Over the holidays I had a look at all the entries for the Fake It cliche video. They're sweet, but I think we still need some more, so I'm going to extend the deadline out indefinitely.
A few people suggested I put together a Youtube video begging for more submissions, so my crappy beard and I have done that here:
Beard out!
Crayon Physics Deluxe is out. Not only is it an amazing game, it has a remix of one of my songs in it:
I tried doing a podcast a few years ago and failed. I just wanted to share some music I was into but compiling the podcasts was time-consuming enough that it got pushed aside almost immediately.
So I've started another podcast on Sellout Central which I'm planning to put out every Monday.
This time though I've spent some of my vacation time figuring out how to automate most of the process.
The nerdy details:
Using sox, flite, lame and a bash script, all I have to do is export a playlist from Foobar2000 and run a script. Sox crossfades the songs and compiles them into one big WAV file, flite generates the speech synthesis for the intros and outros and then lame compresses them into an MP3 with appropriate ID3 tags. So basically, I export the WAVs and then run:
./podcastit.sh [episode #] [# of songs]
And get back a shiny podcastable MP3. Whether anyone will like the songs I like is a whole different matter.
If you want the script, let me know and I can package it up.
Update: and here is the script all packaged up.
I just break all my resolutions but here are general goals I'm thinking about for this year:
What are you folks up to?
My pal Future Boy sends word of a complete remix album he did of Out of It:
This is my take on the album Out Of It by Brad Sucks. These aren't so much remixes as they are what might have happened if Brad had approached me with his songs and asked me to produce his album. The vocal tracks are mostly intact and the song structures have not been messed with all that much. Nevertheless, these mixes are wildly different in character from the original tracks. The album was mastered by Ben Phenix.
So far I'm really enjoying it, the production is more experimental and makes the songs interesting to me again.
I'm not doing much of anything this holiday other than hanging with family plus getting nearly barfed on by the new puppy (who is still cute and still unnamed).
It's weird, I sort of have no idea what the new year will bring. I have no real live show right now, lots of music sitting around needing to be finished and a lot of fairly decent work to do. I guess I'll let the universe pull me wherever.
I'm happy with how my new record did in 2008 and all the cool people I got to meet. Thanks to everyone, hope you're all having a great end of the year.
Adopted this Catahoula/Beagle mix today:
She is super cute. Not traumatized too bad by us so far. Some quick introductory photos here.
Got any name suggestions?
I'm working on getting someone to redesign this website. It needs to be wider, more attractive, blah blah. I'm pretty happy with the general layout and usability, but it could use a little lipstick and an eyebrow wax at least. I spent some time going through all sorts of famous musician websites today. It's pretty amazing how most of them are super cluttered and do not have music sections.
I mean I get that not everyone wants to give all their music away, but jesus, throw a dog a bone. If I get more music going to your MySpace page than I do your official website, something's wrong.
Anyway, the most startling thing is that out of all the websites I visited, one of the best was Britney Spears':
What it's got going for it:
I can't say it's the greatest but compared to most musician websites it's amazingly restrained, simple and informative. Also it has inspired me to create a Brad Sucks fragrance.
What other musician websites are decent? Who should I steal from?
Over the weekend I broke up with my band. It wasn't them, it was me. Thanks to Bruce and Matt for the awesome support and good times. I'm trying to figure out what's next and I'll probably be looking for ideas on here.
How does a “one man band†do a rocking live show that isn't boring as all hell?
I don't normally listen to podcasts, but on this last bit of travel I tried out a bunch that were suggested to me via Twitter. Here are some reviews: Quirks and Quarks
This is a great science radio show but I'm not sure it was engaging enough to focus on completely. It put me to sleep several times on the airplane which was nice of it.
I like a lot of Bill Maher's stuff even though he's the whitest man in the world. This podcast is just the audio from his HBO TV show, which seemed like itd'd be all right, but the crowd cheers and laughter were so loud compared to the speaking I had to keep dialing the volume up and down to keep it from blowing my ears out. I gave up part way through the first episode. Next time I may run them through a compressor first.
