Finally got around to putting more photos online from the gigs we've been doing. I'm using FAlbum now to load the photos directly from Flickr so hopefully I'll be better about updating it.

So the guitar painting summary: I'd say it was a success. Here's what it looked like before:

And here's the "after". Me using it on stage at Riverpalooza:

 

While I can point out imperfections in my work until everyone gets totally bored, I think it looks good enough. Definitely learned a lot about guitars and painting and general craftsmanship along the way, which was the point.

I like the guitar. I installed new pickups which sound a lot better and a new switch (the old one was broken). I'm noticing some possible intonation problems which I may have to go get my local guitar guy to look at, though I've gotten cocky enough to adjust my own truss rod and bridge now, so we'll see if I can fix it on my own.

A lot of people have asked me for advice as I've done this project, so here are a few things I'd do differently if I started it over again:

• I would make sure to sand the sanding sealer down better. I wasted a lot of time by not sanding it properly and then the primer didn't adhere to it. I thought shinier was better. Also any nicks and dents that are visible now were certainly visible at the sanding sealer stage.
• I would be more careful around the edges when sanding. Everything I read said to be careful around the edges when sanding and I still wasn't careful enough. The edges are where you can see the biggest imperfections on my guitar.
• I'd sand the inside of the "horns" better. The two pointy things at the top. In there I did the lamest, laziest sanding job and it looks bumpy and gross. No big deal, who can see it, right? Well, whenever you look down as you're playing it, you'll see it and you'll remember how lazy of a sander you are.
• I would put more than 10 thin clear coats on the guitar. Can't hurt to have the extra coats if you're unsure about wet-sanding. I managed to sand through the clear in a few points and strip off some of the paint. Extra clear would have given me some extra protection and it doesn't take that long to apply.

Sanding, sanding, sanding. If I had to do it over again it would be way easier just for the experience in sanding that I've picked up.

Want to do this yourself? Here's the reference material I used:

• Paint Your Own Guitar - I bought this eBook -- it and the free videos you get were a huge help. My only complaint is that the book is geared more towards copying various famous rock guitar designs and solid colored guitars are considered afterthoughts. But really, about 90% of what I did I learned from this book.
• Project Guitar.com - Great site with a lot of excellent tutorials. This is the site I got the heat stripping idea from, which was a fairly painless way to strip the guitar.

And thanks a lot to everyone who emailed and commented with helpful advice and suggestions. Part of my motivation for blogging the whole process became knowing that someone out there might be able to help if I boned things up too badly.

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

R-F-T Telefunken M16 and Apex 460 Bench Test - two microphones: one $1400 and the other $230, both with basically the exact same insides.

It was Google Press Day yesterday. I'm looking forward to Google Notebook launching next week as I don't have time develop cluebacca. I've been trying other notebook solutions (SEO Note, Evernote) to replace Keynote but they don't behave the way I want them to. And the only simple web-based note app I've found is Simpy which is dead slow most of the time. I got the new Google Desktop with "gadgets" (aka widgets) and quickly took a stab at writing a gadget, which is a little widget you can float around your desktop or dock to your Google sidebar. As much as I envy the sexiness of Macs, I'm still unclear on how these things are supposed to be useful in any way. How many floating clocks and plants does a person need?

Frontalot's been a busy guy. He's got a tour going on. Did I mention his recent Nerdcore Rising album before? I got a copy and am very happy with it. He's also the subject of an upcoming documentary. There's a preview of it that I'm hosting a torrent for as a link from Penny Arcade has the ability to crush even the most ample servers these days.

Nearly a month after buying my laptop, I've moved onto stage 2 of Brad's mobile recording adventure: buying sound cards. Today I bought the Edirol UA-1EX for softsynth and general low-latency use on the laptop. And the Presonus Firebox for recording on the desktop as well as the laptop when I want to move it around. This is my first time using USB or Firewire audio devices so I'll try and record my thoughts and feelings as I set it all up and try it.

BitTorrent + Donations = Viva la revolution? is an interesting question on Ask Metafilter about providing a service that makes it easy to share music and donate to the artists (which I was actually just talking to someone about the other day.) Metafilter user scarabic suggested that the Internet doesn't need any help with the trading but to stick to the  facilitating donations aspect. Which made my wheels turn and I posted this:

The idea is decent but I think scarabic might be right. Why not find a way to hook donations into all the trading activity that's going on right now?

