Hey, here's another messy demo: Guess Who's a Mess (demo)

It's the title track and will probably be track 6 on Guess Who's a Mess.

Scott's rolling to a stop on his solo live playing. I think that's cool, I started to weigh in with a comment on my own struggle with playing live but it got too huge so here it is:

A couple of years ago I was fed up with playing live. Some people love to perform and I'm just not that guy. I wouldn't say I'm shy but I wouldn't deny that I'm an introvert. Then I had a pretty bad string of rough, demoralizing gigs and it was messing with me. I'd travel home afterwards all bummed out and thinking my time would have been much better spent recording or writing or doing stuff on the internet. Plus it's easier and more fun to me.

I got fed up, took a break and decided to play less shows but to make them more meaningful. Promote them better, book them better, work harder at them. In 2010 that approach was pretty successful so I'm planning to play some more in 2011.

A lesson I learned, and this may only apply to me and my city, is that there's very little point to playing thankless gigs. Maybe you're getting some practice in. Maybe you enjoy it. But you're not building a fan base. You're not generating buzz. If you have a small draw, which most bands do, you're spreading it too thin over many sad shows rather than saving it up for a few good ones.

Now that I'm taking this new approach I'm enjoying the shows way more. I'm still not much of a performer, but I've been enjoying the crowd interaction. I like getting yelled at. I enjoy feeling like my being there and doing my thang is facilitating a good time for others.

So when people come out now, tell me they like my stuff, tell me they're looking forward to new music, it's pretty great. It's very easy on the Internet to group fans into one single entity. But when I meet people face to face who seem to genuinely connect with what I've done or what I'm doing, well that's encouraging and awesome and nice.

Last night's show was fun, thanks to everyone for coming out. These three shows I've done with the new band have been pretty encouraging. I'm not someone who actually really enjoys performing or being on a stage, but I do get a huge kick out of an energetic, happy crowd and instigating a good time.  So I'm gonna let that motivate me into more show bookings and hope it's enough.

Well, 2010 was a mixed bag Brad Sucks-wise. My live show is sounding good I think and I'm happy with that. A few encouraging shows went down. I got some demos done. But I betrayed a next-album deadline and overall I was distracted with some mid-year depressions and med change as well as other projects and jobs.

Money from the Brad Sucks stuff is nice but it's unpredictable. It's been hard to justify working on music for potential future maybe-dollars when there's guaranteed money waiting for me somewhere else.

But I need to do better. It may sound awful, but my goal for 2011 is to treat music more like a job. As opposed to a hobby that gets pushed aside as soon as I have another opportunity. I'm fortunate to have anyone wanting new music from me at all and I'm disappointed I didn't deliver more in 2010.

But that's in the past. I hope you're all doing great.

I got asked if some folks from Germany could use my music in a sport DVD. I said yes. Then they told me it was for Sporthockers (sport stools) and I said double yes. Here's what it looks like:

I love any sport where the goal is to become successfully seated.

Do you remember that I did a cover of a friend's Christmas song last year? And that it was called Fuck You, Motherfucker (It's Christmas)? Ah, good times. Back when I made songs.

Whooo the switch to the Mac has been time-consuming. Nothing like re-learning decades of software and keyboard shortcuts and... everything.

Stuff I love:

• Unix. Yay. No more DOS or batch files or Cygwin or whatever.
• The apps are generally better. Lots of creative, well-designed software out there.
• Spaces is great. Virtual desktops were always clunky in Windows, but Spaces is slick and works.
• I always hated it in Windows but iTunes is excellent on OS X. I feel happier with my music collection than I have in years.
• I feel more in control of my software and OS. I always suspected Windows was betraying me in the background, OS X feels pretty locked down.
• The audio is rock solid. I had gotten used to Windows audio crapping out if I launched two audio apps at the same time or various other factors. No more!
• Time Machine is great and has simplified my backups.

Stuff I don't love:

• I hate the magic mouse and tiny keyboard. Holy god they're awful. It took me a week of struggling to get used to them before I tossed them and figured out how to disable mouse acceleration. And I also felt ripped off getting a shitty little laptop keyboard with my big expensive desktop.
• I miss Total Commander. I feel like a dummy in Finder, clicking and dragging around like a baby. I'm adjusting, but slowly.
• I haven't found a window manager I like yet. I was using Winsplit Revolution on Windows and it was nice.
• Page Up/Page Down/Home/End. OS X hates these keys. I've remapped them but there are still a few apps that act weird when I hit page down and page up.
• Every app seems to have a different keyboard shortcut to switch between its tabs. On Windows it's always ctrl-tab. I've remapped them now (yay) but it was a dumb struggle.
• Mac software is really expensive.

