I'm working on a top secret project. It's totally top secret. And also a ways off (there is a lot of work to do.) Anyway here's a leaked photo:

Who knows what I could be up to.

I'm not much of a keyboard player. I started writing music on the computer tapping notes into trackers with the computer keyboard. I also have a shitty right arm that wigs out when I play keyboards. So I've wound up trying a variety of different MIDI keyboards and for the most part they sit beside me and I put papers and junk on top of them and then avoid using them because I'm too lazy to clean them off. So I wind up playing basic sequences in with the computer keyboard. Enter the inexpensive, tiny Korg Nano Series.

I snapped these up when I read about them, thinking they'd come in handy for live performances (I'm not optimistic enough to think I'll write music away from my office) but when I got them home I realized they solve at least part of my MIDI keyboard problem. Now I keep them on a shelf under my desk and pull them out whenever I need them.

The Kontrol and Pad are great - simple and effective and relatively sturdy. I've tried many different drum pads over the years and the nanoPad is actually my favorite, which is surprising for such an inexpensive device. The nanoKey is the most dodgy, but also the one I've used the most, so it can't be that bad. The keys feel exactly like (kind of cheap) laptop keys. It has the same weak/wobbly spring feeling. I'm not looking for sweet action, but it would be awesome if they felt slightly more crisp - something comparable to a child's plastic keyboard would be fine.

My only other complaint isn't Korg's fault (I think) - the nature of these devices is that I want to plug them in as I need them, swapping them out at will. But all the audio software I've tried with needs to restart (or at least reset the audio device) each time I plug in or unplug a device. Minor thing I know.

All in all, they're very useful tools and I'm happy to have 'em.

Update (3/4/11): My Nanopad randomly died and in researching fixes that seems to be an epidemic. So I wouldn't bother. The Akai LP line seems to be more durable and that's likely what I'll switch to.

Been hacking around trying to get some nifty synced visualization stuff going. Best (and cheapest) visualization seems to be Milkdrop in Winamp, so I got it responding to MIDI signals sent from Ableton Live on another machine. Here's a quick demo:

I'd like to be able to trigger video clips next, then I'm not sure about combining them all onto one display and swapping between them.

Anyone out there know much about syncing visualizations & lights to Ableton Live? I have a totally top secret project I'm working on and it requires some eye candy. I'm up to my eyeballs in reading about DMX controllers and video DJ software and there has to be a simpler way…

Over the weekend I developed something described as a blister on my left eyeball and wound up in the hospital for a little bit. It seems to be clearing up but I hope you all had a better time this weekend than I did.

So I failed again with the monthly demo. My excuse: it's been a stupid crazy busy month and I'm addressing the problem, since I can't seem to keep up anymore. It's not an awful problem to have but it's uncool.

Anyway, I need to make myself pay for my failure, so here's two humiliatingly incomplete things you can listen to.

#1: Every now and then people ask me to make intro music for their shows or whatever. Then their shows get cancelled or do not air. Amber MacArthur asked me to do one last year and the show was immediately disintegrated. Here's the thing I wrote for her:

Intro Music for the Damned [1.6 MB]

#2: Ben and I have been working on the two-person Brad Sucks live show for a while but are bringing a drummer in now. To help him out with practicing on his own we recorded the live set in my office. Direct-in, one take and at very low volume. Here are some embarrassing clips from that:

Crappy Live Clips [4 MB]

Neither are mixed worth a whatever, etc, etc, etc.

I've been busy lately re-doing my “studio” (aka office). First thing was to get a new desk (out with the Jerker, in with the Galant). After that it was an Eina night stand and a Galant drawer unit. The most recent thing has been building my own acoustic panels to deaden the sound in here a bit for better mixing and recording:

I had researched acoustic panels a bunch and there was a ton of conflicting information out there. It wasn't until I found this great how-to that it seemed approachable. The big issue for me was that the rigid fiberglass Americans use is Owens Corning 703 or 705 and figuring out what the equivalent was up here in Canada was difficult. (Turns out it's OFI 48).

After locating the right rigid fiberglass, I found some black muslin fabric and cut up some plywood I had laying around. I've made two panels so far – the second one is far uglier than the first because I am not skilled, but both of them provide a startling amount of sound dampening. I've been making non-sound nerds speak against my regular wall and then into the panels and they've been shocked at the difference even if they don't care about acoustics.

I'm going to build a few bass traps for behind my monitors and then a few free-standing panels I can move around and use for whatever and then I should be good for a while.

