hype, but it finally launched and it's definitely neat. Comparing it to Google is semi-ridiculous as Google uses structured data and “facts” only as an afterthought.

The servers are taking a beating right now, but here are some queries that were interesting to me:

A lot of data I encountered is old-ish – a lot is from 2004 -- which I think says more about the crappy state of authoritative structured data than Wolfram|Alpha itself.

I think the most exciting thing about Wolfram|Alpha is that it's intriguing and useful enough that it may encourage more organizations and individuals to make their current data available and keep it up to date. Which would be a huge benefit to everyone.

Taking care of business

I'm at this weird point in my music “career” where doing it all myself is getting hard to maintain. I'm naturally cagey about involving anyone else in my stuff but it's probably time to delegate some of the things I'm not good at (booking, promotion, talking to other human beings).

I've been attending workshops put on by Live 88.5, a local radio station, and it's been helpful – mostly in that it's shown me what I don't want.

Not to bag on the panelists because it was very informative and they're all successful, but I felt like a big dumb outsider. Things I heard: “What the fuck is a twitter”, “I get my son to show me how to work Facebook”. The preferred strategy was generally:

  • Tour endlessly
  • Lose money/go into debt
  • Chase radio play
  • Wait for it to eventually become profitable

This obviously can work and that's cool, though the scale seems impractical to me.

I'm not unique in having put together a modest fanbase and income from music, and that strategy feels like a tremendous step backwards. And for what? All I can think of is the promise of fame, but sustainability's always been more attractive to me.

Last night I asked a long rambling question focusing on the Internet, but I think the larger question is: where do I find people who can help me grow from where I am, not re-start my career in some traditional way?

MOTU

After having so many live performance troubles with the M-Audio Firewire 410, I looked around for the best alternative. My research lead me to the MOTU UltraLite mk3. People referred to it as “rock solid” and I had previously heard lots of great things about MOTU hardware. There's not a lot of competition in this area for some reason. Anyway, I bought one.

Immediately I started having audio drop-outs. Firmware upgrades were involved. I filed a trouble ticket and I complained on Twitter. I read lots of posts and comments about MOTU's “legendary” bad support (which was not so legendary that I knew about it before I bought one of their products). I wound up going back tonight to have a look at my ticket's status and check this out:

 motu-sucks

Wow, ten days later and my ticket's still Unread. I mean I guess appreciate that they're up front about not caring, but maybe putting forth at least the illusion of customer service would be a better business strategy. I don't know.

TaggedFrog adds audio previewing

imageI bugged the author of (delicious/flickr style) file tagging software TaggedFrog to add support for audio file previews and v1.0.1 has it. (Make sure you grab and install Croak on the download page.) I'm also told if you need mp3 support to download the irrKlang library and place the irrKlang.NET2.0.dll file in the root folder of your TaggedFrog installation. It'll automatically enable mp3s in TaggedFrog. (It's not included due to licensing issues.)

This is a pretty great solution for Windows musicians looking for something similar to Audiofinder for the Mac. Thanks Andrei!

Brad Sucks t-shirt trouble

image From the forums, this is great:

Something funny happened to me, at my school, a teacher saw my Brad Sucks t-shirt and decided to give me a talking to. She said That my shirt is very offending to people named Brad and that i cant wear it.

As I said I mentioned in the forum thread, if anyone needs a permission slip or something, please be in touch.

Also: God I hated school.

Just. Hated.

Update: here is the permission form people requested.

State of me

I seem to Twitter more than I blog, so let me get caught up here:

  • My dog Maui was spayed Friday and is full of reflections on life without a cone collar:

    image 

    She's got 12 days to go. :(

  • I'm still slowly working on the new live show. The pace should pick up soon and maybe some shows in a month or two?
  • I tried out some LandRollers (in my living room):

    image

    I'm thinking about getting some of these to skate with the dog instead of buying a new bike (which was the original plan for this year). Only catch: I am not a skilled skater.

  • I'm also so close to being done with the new web design:

    image

    Looking forward to getting that out the door.

  • Sellout Central Episode 13 goes up tonight at midnight. The fact that I've stuck with it for 13 episodes is all thanks to my podcast generator script. Still not sure I can do the entire year though – do I really like that many songs?
Most Annoying Song Ever?

MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever:

An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.

It stretches the boundaries of what I would call a “song”, being 20 minutes long and the individual parts often have no musical relationship. It reminds me of one of those Halloween sound effects CDs but with accordion, opera rap and tuba.

The individual parts isolated often aren't that bad, but as a whole it's definitely a drag to listen to.

Simplifyin (demo)

This is a song I've had around for a very long time but I could never get the recording the way I wanted. I resolved to do the best I could with it for this month's demo and quit agonizing over it.

I'm still not very happy with the recording – getting the huge wall of sound I want without everything becoming muddy mush is rough. But the month is almost over and I'm out of time, so here it is for now:

Simplifyin (demo) [7mb MP3]

A different way to think about creative genius

I loved this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about creative genius:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

It's very inspiring and I really admire how she's reconciled her creative expectations.

A point I think is also missing from most discussions about creative genius is context. The time and culture a work is released in have a lot more to do with being considered genius than the work itself.

If I had a time machine I would travel to the past and play some electronica on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Project: Guitar with arcade buttons

For the past year I've been thinking a lot about solo guitar interfaces. One of the challenges with being a guitarist and playing solo is that both hands are almost constantly busy with the guitar and your feet are usually busy with pedals. Doesn't leave a lot of other options.

I've thought up a lot of ways the guitar as an interface could be improved or augmented and the simplest idea seems like it would be to put a bunch of easily accessible buttons in the guitar and have those buttons simulate keystrokes on my laptop. How hard could that be? Let's see.

Step one:

I ordered some Seimitsu PS-14 arcade buttons. A lot of the buttons I found were wayyyy too deep (such as these) but these ones looked like they might not go all the way through my guitar and halfway into my torso while playing.

image

I also impulse bought an Arduino. The Arduino is awesome but turning button presses into keyboard strokes isn't really its main deal. So I ordered an I-PAC VE which is dedicated entirely to simulating keyboard controls.

image 

Step two:

Months later when the I-PAC finally arrived, I wired up the buttons and the board and it all worked on the first try. I made a little cardboard stand for testing:

IMG_6072

image

But it doesn't look like there's much testing to do, it's pretty brain dead easy. I had it entering keystrokes on the computer and triggering clips in Ableton Live within minutes. Windows XP even recognized the I-PAC without any additional drivers, very nice.

Step three:

Where should the buttons go on the guitar? I put some cut-out circles on it to see where they'd fit and be most useful:

image

This is the layout I'm thinking of right now. There's a lot to take into consideration, such as:

  1. Ease of access while playing (the upper right ones seem close enough I'd be able to hit them with only a brief pause in playing)
  2. Staying away from locations where accidental hits are likely (the right side is where my arm is while playing)
  3. Making sure I don't interfere with any of the guitar's guts
  4. Keeping them far enough away from the edge that I don't weaken and collapse it

Right now I'm wondering if I should try to house the circuit board inside the guitar and run a USB cable from the guitar to my laptop or should I run the wires from the buttons to the external I-PAC which would be by the laptop? I do not know.

Polishing a turd

imageI try to stay away from idioms and other bits of faux-wisdom but one that actually stuck with me from recording/songwriting circles is “you can't polish a turd”. 

Which I always took to mean “if your song isn't any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it good”.

So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.