It would be interesting if someone would build a verified directory of where to donate money to artists. Have an open API so torrent trackers and other music trading sites could implement it as a feel-good gesture.

That way if someone's on some torrent tracker and is grabbing my album they could have a little link that says "Hey, like the album? Click here to donate to the artist."

I think that'd be neat and have the potential to catch on and also potentially put a nice spin on all the trading that's going on if it were to actually work in artists' benefit.

Not sure if it's actually doable though. If a big paypal directory's not possible, you could turn yourself into a collection agency, hold and distribute the money or something. (Then turn evil and crook all the musicians out of their cash of course.)

I haven't thought much about the technical aspects of it but I think it's an interesting idea.

Ziggy Stardust comic - scans of a David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust comic. They should revive the Rock Fantasy line of comics and do indie bands. Everyone can be working day jobs and have no time to fight crime.

I'm way, way, hopelessly, way behind on posting remixes. I've been in denial about it as they've stacked up, but I think I have to admit that I'm so far behind I may never be caught up again. I still love getting the remixes -- but it takes a lot of time to process them and I'm short on the time lately. CC Mixter and I'll make listing those here a priority. Sorry to all the remixers who sent stuff in that hasn't been posted. Anyway, I just thought I'd come clean.

Update: Remix posts to CC Mixter should automatically show up in the remix section (way down at the bottom) now. Still tidying that up, but it seems to work.

I'm trying to put my Brad Sucks gallery back together. I lost a lot of that stuff in some sort of server disaster long ago. If you've done any Brad Sucks artwork or videos, feel free to send them in. Also I'm trying to remember the credits for some of the things in there.

There are 24 hours left in the Worth1000 Brad Sucks logo contest. 52 entries so far and I'm looking very much forward to seeing them.

List of problems solved by MacGyver - I don't think there can be any dispute that Wikipedia is awesome when it has a page of all the problems that have been solved by MacGyver.

Well, our first full set went pretty all right I think. Stumbly here and there, but no major disasters. We opened for The Eric Eggleston band and they were really cool to us and great musicians -- thanks to them for allowing the use of their PA and very hot lights. Now I will hopefully spend the rest of the holidays drunk. Merry Christmas everyone!

The finals for Tech Rocks 2005 are this Friday (December 9th). It's at Barrymore's in Ottawa. Doors open at 7:30pm and we're on first, doing a three song set (Borderline, Look and Feel Years Younger and Dirtbag.) This'll only be our second live performance together, so the fact that we're even getting to play somewhere that real bands play is pretty cool. Also I should mention that it's all for charity:

Proceeds from the event are targeted to support human resource development through projects and programs from kindergarten to the post graduate level and will support the development and expansion of Ottawa's technology talent pool.

Hooray for human resources!

I drove by this the other day:

It says "Loving God..." over the exit and "...Loving people." over the entrance. I didn't go inside.

And now the source for my song Fixing My Brain (78mb). Only two more to go.

Here's a video history of the Amen break. It's an interesting story and then it turns into an anti-copyright rant at the end which I'm not feeling. I'm not sure how The Winstons all quitting music and getting nothing while countless artists and companies get rich using their recording is supposed to be some happy ending that everyone trying to make a living in music should be shooting for. "Hey kids, give up the copyright on your music and you too can bust out of the music business and wind up with a PHD in political science!"

Without some sort of success story for The Winstons I think all the example does is serve as a musician horror story: how you can make something that impacts millions of lives and still not be able to support yourself. Spooky!

My little game and interesting links site In4mador! is three years old today. That's older than many humans. Still needs some cleaning up though.

Upgrading to WordPress 1.5 looks like it'll be more work than I thought and maybe it'd be easier to do just re-do the whole damn thing. If you're a web designer, please drop me a line at brad@bradsucks.net.

Here's a pretty rough exchange between Fightmaster Jr. (one administer of Songfight!) and an editor at Wikipedia as Fightmaster tries to get some inaccuracies fixed in the weird Songfight entry. The editor's rant is indented. I can understand the editor's perspective and the difficulties inherent in an open editing environment, but can't understand the seriously nasty attitude. The current Songfight entry weirdly fixates on the number of fight entries -- which has never been that big of a deal -- and ignores a lot of other good Songfight info. Which is fair enough, but it's kind of insane that hissy fits get thrown when the best authority on the item in question offers some revisions.