I wasn't sure I'd like this hyper-literate ultra-nerdy sorta hipster comedy talk-show, but it worked for me and I wish I'd brought more.
The Ongoing History of New Music
I was excited to see this show on iTunes as I love it and looked forward to catching up, but it only feeds one minute previews! What the hell!
Gonna go out on a limb here and say the show last night in Denver effing blewww. It was amazing. I don't really want to suggest it was legendary but I had a difficult time through security back to Canada and am thinking word might have gotten around.
I also don't want to characterize a particular Denver sound man as “a douchebag†but I'm not sure how to finish this sentence without doing exactly that.
I will likely blog more about some lessons I learned once my brain unpacks.
It was nice to meet Jeff though even if it was just shouty bar conversation. NICE TO MEET YOU JEFF.
This past Friday was the occasion of my birth. I am now old enough that I wasn't sure what age I'd be turning. Thanks for all the kind wishes.
I am in “crunch mode†for the Denver show on Thursday. I am also “nervousâ€. This'll be only my third solo show but it'll also be the first one where I'm not doing my own sound. So maybe that will be good? Maybe I have nothing to worry about?
Very much enjoyed this video for Dropping out of School that Brian Ross just sent me:
Clowns++
Ugh, so busy. I didn't even blog about Halloween. Here are some shots:
We were kind of busy (and lazy) this year so we didn't really get up to a lot of the ideas we had. But I got to play with my jigsaw and made this witch and cat:
The resulting shadow was pretty good, though the cat didn't show up very well:
My costume turned out nicely. This flash photo doesn't really do it justice:
I'm really not much for scaring kids so what I would do instead of jumping at them or anything was stand completely still. The kids would see me and know something wasn't quite right and they'd stare and stare. And I'd stare back at them and they'd just be completely unnerved, thinking something was going to happen I guess. And it seems I'm okay with doing that to children as I feel no remorse.
There are some upcoming Brad Sucks shows:
November 7th & 8th: Playing two nights at Kelly's Welcome in Manotick, ON. Full band.
November 20th: The Bluebird Theater in Denver, Colorado. Solo.
There's a pretty good possibility I'll be doing some touring in the new year, so be sure to put yourself down on the map on my live page.
Hey, Out of It is now in the iTunes Music Store! (thanks Jesse)
Why it's $9.90 instead of $9.99 is a mystery to me, but whatever.
Also I noticed this censored auto-complete hilarity when I searched for it:
Oh Apple.
One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes. I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:
And bam:
I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.
Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!
State Shirt has a new album called This is Old and it's available for pre-order now.
I managed to get my store dealy running for him but mercy it was a rough ride. I had hoped to open source all my latest additions (variable pricing, wordpress integration, etc) but I don't think I have the time to put into it. If anyone wants to take the lead on that feel free to get in touch.
Holy cow, Zap Your PRAM was great. It would take some sort of endless series of biographical novels to explain it all.
Basically it was roughly 50 super interesting people (and me) in a beautiful historical Prince Edward Island cottage slash hotel. All passionate, all thoughtful, all interesting, no shills. Even (maybe especially) when I didn't think their fields of expertise were things I was interested in, I wound up being fascinated.
Thanks to the adorable silverorange team for all the hospitality and amazing dessert per day ratio. I don't know that there's a nicer group of people to have yell “bum sex†at you on the street.
I was nervous about giving my first ever talk/presentation but it seemed to go well and lots of people said nice things about it. It was both awesome and intimidating to be talking to such a knowledgeable crowd. Seems like it'd be easier to talk to dumbasses, but the feedback wouldn't be as rewarding.
For a general list of what went on, Stephen DesRoches has an excellent write-up and some beautiful photos.
My camera actually died as I sat in the Ottawa airport getting ready to go. So all I have is a crappy cell phone picture of the metal cow in the Charlottetown airport. Which is above.