Thanks to everyone who came out to the CD release party on Friday. Nice to see you all, let's do that again sometime. Here's the fourth (and title) track off the new album, which, if you did not know, you can get here.
Guess who's got a new album out? That's right, it's this guy. And probably other people. Click the cover art to check it out and possibly buy it:
It's called Guess Who's a Mess. Ten songs of kinda loud uptempo stuff. I think it's about dealing with people's expectations. It should be on iTunes soon.
The CD release party is tonight at Zaphod Beeblebrox in Ottawa. I'll be on CBC radio today at 3 to say some things with my mouth.
Thanks to everybody for their patience and help and support while I struggled through the production of this record and my other records and my whole life. Here's the latest song I posted to Youtube:
Creep me on Twitter if you require further updates.
I did an interview on 9to5 (dot cc): http://9to5.cc/scott/2012/10/23/a-chat-with-brad-sucks/
And also an interview on the Music Manumit podcast:
http://www.musicmanumit.com/2012/10/brad-sucks-121022-music-manumit-podcast.html
Here's the first track off the new album:
Hey hey. You can now pre-order my new album through this website. It'll be out November 2nd and then up on iTunes and Amazon and whatever else shortly after.
Also there's still a record release party happening.
The new album will be out November 2nd. There'll be a release party:
There's this book I did an interview for years ago called The Indie Band Survival Guide. They just released a second edition:
I haven't read this new edition yet but the first was pretty good even if I do say so myself.
Welp, the album's off to mastering. What a needlessly awful process that was (spoiler: all my fault). Maybe one day I'll write up all the things I learned but for now my priority is to move on and keep some guilt-free momentum going. I'm excited to not take four years to make my next thing. So there are some shows booked. I'll have an official release date (spoiler: November 2nd) and all that jazz sometime soon. I'm working on new songs and I'm not sure what I'll do with them yet. Slow and steady wins the race.
Also: my buddy JB who runs Songfight! had a 40th birthday recently. A bunch of us did covers of his songs as a birthday surprise. I covered What We Need More of is Science (original is here.)
Hi everyone. I figured I'd jinx myself by saying the album's coming along nicely. A total of eight tracks will be ready for mixing by the end of next week. Right now I'm focusing on how great it will be when I don't have to think about it anymore. Mmmm, that'll be sooo excellent.
I don't know when it'll be out though. I've gotta start thinking about promotion. At this point I'm tempted to just throw the record online, call it a day and move on but everyone says that's unwise. We'll see.
What are you guys working on?
Here's a question. Someone emailed me and asked me:
Also this is off topic, but if you have any suggestions on where to host an internet radio station please send those as well, as right now we are using a host that will not allow us to do anything live.
But I don't know anything about internet radio stations. Anyone know the answer?
I'm trying out a contest on 99designs.com for Guess Who's a Mess's album art. If you're a designer, feel free to have at it. If you're not, you can still enjoy these goofy photos of me as a kid I included in the design brief:
That was a Michael Jackson Thriller FM transmitter microphone. So you could sing through your stereo. Also an all-black Thriller jacket. The cabbage patch doll was not mine. I had sparkly socks too but I'm not wearing them here.
Atari 2600 and a Texas Instruments 99/4a, my first (borrowed) computer. All I did was type Basic programs into it. I had no cartridges so I'd lose whatever I had typed in when I turned it off.
Math tells me I'm eight years old here. Update: ken and my mom disagree. I was seven and the eighth candle was "one to grow on". Embarrassing.
Sulking at my sister's birthday party (reason: too much attention for her, not enough attention for me.)
A few years later. Lanpar IBM PC, my first official computer. It had a 20 meg hard drive and ran at 4mhz. Later I found out it had a "turbo" mode which doubled the speed to 8mhz.
Also visible: terrible, boxy first mouse, Gravis Joystick, collection of Sierra games and my entire California Raisins collection.
Update: Contest's over. Unfortunately it was not a success. There were lots of entries but nothing I could actually see using so I'm still on the hunt. Thanks to everyone who entered, sorry I'm so picky.
There wasn't a lot of exciting software at the NAMM music trade show this year and it made me wonder: why are recording software manufacturers being so slow to add Internet collaboration features?
Anyone will tell you that we're in an Internet indie music golden age but popular recording tools barely recognize the Internet exists for anything more than patch updates. Cloud services have come to the most mainstream services (email, calendar, music, photos, contacts) but recording software has barely made a move in that direction.
There are so many ways the Internet could improve software like Pro Tools, Reaper, Reason, Logic and Ableton Live -- easy collaboration, cloud backups, portability (easily access your audio data on your iPad & iPhone), revision tracking, quick in-software purchasing of samples/plugins/devices, preset sharing and hands-on lessons to name a few off the top of my head.
And it makes business sense for the companies. By making the Internet an integrated part of the recording software companies could get their customers into a subscription model instead of this weird yearly upgrade cycle and they’d be free to roll out & market new features any time, distribution and copy protection would be easier, companies could gather metrics on performance to improve the software & stamp out bugs, you could demo and sell features, samples, presets, plugins and lessons to your customers, sell iPad/iPhone/Android apps to work with your cloud data, etc, etc.
I feel Ableton Live and Reason are uniquely positioned for success in this area. They’re largely MIDI, sample and loop based so they’d use less bandwidth to sync. Plus their interfaces are already very modular -- selling new devices and features and packs wouldn’t require much redesign.
