Scott Andrew's new record Save You From Yourself is out. Check it out, he's OG-Internet. Congrats, Scott.
There's a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising -- a "real guitar" version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I'm calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?
Here's a picture I took when I was sorting socks a few months ago:
Look at all these different bastards! What for? Can the human race not agree on a black sock style?
What I'd like is a standardized black sock specification. So I could always buy replacement or additional socks that match the ones I already own. Please: open source community, W3C, Creative Commons -- somebody help make sense of this important issue.
Trent Reznor released some facts about the Saul Williams record he produced and then released digitally for $5 [nin.com]:
Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay.
Of those paying,
3220 chose 192kbps MP3 19,764 chose 320kbps MP3 5338 chose FLAC
Thoughts:
- 28,322 * $5 = $141,610 which for a solo artist and zero marketing investment seems pretty decent. Of course partnering with a super famous established artist like Trent helps.
- With 154,449 downloads and earnings of $141,610 that works out to earning $0.92 per download which vastly exceeds all bandwidth costs.
- 154,449 seems like an extremely low number of downloads. The hype for this album was primarily in nerd-centric venues so I'm assuming the majority skipped the ecommerce shit and went straight to torrents for their downloads.
- This isn't counting other digital sales avenues -- did they put it on iTunes? That's where most people are buying their digital music these days, not going direct to the artist's website.
- I think putting such a low limit on what people could pay was a dopey idea. If we're going to be dealing in intangible value, why not let consumers decide for themselves?
- Are there really that many FLAC users out there?
All in all I think it was a success even if they feel disheartened. Trent admits that he spent too much on the record. I'd be interested to know what the costs amounted to. I can't even conceive of spending $40,000 on a record let's say and having $100,000 left over would keep me in beer and guitar strings for another year or two.
Anyone out there using allpeers? I've been wanting a way to easily share MP3s with friends for a while and allpeers seems pretty nice, though I've yet to get it to work in the Firefox 3 beta.
I'm 'frenetic' on there if you'd like to add me and make me listen to your favorite songs.
I've been jealous of Gimme Some Candy for a long time. I've hassled them to let me in but they're not accepting new artists. It's a great idea -- a tip jar with benefits. Supporters can buy items and leave a little message that gets displayed on the artist's homepage.
So I've written and released an open source clone that's pretty easy to set up. It's called Gimme Some Money. The default items are a star, heart and cookie but they can be swapped out. You can see mine (using the default icons) over on the right sidebar.
Requirements: PHP 4+/MySQL & a Paypal account
Update: fixed an IE/Opera bug and updated it to v0.86 (thanks to jason for pointing out the bug).
Hope everyone's having a nice holidays. I'll have a belated open source Christmas present for other artists up here tomorrow when I'm less stuffed full of spätzle, potato dumplings and beer.
That wasn't too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:
- bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal's -- should allow alternate payment methods
- zero dollar downloads
- buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)
The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that'll have to wait as I got things to do.
Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:
Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.
Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:
- No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
- Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it's more than zero.
Next stuff I'll be adding:
- Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
- Handle zero dollar downloads.
Hooray for work!
Fantastic optimistic article in Wired by David Byrne about emerging music models: David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. His conclusion:
No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.
As someone doing the 100% DIY thing for years, I've been scouting around for the low to midrange music biz services and been fairly disappointed with the options. Hopefully that'll improve.
The Washington Post has a cute article: The Moby Equation. A helpful sellout guide, taking into account rock and roll ideals, the song's sacredness, the artist's reputation, wealth and time since their heyday.
These days with a PVR and downloading TV from the Internet, television commercials are alien to me. The idea of a song being "wrecked" by a commercial seems like a thing of the past, but I'm often weird about these things.
I met Marc when I was in Seattle at Microsoft a few years ago -- he was a super friendly, knowledgeable guy. We kept in contact and he was always passionate about what he was doing and what everyone else around him was doing. He was a guy I had hoped to meet up with again down the road and it's shocking that I won't get that chance.
My best to his family.
One exhaustive search and some tireless tagging later, my sample library dreams are mostly realized. The winner? MediaMonkey 3.0 beta. Voila:
MediaMonkey 3 adds support for multiple genres and a "track browser" similar to the one I like in foobar. It doesn't work exactly as I want -- I'd like to have two genre columns and be able to select, say "drums" and "kick" and have it exclusively display samples that are tagged "drums" AND "kick". But it doesn't -- it shows any that are tagged drums OR any that are tagged kick. But doing keyword or keyword -> album is still a great improvement over simple directory hierarchies.
It's also really helpful rating samples that I use frequently. MediaMonkey 3 also supports multiple libraries, all the file formats under the sun, drag and drop to Ableton Live works good and it's totally free, woooo.
And here for your benefit are the results of my many media player experiences trying to find the right sample organization client:
foobar2000 v0.9.5 - Just... complicated. Need foo_custominfo to handle WAV format genre metadata. Then that data doesn't work in the facets view, etc, etc. I'm sure some foobar hacker could make it do what I want, but I don't have the time or energy.
musikCube - Has facet view, does drag and drop, doesn't do multiple genres.
Winamp - Sort of does what I want with enough wrestling -- though the interface is a little retarded in the mind. But it won't do sample drag and drop to Ableton Live, so you're out.
wxMusic - Crashed reading in my media library and gave me lots of warnings that it couldn't read certain WAV files.
mp3rat - mp3rat only does MP3s I guess. Imagine that.
I just saved you a lot of thankless work. Enjoy!
My gamertag on Xbox Live is chillbaron (it's the opposite of chillbilly) if you would like to add me to your friends thing and destroy.
I started playing Halo 3 solo but god Halo is boring. Please, no more boring cutscenes! Maybe it'll pick up once I try playing co-op as the others did.
My genius integration of bbPress and WordPress accidentally shut off anonymous comments on the blog here. Anyway you're all free to comment about OfficeMax and black metal again without signing up for an account.
Say hi to Maya Mia.
Many years ago my family used to smuggle fireworks into Canada from the US. It was wonderful and maybe a federal crime, like all family memories I treasure.
Then we went without fireworks for a long time but recently we've been blowing a lot of money on grocery and hardware store fireworks that just suck.
For my birthday my girlfriend got me this:
That's a hundred dollars worth of fireworks from Kaboom.com. After the last sad display at Canada day I found this place on the web and had meant to order the next time fireworks were required. Turns out it's me turning 30. We're setting them off tonight and if I die, just know that it was awesome.
Update: I survived, but it was still awesome. They were excellent, A+++, will buy again.
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.