Zachary builds guitars out of IKEA table tops:

Awesome. IKEA should really sell these guitars. (via ikea hacker)

I'm releasing the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store.

It's a tidied up version of the DRM-free digital download store I use in my store. I made it for myself but realized this was something most artists could use so I give it to you internet.

Please post feedback/bug reports/troubles here or in my forums. 

Oh yeah and I frigging went dog-sledding yesterday:

How legit is that?

Update: Very legit.

I made this Space Invaders themed poster for our gig last weekend. While I was stuck here in -20 weather it went to LA:

Here it is hanging out with a statue of Charlie Chaplin.

Here it is with Woody Woodpecker, totally qualifying for an admission discount.

Here it is hanging out with Michael Jackson's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame even though I warned it not to.

Frank Sinatra. Classier company.

Marilyn Monroe, ooh la la!

Here's my gig poster hanging out with Shirley Temple's foot and hand imprints.

Oh no, Godzilla!

I understand my gig poster was trying to hail a cab at this point.

My gig poster paid this man a dollar to hang out. Money well spent.

Hooray, I have a digital music store now! You can buy DRM-free Brad Sucks tracks in high quality 192k MP3, OGG or FLAC formats. You can also buy my entire album in whichever format you like with the album art and lyrics included. Buy buy buy! I still feel strongly that people sharing my songs is vital to me as a musician, so I have no plans to stop giving my music away for free. But it's clear that many people want to pay for high quality versions of my songs and I'd like to avoid the middle-man and DRM and offer that directly if I can.

formats

Do people really care about audio file quality? I'm skeptical. But maybe digital purchases will act as a donation "with benefits".

I'm also not sure if anyone really cares about OGG or FLAC formats. I get emails asking for them, but we'll see. I could add other formats as well (WAV?) if there's any demand. I'll give it some time and see what's what.

the nerdy stuff

I wrote the store myself. It runs off Amazon S3 (for cheap and healthy bandwidth) and the Paypal shopping cart. A bunch of PHP and MySQL later and kapow. I stole the play button layout from Scott Andrew's store because everything he makes is pretty.

There are probably bugs, so please forgive me. I will fix them as soon as I hear about them.

I'm also considering packaging this whole sucker up so other artists can use it to inexpensively host and manage their own digital stores. Any kind of file would fit in there, not just music.

If you've got any feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Can I say that Paypal has the slowest, most poorly organized and frustrating website of all time? Because I just did. I'm basically at swear level 8 at this point.

A while back I thought it would be cool to install one of those LED belt buckles in my guitar. And now my dream has finally become reality:

It was easier to do than I thought. Take one slightly abused guitar:

Take one LED belt buckle:

Flip the LED belt buckle over and there's a piece jutting out that's supposed to go into your belt:

Drill a hole in your guitar (not too big or the buckle will flop around):

Push the belt buckle into the hole.

Video:

It's pretty sturdy but I'll probably tie it to my guitar strap hook to make sure it stays attached to the guitar if it falls out. Also I may install a switch so I don't have to pull it out to turn it on and off.

Scott's got a new music store. I'm jealous, setting up something like this has been on my to-do list for months. The options seem to be PayLoadz and E-Junkie. Any others out there?

Update: Oh yeah I forgot about Kagi's Digital Download Service.

John Buckman has the details on putting Magnatune streams into your Second Life land. This is a great idea. Users get royalty free music for their lands, Magnatune gets promotion. Very cool. 

Something I was thinking of: is there an easy way to stream podcasts into Second Life lands? That'd be another huge source of royalty free audio and would be pretty interesting. Virtual radio stations.

There were some great replies to my CDM question about configuring a laptop for live performance. The best stuff:

• Autoruns - I hadn't heard of this program but I'll certainly be using it from now on. You can monitor and alter your loaded drivers, DLLs, services, startup programs and much much more. Great stuff.
• MusicXP.net - This site has a lot of great tuning techniques for audio.
• XPLite - I mentioned this in my question along with nLite but one person recommended XPLite.
• Process Explorer - I've been using Process Explorer for at least a year now and it's fantastic, I can't go back to the default Windows XP task manager.
• Process Monitor - I haven't tried this one but it looks useful.

And there's this awesome tip from art:

Ableton Live custom windows interface

When I use Live in a live environment, I run it as a ‘Custom user interface’ or ’shell’ in Windows XP Professional. Basically what this is if you aren’t familiar with it, is replacing Explorer with Live as a shell. This means there is no desktop environment, no taskbar, no start menu, no applets running, etc.

There are many advantages to this when using Live - improved stability, free memory, improved performance, etc. The disadvantage is you lose a practical way to multi-task. (But who needs multi-tasking when you only need to run Live live?)