These complaints are pending my switch to the replacement Mac as they might be due to this busted unit (more on that shortly):

• The internal speakers could be a lot better. It sounds like the bottom panel in the front needs some holes poked into it.
• The hard drive is a huge bottleneck. Hopefully this will improve once I throw more RAM in, but I'm routinely listening to the hard drive grind and it annoys me.

Re: the busted unit. I bought a refurbished Mac to save $300 or so and three of the four RAM slots were dead. One was physically misaligned. Apple support was good and I'm moving everything over to the replacement Mac they sent me.

Also if this Time Machine restore on the new system works as advertised, I will be so impressed.

Hey, we'll be playing in Kingston at The Mansion on January 7th:

Facebook events here and here.

Happy 25th birthday, Windows. I just had a birthday too, I'm 34 now. DOS & Windows have been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. We've had a good run, but I'm moving on. I just sprung for a quad core 27" iMac and I'm as excited about getting it as can be.

When I was younger I really loved getting my hands dirty, building my own systems, getting under the hood of the OS, tweaking it, customizing it, learning its quirks and weaknesses and how to make it run smoothly. The flexibility of Windows and the control it allowed me was a huge part of its draw. Along with it being the most popular platform - where the action was happening.

But things have changed. The most popular platform is the web and the OS matters less now. And I've personally changed. My number one issue in my life these days is that I don't have enough time to do the things I want. And every time Windows wastes my time, or is unhelpful or counter-intuitive, I resent it and that resentment has finally boiled over. While I have issues with their lack of openness, my iPad and iPhone nearly always feel like they're on my side - they want to help me do what I want.

Here are some things I'm looking forward to:

• Being on Unix. Basically every other machine I interact with on a regular basis is running some flavor of Unix. Going back to DOS and not having all the usual tools available has become intolerable. Write a batch file? Ugh, go die.
• Worrying less about security. As on the ball and cautious as I generally am, even with better browser and OS security and multiple scanning apps, it's still impossible to avoid getting spyware. That of course sucks for performance and security issues but it's also just a huge waste of time.
• Easier backups. I'm excited about Time Machine. My backup situation right now works but is crazy and scattered.
• Higher quality applications. In my research looking around to see if there was any software I'd truly miss from Windows, nearly everything appeared to have a superior OSX counterpart. 
• All my iStuff working better. iTunes on Windows is a slow piece of shit. MediaMonkey is nice (but ugly) and syncing breaks regularly. My iPad and iPhone would rather deal with OSX, I'm sure.

We'll see though - after so long with DOS and Windows the transition will certainly be weird, but I'm looking forward to it.

Getting the laptop into the live show has been a long dumb technical process. It's been working solid now for a long time so the last step was to get it all into a nice portable form factor that was quick and easy to set up and tear down.  I think I'm just about there:

I bought this Gator Studio-2-Go case - which is a 2U rack case (front and back) as well as a laptop compartment on top (and most importantly a hole between the rack and laptop compartments for cable runs). Getting it was a stupid ordeal. I actually couldn't find it anywhere in Canada (everyone said it was discontinued) so I had to order it from Sweetwater, get it delivered in the US and drive across the border to get it.  Sine then it's been a gradual process figuring out everything I need in it.

In the front (sorry for the crappy photos) I've got a Furman M-8X (rack-mounted power strip), a MOTU Ultralite mk3 (sound card) and a Shure PSM200 wireless transmitter (for feeding the click to the drummer). The power strip means I only have one power cord for the whole box, which is great.

In the back:

The sound card's outputs go into a Behringer ULTRA-DI PRO DI800, giving the sound dude three channels of DI'd output.  I had to learn how to build some short angle patch cables since non-angled ones wouldn't fit with the back cover on.

Remaining issues:

• I need an 8-channel XLR s-s-snake for the DI outputs (this has been ordered.)
• The power supply for the PSM200 is one of those dudes with the AC adapter block separated from the plug. Meaning the block is floating around in the case, threatening to knock all my other connections out. I'm not sure how to secure it down or if I should try and replace it with a different adapter.
• The Firewire adapter in the laptop sticks out of the side of the laptop a great deal and makes the side-foam the case comes with not fit properly. I guess I'll cut a hole in it.
• I wish it was easier to get the DI in and out in case I need to adjust something.  Right now I can squeeze my arms in but I'm only getting fatter so that's not a permanent option. I don't know much about racks - is there a. thing for that? A rack drawer maybe?

