Create Digital Music has a good Windows Vista resource: What’s Compatible for Musicians?

I have an irrational desire to upgrade to Vista. There are no real compelling reasons to and lots of good reasons to wait, but here I am all wanting it. No M-Audio drivers yet either, booooo.

I still don't have a Wii (out of stock everywhere and also I haven't tried very hard) but that hasn't stopped me from fantasizing about things to do with the accelerometer in the Wii controller.

First I came across this collection of videos of the 20 Greatest Guitar Solos. My main thought was "a little guitar solo goes a long way".

Then I watched this Wii Wiimote Ableton Live Controller video.

So here's my Wii guitar idea:

1. Strap the Wiimote to the headstock of your guitar.

2. Run your guitar through some effects, such as say, a flanger or a filter.

3. Have the Wiimote control various expressive parameters of the effects.

This way, when you pull this move:

Not only would you be looking dead sexy, you'd also be making expressive changes in your guitar sound based on the movement of the accelerometer in the Wiimote. Everybody wins!

I've read disappointing reviews but this trailer fills me with awesome hope for the Aqua Teen movie:

It was a fun show last night, thanks to The Coggs for having us and everyone for coming out. (A few pictures are here.)

In the crowd were multiple CBC Radio 3 Podcast listeners who heard my stuff the other day as well as a fellow from the open-source Jokosher project, which was sweet.

It was Jacquie in the Kitchen's farewell show and they put on a great one.

Our next (and final one before Rob leaves and we become a three-piece) show is on February 10th. We'll be playing every damn song we know and I'm still looking for an opening band.

Hey all right, the CBC Radio 3 podcast played one of my songs. Sweet!

• Live has no facility for quickly switching between songs (aka "sets") via MIDI so you have to pile them all together into one giant set (unless you want to use the mouse and keyboard to move to your next set). This means the order you perform your songs in will be fixed on whatever order you have queued up, which blows. (Unless I can think up a clever way to jump around via MIDI.)
• After thinking about it I thought the easiest way to start using Live in a live setting would be to have a fixed sequence of scenes (verse, chorus, verse 2, chorus 2, etc) which would go off without any input from the user (me), but I could hit a pedal to stay in any given scene if I wanted to pad it out, solo more, improvise, etc. But there's no "scene follow action", so you have to rig up some crazy solution via MIDI.
• By far the majority of tutorials out there are for "live looping", Kid Beyond style or DJing. I can't find much in the way of singer/songwriter tutorials or using Live inside a conventional band.
• The most commonly used technique with a midi pedal board as far as I can see is instead of triggering specific scenes you set up pedals for "next scene" and "previous scene" so that you can advance (and backtrack if needed) through the scenes. No functionality for this exists inside of Live so you have to use Bome's Midi Translator or an equivalent to simulate keystrokes when triggered via MIDI.

I think what I want to do will be possible, just takes a lot of fussing around.

Sometimes the DJs get existential:

If I manually run a filter sweep over a 16 bar loop am I a musician?

Am I still a musician if I trigger an LFO to do the whole job?

So I bought a Behringer FCB1010, it's a (cheap as hell) twelve switch, two expression MIDI foot pedal. I'm thinking I can control my laptop with it while I play guitar and sing. 

Anyway, the entire experience has been great but not because of the device itself. The manual is terrible, the factory settings don't work with Ableton Live out of the box and programming it via the foot pedals is tedious.

One of the greatest things about buying gear for me as a total nerd is when there's a thriving user community around whatever I just bought. And there's a great one around the FCB1010. Here's some of what I've found:

• There's a great Yahoo Group full of resources for it. Photos, utilities, tutorials, patches, sysex dumps, hardware mods and more.
• Hackers have made $10 replacement firmware chip for the FCB1010 that adds a lot of great functionality such as tempo tap, stomp box mode, not needing to put the device into "sysex receive mode" to transmit patches to it and more.
• There's an excellent home-brew PC Editor for programming the device.
• A great FAQ.
• Plenty of tutorials for getting the FCB working with Live.

As I was describing this, particularly the replacement firmware, a friend of mine wondered why Behringer doesn't open source their firmware. They make their money on the hardware (unlike video game consoles for instance) and are also widely criticized for ripping off other company's designs, manufacturing them cheaply and selling them at a fraction the price.

Seems to me they'd have nothing to lose by open sourcing their firmware. Hackers could add all the functionality they want, people would buy their products with the intention of tricking them out, it's free R&D that they can fold into future devices, and their nerd karma would go through the freaking roof.

Rob Cosh, friend and guitarist of Brad Sucks Live is leaving the band. There's no drama -- Rob's helping me produce my next album so we still tight. He's got his own music to do and a family and business to tend to. He was the motivational force behind me getting my ass in gear and doing the live stuff, so I owe him a huge thanks.

Rob will still be playing our two remaining dates (on January 27th and February 10th) so be sure to come out for the rock!

As for the future, he says peering into his crystal ball, I had been thinking about toning back the heavy rock and getting things to sound a bit more like my recorded stuff with the synths and the effects and the so on. Brad Sucks fans that came out tended to be a little put off by how guitary the show was and while it's been huge fun it's probably not where my heart lies. So I think I'm going to dial it back to a three piece augmented by a lot of laptop use and see how that goes.