To accomplish this in Windows XP Pro, type ‘gpedit.msc’ in the run command. This brings up the ‘Group Policy Editor’. Under ‘User Configuration’ / ‘Administrative Templates’ / ‘System’, there is a setting called ‘Custom user interface’. By default this setting is ‘Not Configured’ (meaning Explorer).

If you select ‘Enabled’ and type in the path to Live (or any application), Windows will boot into Live upon startup without anything else running.

You must include parenthesis if the path to Live contains spaces - ex. “C:\Program Files\Ableton\Live x.xx\Program\Live x.xx.exe”.

Restart computer!

If you do the above & wish to change the setting back, just hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager, hit New Task (Run), type ‘gpedit.msc’ and change the setting back to ‘Not Configured’. Restart and you’re back to Explorer. If you use a sound device that requires an applet to be running all the time, then I don’t really know what your success will be. I used to use an Emagic EMI USB card that installed itself as a system service and always ran at boot-up. I never had any problems running Live as a shell. If you decide to give it a shot, it won’t mess up your system in any way. If for instance you enable this setting & the path or program is not found upon boot-up, Windows$ will load the default Explorer shell.

Hardcore! This is an awesome tip and the sort of thing I was looking for. I used to use Litestep and some other Explorer shell replacements so I know how bulky just having Explorer running is. And pointless if all you're doing is running one program.

I do wonder if it'd be better to use that approach but also dual boot to protect against whatever crap is already in your registry, pointless drivers and services, etc.

Thanks to Peter for posting my questions and for the readers for dropping knowledge like bombs

For those of you who can't make it to the show Saturday night, I managed to film the end of us rehearsing our Search and Destroy cover:

 So glamorous!

Peter from Create Digital Music was nice enough to ask his readers a question for me about potentially dual-booting my laptop.

I use my laptop for regular stuff but am wondering if it might be better to have a separate XP install with minimal services, applications, no internet, etc. for live performance. Or maybe I'm just worrying too much.

I've been trying to think of something thoughtful to say about Steve Jobs' anti-DRM essay.

There's a good analysis at Daring Fireball.

I think it's cool and all but I don't get why Apple can't offer DRM-free downloads for those labels (or artists) that want them. That'd give people who reject DRM a competitive advantage and put the squeeze on the majors.

Last show with Rob on guitar! He will be missed! But not by you if you show up!

Picked up an M-Audio Firewire 410 on the weekend and boy is my wallet tired. The goal today was to put together the basic live setup:

Coming along okay, sounds not too bad. Need a 6->4 pin Firewire cable. It's pretty fun to jam, I could see writing a lot of songs like this.

Magnatune has a Second Life location. Free t-shirts and most interestingly -- audio streams for your lands. Very neat. The info:

• - Listen & hang out: a large space on Joi Ito's island Kula 1, with themed listening areas for each of our genres (with our streams playing), along with comfy furniture for you to hang out with your friends. Search for "magnatune" in SL to find it.
• Music for your land: audio streams for over 40 genres that you can use at no cost in your own land. Click on the sign at the Magnatune space in Second Life for information.
• Tshirt: a free Magnatune tshirt for your avatar
• Message board: leave us a comment when you visit
• Film: "Magnatune in six" video showing
• and an email discussion group for organizing get-togethers there.

Gonna drop by there in a second and pick up a shirt and check it out. I'm "Brad Susenko".

Aw man, Brave New Waves is cancelled. It's been years since I listened to the eclectic CBC late night radio show but it was responsible for opening me up to a lot of different styles of music. And I also won a t-shirt once during a contest to insult host (and object of my first voice-crush) Patti Schmidt.

It was a force for good and it'll be missed.

I guess I should "camp" more on my "credit card statements" as Blizzard has been conducting "raids" on my "money" for the past "year" since I quit "World of Warcraft".

Anyway I'm like a level 20 complainer now. At 30 I think I finally get to talk to a manager so I've got a lot of grinding to do.

So I don't know if you know but it's pretty cold in Canada right now. Anyway, the Brad Sucks rehearsal space is in a garage and it's like -25C outside. As a pre-rehearsal measure this is a video of how we heat the garage:

It's pretty effective but it's still goddamn cold out.

I think I may be able to declare success in the singer/songwriter versus Ableton Live and the Behringer FCB1010 Midi pedal board. It took a lot of thinkin'. I can't say this is the best way, but I've got it working and boy will it be boring for you to read about! So here's what I wanted:

1. My songs divided up into scenes (verse, chorus, etc) and for Live to automatically advance through them with no input from me.
2. A pedal that repeats the current scene (for those extended solos or when I screw stuff up).
3. A pedal that plays the previous scene.
4. A pedal that advances to the next scene.
5. For Live to control my Boss GT-6 guitar effects throughout the arrangement.
6. For Live to automatically apply effects to my voice throughout the arrangement.