So instead of bringing in a pile of devices and having to set up all my cables each time, I'm down to one AC adapter and a handful of XLR outs and I don't need any DIs from the house.

That was a lot of work.

The original Rebirth RB-338 was great. Released in 1996, I remember it being one of the first software synthesizers on the PC that seemed serious and sounded cool. An iPhone version has been around for a while but the iPad version was just released for $14.99 and I couldn't resist trying it out.

The multi-touch is what makes the difference of course. While the screen is a tiny bit smaller than would be optimal - it's hard to select drums without accidentally engaging a button or knob - being able to manipulate multiple controls at once without using a mouse is undeniably fun. You can actually feel like you're jamming to a certain extent.

Ultimately though I feel disappointed and am not sure it was worth the $15. We'll see if I go back to it. Without any sort of MIDI support (sending or sync or export) this is just another bleep-toy that won't really integrate with my existing audio tools.

The 303 sounds are also pretty dated sounding to me (or at least not as fat as modern soft-synths), but the drums are still thick and fun. There's also some ugly digital clipping if you start driving it too hard which is less present in modern plugins.

So, much like the original Rebirth, I'm still waiting for an iPad music app that seems serious and sounds cool.

Hey guess who's back, it's totally me. Since I last wrote I switched my brain drugs to Cymbalta. It was a rough transition and it's expensive, but everything's going pretty nice upstairs now. A good decision overall, I wish I had switched a while ago. Also I've been busy working on some non-music things re: paying the bills, putting food on the table, bringing home the bacon, etc. What else happened? I can't remember. Let's look through my phone's photos:

Oh right, we made some acoustic panels for Justin the drummer's practice room. We have not practiced since. I wonder if they worked.

James Brummel painted portraits of Ottawa musicians onto drum heads for a gallery showing and compilation. I was one of them.

I haven't seen the finished one yet. The left side of my face came out a little fat I think.

This is a Bhut jolokia pepper. A chef friend tried it but I did not have the mouth-balls. He said he expected worse so we think we got a dud. He definitely did better than this guy.

My dad didn't want to store this heavy-ass arcade cabinet anymore since I have no time to work on it and he proposed we burn it on Canadian Thanksgiving. Which we did:

Kiiind of a waste but it was also awesome, so maybe it evens out?

This is my favorite new wine. They no longer sell it here so I'm favorite-wine-starved. :(

My lady's practicing doing Halloween make-up so I am a cut and bruise canvas.

Next up: maybe a Fallout: New Vegas gamecation followed by getting back to working on the record. Yes!

Seriously gotta get moving on these album demos. Here’s one:

The First Thing About Me (demo)

The mix is a disaster, but I MOVE ON. It’ll be the last track on Guess Who’s a Mess.

My friend Ken Flagg (aka Vic-20, touring keyboardist for MC Frontalot) is using Kickstarter to fund a really cool looking animated music video for his song Pieces. He’s over halfway to his goal and needs a final push in the last few weeks. Here’s the project:

You can check out the album the song is from here. Good luck, Ken!

As a follow-up to my last post re: brain chemicals. I’m switching from Celexa, which I’ve been on for many years now to Cymbalta. I’ve been feeling a general decline in energy and optimism for a while and Ian’s post a few weeks ago really made me think about it and decide to make a change. My reaction to simple life challenges should not be to say “fuck you” and give up.

So we’ll see – this weekend I’m winding down my Celexa and will be kicking off next week with the Cymbalta. Here’s hoping I get to avoid finding out what brain zaps feel like. Brains are lame.

I'm shopping around for some new brain chemicals. What are you folks on?

Update: oh man, I meant anti-depressants.

Anyone using the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store (BSDDS) should probably upgrade to the new 0.50 release. I haven't been working on it at all but thanks to the power of open source I've been receiving some contributions. These ones are thanks to Geoff Kassel (geoff at kassel dot id dot au):

• made the store easier to customize - including currency settings, messages, and available payment methods
• the store is now in standards-compliant HTML 4.01
• added support for new file formats so that the store can sell e-books
• preliminary support for per-product shipping pricing
• debug code can now be toggled
• logging output can now be customized and toggled
• the admin login page now redirects automatically to the main admin page on a successful login
• the button and logo for a payment method is displayed only if that method is enabled
• improved security
• improved code documentation
• consistently formatted code

Thanks again Geoff.

