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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:

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.

Venue: Cafe Dekcuf
City: Ottawa, ON
When: July 31, 8pm
Cover: $10

Event listings:

Facebook
MySpace
Eventful
Upcoming
last.fm

I happened across Bobby Owsinski’s blog when he replied to my review of one of his books. Lately he’s been posting links to a lot of isolated parts of songs with his comments on them, which is really interesting if you’re a recording nerd. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Enter Sandman” Isolated Vocal
• “Ticket To Ride” Isolated Vocals
• Foo Fighters “Everlong” Isolated Drums And Vocals
• Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” – Isolated Drums
• “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – Lessons From The Isolated Guitar

And here are links to the categories themselves:

• Isolated vocals
• Isolated guitar track
• Isolated drums

I hope he keeps it up. Also: I find the amount of reverb on older vocal recordings to be crazy!

Venue: The Tranzac Club
City: Toronto, ON
When: August 7, 7pm
Cost: $12

Event listings:

Facebook
MySpace
Eventful
Upcoming
last.fm