After having so many live performance troubles with the M-Audio Firewire 410, I looked around for the best alternative. My research lead me to the MOTU UltraLite mk3. People referred to it as “rock solid” and I had previously heard lots of great things about MOTU hardware. There's not a lot of competition in this area for some reason. Anyway, I bought one.

Immediately I started having audio drop-outs. Firmware upgrades were involved. I filed a trouble ticket and I complained on Twitter. I read lots of posts and comments about MOTU's “legendary” bad support (which was not so legendary that I knew about it before I bought one of their products). I wound up going back tonight to have a look at my ticket's status and check this out:

 

Wow, ten days later and my ticket's still Unread. I mean I guess appreciate that they're up front about not caring, but maybe putting forth at least the illusion of customer service would be a better business strategy. I don't know.

April demo: Model Home (demo) [5.7MB MP3]

Two things about this track:

• It's the first song on a concept album I'm working on. All the songs are roughed out (but incomplete) and the track order is decided. The other song I've released that fits on this album is Thanks for the Add (which will be track 5).
• This is the first song I've done in REAPER. I'm really impressed with version 3 and I'm trying to switch to it from Cubase (more on that later). The mix isn't great on this song but that's not REAPER's fault. It is a demo so I'm forcing myself not to care.

I bugged the author of (delicious/flickr style) file tagging software TaggedFrog to add support for audio file previews and v1.0.1 has it. (Make sure you grab and install Croak on the download page.) I'm also told if you need mp3 support to download the irrKlang library and place the irrKlang.NET2.0.dll file in the root folder of your TaggedFrog installation. It'll automatically enable mp3s in TaggedFrog. (It's not included due to licensing issues.)

This is a pretty great solution for Windows musicians looking for something similar to Audiofinder for the Mac. Thanks Andrei!

Previously, on Twitter:

Neighbor agreed to give me the Vindicators arcade cabinet on his front porch "as long as I don't tell his kids". Kekeke.

And now this is in my driveway:

 

Kekeke.

My pal Allen made this animated video for my song Time to Take out the Trash. Read about it on his blog or just plain watch it here:

I declare it to be sweet.

A couple people asked for the permission form I offered in the previous post. So here you go:

Pretty sure that'll hold up.

From the forums, this is great:

Something funny happened to me, at my school, a teacher saw my Brad Sucks t-shirt and decided to give me a talking to. She said That my shirt is very offending to people named Brad and that i cant wear it.

As I said I mentioned in the forum thread, if anyone needs a permission slip or something, please be in touch.

Also: God I hated school.

Just. Hated.

Update: here is the permission form people requested.

I seem to Twitter more than I blog, so let me get caught up here:

• My dog Maui was spayed Friday and is full of reflections on life without a cone collar:

   

  She's got 12 days to go. :(

• I'm still slowly working on the new live show. The pace should pick up soon and maybe some shows in a month or two?
• I tried out some LandRollers (in my living room):

  

  I'm thinking about getting some of these to skate with the dog instead of buying a new bike (which was the original plan for this year). Only catch: I am not a skilled skater.

• I'm also so close to being done with the new web design:

  

  Looking forward to getting that out the door.

• Sellout Central Episode 13 goes up tonight at midnight. The fact that I've stuck with it for 13 episodes is all thanks to my podcast generator script. Still not sure I can do the entire year though – do I really like that many songs?

Here's my demo for March. It's extra retarded: I Command You to Be My Woman (demo) [4.5MB MP3]

The story behind it is this: my buddy JB from Songfight! asked some of his musician pals to write songs to surprise his would-be fiancee with just before he popped the question. I spent a month working on a very tender and sincere ballad and then shit-canned it at the last moment and wrote this thing.

Check out the other entries on Songfight. And I'd say wish JB good luck but she'd have to be jerk of the year to say no after everyone wrote all these songs. So I think it's basically in the bag.

Here's the final video for the Fake It Video Project:

Thanks to everyone who contributed! Also big thanks to Allen for editing it all together.

MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever:

An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.

It stretches the boundaries of what I would call a “song”, being 20 minutes long and the individual parts often have no musical relationship. It reminds me of one of those Halloween sound effects CDs but with accordion, opera rap and tuba.

The individual parts isolated often aren't that bad, but as a whole it's definitely a drag to listen to.

This is a song I've had around for a very long time but I could never get the recording the way I wanted. I resolved to do the best I could with it for this month's demo and quit agonizing over it.

I'm still not very happy with the recording – getting the huge wall of sound I want without everything becoming muddy mush is rough. But the month is almost over and I'm out of time, so here it is for now:

Simplifyin (demo) [7mb MP3]

I just uploaded v0.20 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Some small changes and one big one. It now supports Amazon's Flexible Payments Service:

Of course I can't actually offer it on my website as Amazon doesn't offer the service in Canada. So that's pretty weak. But for all you Americans: go nuts.

Update: I've pushed out v0.22 of the BSDDS, fixing a batch of bugs.

I loved this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about creative genius:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

It's very inspiring and I really admire how she's reconciled her creative expectations.

A point I think is also missing from most discussions about creative genius is context. The time and culture a work is released in have a lot more to do with being considered genius than the work itself.

If I had a time machine I would travel to the past and play some electronica on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Minor update to Gimme Some Money, the object donation script. Just a formatting issue with the Javascript widget that should make installation less annoying.

For the past year I've been thinking a lot about solo guitar interfaces. One of the challenges with being a guitarist and playing solo is that both hands are almost constantly busy with the guitar and your feet are usually busy with pedals. Doesn't leave a lot of other options.

I've thought up a lot of ways the guitar as an interface could be improved or augmented and the simplest idea seems like it would be to put a bunch of easily accessible buttons in the guitar and have those buttons simulate keystrokes on my laptop. How hard could that be? Let's see.

Step one:

I ordered some Seimitsu PS-14 arcade buttons. A lot of the buttons I found were wayyyy too deep (such as these) but these ones looked like they might not go all the way through my guitar and halfway into my torso while playing.

I also impulse bought an Arduino. The Arduino is awesome but turning button presses into keyboard strokes isn't really its main deal. So I ordered an I-PAC VE which is dedicated entirely to simulating keyboard controls.

 

Step two:

Months later when the I-PAC finally arrived, I wired up the buttons and the board and it all worked on the first try. I made a little cardboard stand for testing:

But it doesn't look like there's much testing to do, it's pretty brain dead easy. I had it entering keystrokes on the computer and triggering clips in Ableton Live within minutes. Windows XP even recognized the I-PAC without any additional drivers, very nice.

Step three:

Where should the buttons go on the guitar? I put some cut-out circles on it to see where they'd fit and be most useful:

This is the layout I'm thinking of right now. There's a lot to take into consideration, such as:

1. Ease of access while playing (the upper right ones seem close enough I'd be able to hit them with only a brief pause in playing)
2. Staying away from locations where accidental hits are likely (the right side is where my arm is while playing)
3. Making sure I don't interfere with any of the guitar's guts
4. Keeping them far enough away from the edge that I don't weaken and collapse it

Right now I'm wondering if I should try to house the circuit board inside the guitar and run a USB cable from the guitar to my laptop or should I run the wires from the buttons to the external I-PAC which would be by the laptop? I do not know.

Had to do this to get it out of my head. Now I can move on.

I try to stay away from idioms and other bits of faux-wisdom but one that actually stuck with me from recording/songwriting circles is “you can't polish a turd”. 

Which I always took to mean “if your song isn't any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it good”.

So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.

Graphs of Billboard's 2008 Hot 100 and Pitchfork's Best 100 Tracks of 2008. 

I like the disparate song lengths. Maximum song length on Billboard: 5:21. Pitchfork: 17:03.

Also are we not ready, as a people, to combine the post-grunge and hard rock genres? [via waxy]

Radio Aporee is geo-located field recordings. I have no idea what use this is, but I like it.