After a year and a half of performing I'm also interested in trying out playing solo again. I love the sound and energy of a live band, but I've been watching some Ableton Live performance videos (1, 2, 3) and am inspired to try it. I ran out and bought an FCB1010, which I'll be blogging about later.

After trying to quit del.icio.us for Google Bookmarks, I'm back at del.icio.us. Here's what I liked about Google Bookmarks:

• The GMarks extension is great, with super quick posting (integrated in Firefox's CTRL-D bookmark dialog!), a nice sidebar for quick bookmark searching and a toolbar star displaying whether you've bookmarked the page you're on.
• When you search in Google your bookmarks are labelled as having been bookmarked.

What I hated about Google Bookmarks:

• Clunky weird online interface. Just... bad.
• I missed having public bookmarks. People would ask me for things and instead of saying "uh go check my audio tag in my bookmarks" I had to go look.

Now I'm looking for an extension for del.icio.us that's as good as GMarks.

So who's watching Metalocalypse?

It's the best Death Metal-themed cartoon I have ever watched.

I added a customized google search for audio recording to my customized google search page.

This one emphasizes results returned from popular message boards and recording info websites.

If I get the time I think I'll try and combine them into one, which would be more convenient. 

In anger I made this today: Audio Gear Google Search.

It's a customized Google search that emphasizes audio gear & instrument reviews.

I'm still tweaking it, if you've got any review site suggestions or feedback, let me know. I'm already pretty happy with it.

I've been jealous of Write Room for the Mac for a while but now there are two Windows (or cross-platform) clones: Dark Room and JDarkRoom. They're all stripped down full-screen text editors:

It's sort of stupid that with all the amazing multitasking and features on the average desktop that a full-screen and nearly featureless text editor seems exciting and fresh. I think it reminds me of my days writing in Telemate. (Wow, there's no Wikipedia page for Telemate.)

Too busy to blog. Got a cold. Not actually all that impressed by the iPhone or Apple TV. Maybe I would be if iTunes for Windows didn't suck a ball.

Hey, there's a Brad Sucks show coming up on the 27th of January, we're on at 9pm. BE THERE OR BE ELSEWHERE.

I'm trying out two new (to me) music stores.

Jamendo

All music on Jamendo is free to download and licensed through one of several Creative Commons licenses or the Free Art Licence, making it legal to copy and share, as well as to modify and make commercial use of for some, depending on the licence. Jamendo allows streaming of all of its thousands of albums in either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format, and downloads through the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. (via Wikipedia)

I had tried to join Jamendo a while back but the "Jamuploader" software "jammed up" and "crashed my computer". It worked this time and my album is here. Nothing in particular has happened since then. It's a very creative commons friendly site and I've received a strange amount of email mentioning this site so I thought it'd be worth checking out.

Amie Street

Amie Street is an online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown seniors in Providence, Rhode Island. Based on a demand algorithm to determine song prices, artists upload music onto the site to allow users to purchase it for whatever price the song is currently listed at. Users can also earn credit by recommending ("REC") songs to their friends. If the REC was for a good song and leads to users purchasing it, the price of the song will increase. The user will earn credit based on the increase in the price of the song after making the REC. (via Wikipedia)

I like the idea of this one though whether it will work in practice should be interesting. My page is here. Songs start free but user recommendations drive the prices up and the users who recommended the songs get kickbacks.

So far there have already been a bunch of reviews of my music and the cost of my song Fixing My Brain has rocketed up to 7 cents.

One catch: looking at the album info I see that Fixing My Brain's revenue is currently at $0.19 and there's a "storage fee remaining" of $4.81. So I guess you have to pay Amie Street five dollars before you can make any money on each individual song (which is $60 total for a 12 track album). I'd assume at such low prices very few artists pay off the storage fee (at 7 cents I'll have to sell 71 copies of Fixing My Brain to pay off its storage fee) so each semi-failed song is money right into Amie Street's pockets. I'm not sure if they take a cut after the $5 has been paid.

I would very much like a T-Qualizer shirt:

Product Features

• EL Lit Glowing Equalizer animates to ambient noise or music
• Battery Pack fits in small interior pocket inside shirt
• Each Equalizer bar reacts differently depending on sound frequency
• 4 AAA Batteries Required
• Battery pack is removable, shirt must be hand washed

Happy holidays everyone. I've had a busy but basically sweet year. Lots of live shows, the band unit really came together to a level of tightness I'm shocked to be a part of. I quit sulking and got my ass back in gear about making music again, I turned 30, I discovered a love for sushi and ultimately a dislike for paying high prices for sushi.

Thanks to everyone who helped out and was supportive of the whole Brad Sucks thang this year. All you podcasters, listeners, emailers and most especially all the people who gave me money. Man I love you guys.

Also of course a huge thanks to Brad Sucks band members Bruce, Rob, departing bassist Richard and newly-hazed bassist Matthew. I'm not a sentimental guy so I'll just say: hey what's up.

2007 looks like it'll be fun. I've got a lot of projects I've been working on that should be ready this year as well as more playing live with the hard-earned confidence and so on.

Now I have to go drink.

I went through Youtube looking for videos that used my songs and also uploaded a couple. There's a video player at the bottom in my the gallery now.

If you have or know of any others out there, send them in.

This collection of the worst album covers has some gems. On the down-side this was going to be the cover of my next album:

Back to the drawing board.