MP3: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever:

An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.

It stretches the boundaries of what I would call a “song”, being 20 minutes long and the individual parts often have no musical relationship. It reminds me of one of those Halloween sound effects CDs but with accordion, opera rap and tuba.

The individual parts isolated often aren't that bad, but as a whole it's definitely a drag to listen to.

This is a song I've had around for a very long time but I could never get the recording the way I wanted. I resolved to do the best I could with it for this month's demo and quit agonizing over it.

I'm still not very happy with the recording – getting the huge wall of sound I want without everything becoming muddy mush is rough. But the month is almost over and I'm out of time, so here it is for now:

Simplifyin (demo) [7mb MP3]

I just uploaded v0.20 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Some small changes and one big one. It now supports Amazon's Flexible Payments Service:

Of course I can't actually offer it on my website as Amazon doesn't offer the service in Canada. So that's pretty weak. But for all you Americans: go nuts.

Update: I've pushed out v0.22 of the BSDDS, fixing a batch of bugs.

I loved this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about creative genius:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

It's very inspiring and I really admire how she's reconciled her creative expectations.

A point I think is also missing from most discussions about creative genius is context. The time and culture a work is released in have a lot more to do with being considered genius than the work itself.

If I had a time machine I would travel to the past and play some electronica on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Minor update to Gimme Some Money, the object donation script. Just a formatting issue with the Javascript widget that should make installation less annoying.

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.

Had to do this to get it out of my head. Now I can move on.

I try to stay away from idioms and other bits of faux-wisdom but one that actually stuck with me from recording/songwriting circles is “you can't polish a turd”. 

Which I always took to mean “if your song isn't any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it good”.

So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.

Graphs of Billboard's 2008 Hot 100 and Pitchfork's Best 100 Tracks of 2008. 

I like the disparate song lengths. Maximum song length on Billboard: 5:21. Pitchfork: 17:03.

Also are we not ready, as a people, to combine the post-grunge and hard rock genres? [via waxy]

Radio Aporee is geo-located field recordings. I have no idea what use this is, but I like it.

I've been tagged twice now in this Seven Things meme, first by Rob Campbell and second by Dan James. I resist this stuff because I'm boring but I've found reading other people's lists fascinating, so here we go:

The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they've been tagged. (you'll just have to trust me)

My seven things:

• Jobs I have wanted in chronological order: Dickie Dee man, baseball player, Sierra On-Line adventure game designer, computer programmer, writer and musician.
• People I have written fan mail to: Mr. T and Michael Jackson. Neither replied. In my letter to Michael I lied and told him I lost my copy of Thriller and could he send me another one (signed please).
• When I was 17 and a desperate aspiring writer, I emailed Terry Pratchett to see if he'd answer my questions about writing. He graciously said "Sure, as long as they're not too dopey". I then asked him what he kept his margins set at in his word processing program. I still regularly think about how stupid that question was.
• The first concert I went to was Corey Hart (opened by Katrina and the Waves) during his Boy in the Box tour. I had backstage passes but Corey had already left when we tried to go up. (I lied and told all my friends I met him anyway.)
• A few years ago I was diagnosed with vitiligo, which is the disease that allegedly turned Michael Jackson white. I'm a pale guy so other than it turning a lot of my hair white it's not very visible unless I tan.
• When I was four or five I had a habit of peeing on my neighbor's steps. I can still remember my dad hosing them off.
• Me: “I need a seventh fact about me.”
  Her: "Why don't you say that you try to get angry at animals when they run out in front of the car so that you don't feel as bad if you kill them?"
  Me: ”Did I say that?”
  Her: ”That's what you told me to do.”

I am tagging Aaron Walker, Courtney Summers, Jesse Dangerously, David Weinberger, William Gibson, Hannah Aviva and Justin Dykhouse.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is out. Not only is it an amazing game, it has a remix of one of my songs in it:

My pal Future Boy sends word of a complete remix album he did of Out of It:

This is my take on the album Out Of It by Brad Sucks. These aren't so much remixes as they are what might have happened if Brad had approached me with his songs and asked me to produce his album. The vocal tracks are mostly intact and the song structures have not been messed with all that much. Nevertheless, these mixes are wildly different in character from the original tracks. The album was mastered by Ben Phenix.