Yep, this is awesome:

Well, I made it to episode 30 of Sellout Central. That's 30 weeks, 210 days. And I think I'm going to take a little break. It's been fun but a surprising amount of work to do -- the podcast script I wrote made assembling the episodes easy, but the real work of course was in tracking down new music. Which is great on one hand as it forced me to go out and find stuff I liked, but on the other hand it's exhausting. I got shit to do.

It was also an experiment to see what would happen if I kept at a regular podcast week after week so it was reliable. 30 weeks later, it's clear: the audience peaked early on and has slowly declined, so I'm not feeling it's the best use of my time. But I'll let the episodes sit around for a while and maybe I'll get back to it after a while.

July demo: Waste of TV [5 MB]

This is track #7 on the little album I've been slowly putting demos up for. Also as a bonus experiment, there's an album page and a tentative title for it now: Guess Who's a Mess.

I'm not sure what else to do with that page, anyone have any ideas?

The obvious one everyone suggests to me is funding/donations or pre-orders. I'm iffy on that. Mostly I don't want to owe anyone anything creatively (aka I may flake out). And the money I'd get isn't going to make or break the production so it feels pointless.

So what's left? Attention and collaboration/contributions?

Finally got around to adding a radial email address finder to my Mappy Email Signup app. Mappy Email lets visitors/fans select their locations on a map and save their email addresses. So you can contact them only when you're in the area (which is more polite). It's basically an open source Eventful.com that doesn't hang all your contacts up in a third party.

The new version finally has a page (/admin/) where you can specify a radius (in kilometers), click the map and see all the email addresses that are within that area. So you can paste them into whatever mailing list app you're using.

The other day David Weinberger approached me with an idea: what if he bought album downloads from me in bulk so that he could give them away? It was interesting but I was sceptical – I'm already giving away the music for free, why would anyone care?

So we agreed on a bulk price, I rigged up a special download link he could distribute and he twittered and blogged it:

I'm trying an experiment with a business model I like to call a reverse referral fee. Here's how it works…

You click on a link that lets you download a copy of Brad Sucks' latest album, Out of It. The album of wonderful music is yours for free in every sense. (Share it! Please!) But, I'm going to pay Brad for each copy downloaded, at a bulk rate he and I have agreed on.

To my surprise it got a fair amount of attention (aka free word-of-mouth advertising). Many people thanked him for buying them the album, I got a lot of mentions on Twitter that I wouldn't have ordinarily. The 50 copies were all downloaded within about an hour, but it's pretty clear more than 50 people got introduced to my music. Plus David paid me so I made out like gangbusters.

What is there to learn from this? I'm not sure. It's clear that the reaction was much larger than if David had said “go download Brad's free album, it's free and anyone can go get it whenever”. Saying that money was changing hands on behalf of their download definitely got people's attention and created a small viral chain reaction.

David thinks this could be a viable option for super-patrons and that I should offer it as an option. What do you think?

I got some requests for the Steamshovel Harry music, so here's the theme + vocals and the anthem:

• Steamshovel Harry [4.8 MB MP3]
• Earth's Planetary Anthem [2.4 MB MP3]

My buddy Allen was working on a game called Steamshovel Harry and I wrote some music and forced my crappy autotuned vocals into it. I had never written an anthem before, so that was pretty fun. Warning: it will haunt you.

Update: By popular request, I've posted the music from the game.

Tonight's my first show since the crappy Denver one in November and my first since breaking up the previous live band. As I've mentioned, the last band setup was super fun and a great learning experience, but I got a lot of comments/complaints that it didn't sound much like my albums (it was a harder rock sound) and I wasn't sure what to do about that.

After taking a break, I decided to simplify and hooked up with a local guitar wizard named Ben and I've been pretty happy with the sound in rehearsals. It's the laptop doing bass/drums/noise, Ben on acoustic/electric guitar and background vocals and myself on electric guitar and vocals.

I've been pretty bummed out about a lot of the sound and technical issues at the last batch of shows I did, so I'm hopeful doing a show in my little hometown will be a nice baby step. We will see!

Update: It all went well technically, was a bit awkward. I'm trying not to be too demoralized.

Welp, Michael Jackson died. What can you even say about that? Like many, he was a hero of mine and then he was kind of a monster. It was probably a good learning experience to have to reconcile those two things at a young age. It's hard for me to feel sad that he died since the guy was clearly in nearly constant emotional pain. Also he maybe molested children.

Anyway, here's me in March 1985 dressed up as him:

That's me in my Michael Jackson Thriller jacket (in black – though I wanted the red and black one), a glitter glove (in red, I wanted white like Michael had), a Michael Jackson microphone that I can't find the name of (“Mr. Microphone”?) – it transmitted your voice to an FM radio station so your voice would come out of the stereo.