Hey, the Toronto show was nice, thanks to everyone. And so ends the first few shows with the new band. They've been fun, I'm pretty happy with how everything sounds and I don't feel totally ashamed which is new.

Anyway, gonna take some time out and work on the next record and think about what's next. There are a bunch of things that'll need some adjusting as I go forward with the live show - like not losing money for instance. That would be awesome to not lose money.

After a lot of planning, promotion, practice and worry, the show in Ottawa last night went pretty good I think. It was the first real club gig with the new band and I was surprisingly happy with the sound.

The crowd was energetic and fun, if not as large as I had hoped from the amount of frigging time I put in promoting it. Lots of people sang along with my songs and knew the words and I guess that might be the best feeling in the world.

I still feel scared having a laptop on stage. I wish I had a better solution but I don't. I love computers and am good with them but that also makes me aware of how easily they can fail. When girls are dancing on stage all I can think about is "I hope they don't accidentally yank out my firewire cable." So, not exactly a carefree experience.

But it was good. Total success basically by all goals I set for it. And I'm looking forward to Toronto next Saturday. And then more shows?

All I've been doing lately is trying to promote my upcoming shows (July 31 Ottawa! August 7 Toronto!) Previously I've been lazy about show promotion due to insecurity and shame but desperation has once again won out.

I'm pretty sensitive and protective towards people who subscribe to my mailing list. I don't want to piss them off with bullshit updates or waste their time. This is mostly an issue when I have an occasional show - nobody cares if there's a show far away from them that they can't attend and it's annoying to get those emails. So I built this mappy email signup thing which you can see on my live page.

I've built up a good number of email addresses in there and they're targeted nicely. Anyone in there has specifically entered their email address and selected their location. That's about as opt-in as it gets in this world. "Please contact me if Brad Sucks is in this area, no fooling."

So while I went about contacting folks I tracked the event detail clickthroughs with a url shortener and the results were disappointing:

CAMPAIGN	CLICKTHROUGH RATE
Listmessenger Ottawa	8%
Listmessenger Toronto	16%
MailChimp Ottawa	10%
MailChimp Toronto	3%
Eventful Ottawa	0%
Eventful Toronto	0%
TOTAL	5%

Listmessenger

First I sent email the way I usually do -- I use Listmessenger from my server. I've had suspicions for some time that my mail was not getting to most people on the mailing list but I didn't have anything super important going on so I didn't stress about it.

The clickthrough rate for Ottawa was 8% and 16% for Toronto. From what I can see that's not a bad rate for your average semi-spammy email list. But again - this one is as targeted as it gets. Why isn't it much, much higher?

Eventful

I have a decent number of demands over on Eventful. I've bitched before that they don't give me access to my demanders' email addresses (and was laughed at by the CEO for the suggestion I should have them if Eventful gets access to them). I sent out mail to my fans in areas in and around Ottawa and Toronto. For Ottawa and Toronto both I received zero clickthroughs. For Toronto I got 1.

I'm pretty shocked at that. What's the deal? Did the emails bounce? Are the addresses invalid? Are the Eventful emails getting marked as spam? I have no way to know. You fire your message to people who have demanded you in the area and that's that. Hope for the best.

Anyway I've put the Eventful widget up places (including my live page) thinking it couldn't hurt but I think I'm done with that. No point gathering fans through a service if I can't reach them.

MailChimp

Frustrated with these results I signed up for MailChimp. It's a pay mailing list service that's been highly recommended to me and they appear to have a great reputation. My best guess was that ISPs were maybe shitcanning my emails? Anyway, I bought some credits and sent out apologetic new versions of the emails to the same lists (removing anyone who replied that I knew had received the emails).

This time Ottawa got a clickthrough rate of 10% and Toronto got 3%. So it got me some extra eyeballs but it wasn't a huge improvement.

In the end

 

Out of all the fans in and around Toronto and Ottawa who voluntarily gave me their locations I have been able to contact only 5%. Awful.

Of course I feel bad for selfish reasons - I want these shows to go well, I want lots of people to come out, I want them to be a success. I've rented the club in Toronto and I'd like to not lose money. And psychologically a lot is riding on them for me. These will likely determine if I go ahead with some tour plans next year.

But I also feel like I'm letting these folks down. They've specifically asked me to tell them if I'm playing near them, which is such a nice thing for them to ask. I've promised to tell them when I'm in town and now I feel like I'm not able to hold up my end of the deal. That sucks and I have no idea what to do about it.