My suspicion right now is that Ableton (who haven’t released a major new version of Live since January 2009) is working on a full rewrite and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t include a lot more Internet. But whoever it is, someone’s going to make a move and then all the other players will have to play catch up.
George emailed me to say:
I wanted to ask your opinion on what you think computers could do to make it easier for musicians to create and perform music.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to blog two of my replies:
Collaboration: There's a lot of opportunity right now for better creative tools. The biggest feature missing from all the major Digital Audio Workstations is semi-realtime collaboration (realtime is probably asking too much until the net gets better). I was just bugging Justin at Reaper about that the other day. Maybe ohmstudio (http://www.ohmstudio.com/) will fill the collaboration role but I think it's a feature every DAW should have within a few years.
Songwriting: For a long time I've been fantasizing about rapid songwriting software. Something analogous to a lot of the more creative, less technical software for screenwriters. The software could prompt the songwriter for sections, melodies and riffs and keep them cataloged. It'd let you easily rearrange the structure and experiment, organize your notes & ideas and help you generate new ideas. Throw a good rhyming dictionary in there, a markov chain generator for lyrics, etc. So a musician can quickly hammer out a bunch of song ideas and flesh them out without spending much time dicking around in software. I should be able to write and record an entire song with a guitar, microphone and foot pedal to control the software.
And that's the tooth.
I turned 35 yesterday. Luckily I had a flu also so it's all uphill from here. I've decided to get my mid-life crisis over with before 40, so I'm off the antidepressants, in two types of therapy and I hired a personal trainer. While it wasn't a disaster, I'm not interested in doing the next 35 the same way I did the first. So I'm trying to put some work in on that.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes, I really appreciate it.
Hey. my music's being used in this cool AirCassette iPhone app:
I threw all my bags of tapes out long ago but I still have have an emotional connection to some of the cassette designs.
Last night I stumbled across Joan Jett's "Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)" song which I had never heard before (it's great!). I watched the video, saw Joan Jett in a bikini (weird!), and then discovered the song was originally by Gary Glitter. All I knew about Gary Glitter was that he made KLF's Doctorin' the Tardis song possible and that he gets thrown out of countries for raping children. Anyway what I'm saying is that in this context, holy shit this video of Gary Glitter performing "Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)" is the most psycho thing ever:
I mean that's like a musical number in a movie about a horrifying child rapist. Who looks and is named exactly like Gary Glitter.
Anyway I'm conflicted because the song and performance is bad-ass and I feel like a Gary Glitter fan now.
Hey everybody. I accidentally did a show a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty informal. A nice person came all the way from Hungary to see it which was a little nerve-wracking. It went fine though, thank you for coming (if you did). I've been just plain working on my album. Growing a beard. Trying to drink sensibly. Also: playing some video games here and there. Arkham City comes out next week. I might be too busy to play it, how sad is that. Seriously how sad for me are you right now tell me.
I keep thinking of writing about recording the album because they say you should keep your 'online presence' going but that's so fucking boring. Does anyone really want to read that? "I've been re-recording all the basslines." Oh kick ass, Brad. "I'm enjoying playing bass more." Awesome, awesome! I'd rather talk about my awesome dog Rufus:
Just look at that fuckin' guy. What a dude.
But I'm getting restless, which I think is a nice sign. I really want the album to be done so I can move on. I have all these fantasies about how creative I'm going to be when this is over and I'm not working on the same batch of songs anymore. How I shouldn't wait so long between albums anymore. That all my fussing is really only mildly improving the songs. I should be more spontaneous! I should be more like Prince!
But I also want to obsess over every part of it forever until the end of time. I know that my restlessness will overcome my perfectionism soon though and that, my friends, is how babies are born.
[My new nephew Crue (as in Motley).]
You don't get asked to be made an uncle, someone just makes you one.
I'm still using Reaper as my main DAW and I still love it. I'm hacking away at the next album with it. Reaper 4 should be released shortly as they're up to Release Candidate 4 as of this posting. Here are some of my favorite things in v4:
- ReaEQ - They added a live spectrograph to the EQ, which was a feature other EQs (like the one in logic) made me want.
- Selecting chunks of audio in the media explorer is pretty sweet when you have compatible VSTis. You can preview an audio file and select a section from the waveform and drag it right into the plugin or timeline. Very handy.
- Midi Track Controls (ReaControlMIDI) - I'm not actually sure if this was in v3 but I know I was trying to get a weird midi controller to control the tracks long ago and had no luck. This makes it easy.
- Project Bay - Now you can see and manage all the effects and media you're using in your project.
- Screensets - save and recall Reaper window layouts easily. Nice.
Here are some things I am not fond of:
- The default theme is too dark and the color coding of tracks is really hard to see. I was finding it really tough to organize my projects so that I knew what was going on at a glance. So I switched back to the v3 theme, which is OK for now.
- The Media Explorer is slow on my Mac. Hopping between files with the cursor keys is weirdly slow. This was never a thing on Windows.
And here's my wish list:
- I'd like a simple multi-sampler. A Battery-style 'pad' sampler would be my preference. Setting up many tracks of ReaSamplOmatic5000 is cumbersome.
- Some metadata/search in the Media Explorer would be great. I have a ton of samples kicking around but if they're not easily at hand.
- Workflow improvements - Reaper is already so far ahead of the competition in functionality that I think it'd benefit from some time spent on its usability. While it's awesome that each pulldown and context menu and preference page are overstuffed with cool options, it can be overwhelming. And I'm a pretty huge nerd so I assume the less techy out there go into cardiac arrest at the sight of it.
Anyway, great job Reaper team.