Here's the screenshot of my live Dirtbag set in Live for those who want to follow along at home:

Also used: Midi Yoke and two instances of Bome's MIDI Translator.

SCENE FOLLOWING

First thing was to set up automatic scene progression as Live retardedly does not have this functionality. For this I simply selected all the clips in the scene, entered how many bars I wanted it to play for and selected the Next action.

The problem with this method is that if you have gaps in your arrangement (say a section where the bass doesn't play), the missing clip will stop the progression dead in its tracks and nothing else will play on that track.

So you need to pad it out with dummy clips -- all the black clips in the arrangement in the first screenshot. I used a file with a couple seconds of silence and filled all the gaps in with them. That way you can assign follow actions to those clips and it works fine -- but is tedious to set up (and annoying when you're trying to modify your arrangement).

PEDAL TO RESTART THE CURRENT SCENE PART 1

So we're progressing through the scenes automagically now, should be easy to just restart the current scene, right? NO.

Since we're using the individual clip follow actions (as no scene actions exist), when the clips advance to the next scene, the master clip selection does not. Which means that from a remote triggering point of view, Ableton has no idea what scene you're playing. So there's no way to re-trigger what you're currently doing. Awesome!

My hacky solution was to install Midi Yoke and a copy of Bome's Midi Translator. I then made MIDI Track 9: "scene sync" and routed that out to MIDI Yoke's 1st virtual output. I filled the trick with clips playing note C2 at 100 velocity at the very beginning of the clip.

I set up an instance of Bome's Midi Translator to receive on MIDI Yoke's first input and set it to hit the Down cursor key every time it receives note C2 at 100 velocity.

What this means is that if you launch the first scene in the set, the clip in the scene sync track fires a C2 into Bome's Midi Translator which then simulates the user pressing the down cursor key, which moves the currently selected scene down one. So your scene selection will now advance with your song.

PEDAL TO HOLD THE CURRENT SCENE PART 2

Now that Ableton has an idea of what scene we're playing while we're advancing automatically through the scenes, what we want is actually possible.

First I switched the Select Next Scene on Launch preference off. Then I mapped my Midi pedals on the FCB to another instance of Bome's Midi Translator with the input set to my regular Midi port:

So these are set to the keypresses relative to where our follow scene puts our cursor (which is always one scene below the currently playing scene):

• Repeat scene = Up + Enter
• Next scene = Enter
• Previous scene = Up + Up + Enter

CONTROLLING MY GUITAR EFFECTS AUTOMATICALLY

This one's easy enough. I created a "gt6" Midi track and set the output to my Midi controller going into my Boss GT-6. After that all you have to do is send program changes:

Look in the Notes section in the middle. Bank / Sub-Bank, Program. Program is set to 4, so this clip will jump my GT-6 to its fourth patch when it starts.

CONTROLLING MY VOCAL EFFECTS AUTOMATICALLY

This isn't so bad either. I made a vocals audio track, set the input to my microphone and switched Monitor - In on so that my vocals are always heard. Then I filled the channel with empty MIDI clips. I then can modify the clip automation where I want to add effect -- turn insert effects on or off, modify variables, modify sends, etc.

For now I chose to map my FCB expression pedals to the sends so that I can mess with my vocal effects if I want to, adding delay whenever I feel like it, etc. I'll think about this more during actual performances.

THE END

Well, it works. I can have the backing tracks going, play guitar and sing, have Ableton modify my guitar patches and vocal effects automatically and I can alter the arrangement on the fly as well as my vocal effects with my feet -- but holy lord.

Ableton Live is nice and all, but that was hard and I still haven't combined everything into one big set (because Live has no ability to switch between sets via Midi). I've made three sets for different songs of mine now and have tried to keep the track template the same so hopefully that will help.

I'm also not sure how I'll be able to jump between songs as I've started to dislike doing pre-planned sets when I play live. Possibly I'll wind up programming a bank on the FCB per song, so I can switch songs by switching banks.

I get the impression the folks at Ableton could use some more time around singer-songwriter types and full bands. They've got the DJs covered, time to see what the other lads need because while the features lacking are tremendously important, I can't imagine it's actually very much code-wise.

Adding scene follow actions would simplify this entire process a ton and seems easy. Also building in a MIDI->keyboard macro system like Bome's Midi Translator also seems trivial and would add a ton of flexibility to the program.

Now I'm pretty sick of saying the word "clip". That is all.