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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.

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.

You can buy I Don’t Know What I’m Doing in FLAC format again (click ‘more buying options’). Out of It will be available in FLAC as well when it’s released.

The data center the bradsucks server’s in I guess had a big-ass explosion, which is why it’s been offline for the past couple of days.

As they work out backup power I expect service will be spotty for a while, so if you want to read me complaining about it you can follow me on Twitter.

Also: if you emailed me in the past couple days, you may want to re-send.

Update: I guess their backup generator exploded resulting in another day of downtime. Man, what a shitty week for the bradernet.

I want a Twitter-style service for freeform, taggable, time-stamped data. My intended purpose would be to log real-world items. Like I’d IM/text/email the Data Twitter service with:

bike ride tags: bike, ride, exercise

writing a blog post tags: status, writing

phone call from annoying dude tags: annoying dude, phone

basketball tags: basketball, sports, exercise

These would all be time-stamped as I add them. A duration may also be useful.

The data could then be queried, searched, accessed via API from other web sites & apps, read via RSS and imported into spreadsheets.

Potential applications:

• import specific tags (like ‘exercise’) for a certain time period into a spreadsheet for analysis
• power cross-site social widgets from the data feed (most recently listened to songs, task completion, current status)
• use as a remote control for triggering events in software monitoring the feeds (bittorrent clients, server administration)

It’s super nerdy, by nature deals with private instead of social data and likely wouldn’t scale, but I still want it.

In preparation for the new album release I’ve re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I’ll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here’s some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that’s over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?

With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I’m a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy’s all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I’ve wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it’s a limited market.

But lately I’ve been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:

You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It’s really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.

So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files — .WAV files don’t support genre metadata. Boned.

I’ve been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it’s a pain in the ass. Now I’m on to trying other media players…