And I can't tell from the crappy quality of the photo if those are my sparkly Michael Jackson socks. Once I wore them ice skating and my feet went numb as the glitter material cut off my circulation. I remember sitting in an arena penalty box, crying as an older kid helped me pry off my skates, revealing my sparkly white Michael Jackson socks. She wasn't impressed.

June demo: This Meeting [4 MB].

I've been rearranging my office/studio place here with one of the goals being to achieve better quality recordings and mixes. Unfortunately I'm only half done so it's actually worse in here right now. Gotta get me some acoustic foam.

So I failed at finishing a demo for May and I resolved to find an embarrassing enough apology cover to do. Here's a rough cover of Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis and the News (but originally by Exile) to show you I'm sorry. Thanks to Ben for help with the guitars and bass. Heart and Soul (cover) [6.3 MB]

I actually recorded it at the same BPM as the original so it was supposed to sync with the Huey Lewis video. But I can't get it to work and I'm sick of it.

Update: I can't embed it due to "a copyright claim by EMI" but here's the video synced with my cover.

Update #2:

Reaper 3 came out a little while ago and I've mentioned that I'm experimenting with switching to it from Cubase. So far I can't imagine going back to Cubase. Some of the things I like:

• It's fast and small. While the 4.4MB installer file size is great, it's the responsiveness and quick loading time that are truly awesome. Cubase feels bloated and slow after using Reaper, as do most DAWs.
• Powerful. The amount of features in it are ridiculous. You may have to hunt for the options, but 99% of the time it's there.
• I haven't had it crash on me yet.
• It's fully customizable. I feel like I can trick it out as much as I want. From themes to keyboard shortcuts to actions, you can make it your own.
• Frequent useful updates. Unlike Cubase's usual “launch buggy, gradually patch those bugs and save any useful new features for the next version you have to pay for” you actually get an amazing amount of updates and improvements.
• An active community and approachable developers. Reasonable or good ideas get implemented quickly, developers are responsive in the forums, lots of people were helpful when I was flailing around in “I'm used to Cubase!” land.
• It plays nice with dual monitors. HOORAY.
• Quick search of VST plugins.
• I don't feel locked in. Project files are in plain text, you can export your stuff easily. You can move your preferences around easily.

Some things I don't like so much:

• There are so many options that new (and/or less tech-savvy) users will likely feel overwhelmed hunting down the right checkboxes to get the behavior they expect. It's awesome that it's so customizable, but I'd love to see them pick some more universal up-front options and move a lot of the tweaks to a Firefox about:config style interface or just an .ini file.
• A lot of the comping/audio behavior doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The logic behind which items play and which don't when they overlay each other on the same track still confuses me, so I try and avoid it. Comping generally works but lacks the precision of Cubase or Logic.
• Unlike versions 1 and 2, Reaper 3 doesn't have my song Making Me Nervous as the default project. :( :(

Anyway, it's been good and I recommend trying it out. There's an un-crippled evaluation version so you've got nothing to lose.

Here is a nerdy data complaint:

Earlier this year the Ottawa Police announced they would be publishing daily crime data via CrimeReports.com, it's a nice searchable interface using Google Maps. I loved the idea and thought it was fantastic that citizens had an easy way to search and view this data.

Fast-forward a few months and I had some ideas I wanted to try with the public crime data. I hunted around for a way to access the data in a usable format or at least an RSS feed, but there were none that I could find. I looked into scraping the data from CrimeReports.com and that was non-trivial. CrimeReports.com offers emailed crime reports (blegh) and here's what their Frequently Asked Questions page says on the matter:

How can users access crime information for their areas of interest?
CrimeReports.com is a community-facing Web application, and as such, emphasizes the user experience. A CrimeReports.com user simply enters an address of interest (home, office, school, etc.) and clicks on "Get Report" to see criminal activity in a given area on an easy-to-use map interface. The CrimeReports.com Web application also integrates data from multiple agencies into a single interface and offers automated, location-based alerting services.

Which to me is code for “CrimeReports.com would rather lock-in the data, and as such, not help potential competitors.”

Finally, I contacted the Ottawa Police and asked if there's a way for regular folks to access the daily data they're providing to CrimeReports.com. They pointed me to the weekly reports (which look like this, and would be usable with some parsing). Only problem: these have been discontinued in 2009 in favor of sending all the data to CrimeReports.com. They said there's no public feed for that data and that I'd need to make a Freedom of Information request.

So we have a situation here where the Ottawa crime data has been moved to a site that's easier for 99% of citizens to access and understand, but the data is locked up in a third-party website and inaccessible to anyone who wants to do some serious work with it. Which to me is a huge step backwards.