So far I'm really enjoying it, the production is more experimental and makes the songs interesting to me again.

Adopted this Catahoula/Beagle mix today:

She is super cute. Not traumatized too bad by us so far. Some quick introductory photos here.

Got any name suggestions?

I'm working on getting someone to redesign this website. It needs to be wider, more attractive, blah blah. I'm pretty happy with the general layout and usability, but it could use a little lipstick and an eyebrow wax at least. I spent some time going through all sorts of famous musician websites today. It's pretty amazing how most of them are super cluttered and do not have music sections.

I mean I get that not everyone wants to give all their music away, but jesus, throw a dog a bone. If I get more music going to your MySpace page than I do your official website, something's wrong.

Anyway, the most startling thing is that out of all the websites I visited, one of the best was Britney Spears':

What it's got going for it:

• Simple design
• It's not Flash
• Straightforward navigation (home/blog/videos/music/photos/tour)
• RSS feed
• Hey, there's a music section! (though it's just music blog posts – cop-out)
• Some actual content (from a team of Britney bloggers)
• Britney's Twitter status up top

I can't say it's the greatest but compared to most musician websites it's amazingly restrained, simple and informative. Also it has inspired me to create a Brad Sucks fragrance.

What other musician websites are decent? Who should I steal from?

I don't normally listen to podcasts, but on this last bit of travel I tried out a bunch that were suggested to me via Twitter. Here are some reviews: Quirks and Quarks

This is a great science radio show but I'm not sure it was engaging enough to focus on completely. It put me to sleep several times on the airplane which was nice of it.

Real Time with Bill Maher

I like a lot of Bill Maher's stuff even though he's the whitest man in the world. This podcast is just the audio from his HBO TV show, which seemed like itd'd be all right, but the crowd cheers and laughter were so loud compared to the speaking I had to keep dialing the volume up and down to keep it from blowing my ears out. I gave up part way through the first episode. Next time I may run them through a compressor first.

You Look Nice Today

I wasn't sure I'd like this hyper-literate ultra-nerdy sorta hipster comedy talk-show, but it worked for me and I wish I'd brought more.

The Ongoing History of New Music

I was excited to see this show on iTunes as I love it and looked forward to catching up, but it only feeds one minute previews! What the hell!

Ugh, so busy. I didn't even blog about Halloween. Here are some shots:

We were kind of busy (and lazy) this year so we didn't really get up to a lot of the ideas we had. But I got to play with my jigsaw and made this witch and cat:

 

The resulting shadow was pretty good, though the cat didn't show up very well:

My costume turned out nicely. This flash photo doesn't really do it justice:

I'm really not much for scaring kids so what I would do instead of jumping at them or anything was stand completely still. The kids would see me and know something wasn't quite right and they'd stare and stare. And I'd stare back at them and they'd just be completely unnerved, thinking something was going to happen I guess. And it seems I'm okay with doing that to children as I feel no remorse.

One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes. I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

State Shirt has a new album called This is Old and it's available for pre-order now.

I managed to get my store dealy running for him but mercy it was a rough ride. I had hoped to open source all my latest additions (variable pricing, wordpress integration, etc) but I don't think I have the time to put into it. If anyone wants to take the lead on that feel free to get in touch.

I'm off to the Zap Your PRAM conference this weekend. It should be some awesome nerdy maritime fun and I'm really looking forward to it. Regular conferences have a little too much desperation going on and this one feels like it'll be more of a bunch of like-minded (but not too like-minded) folks hanging out.

Matt Haughey from Metafilter was supposed to be going but I guess he's not now which makes me sad. At least now I won't have to drunkenly confess about how many ideas I've stolen from him. So I can tell that to Daniel Burka (Digg designer), and Cal Henderson (Flickr architect) instead.

I'm giving a presentation on Friday I'm maybe calling “A Brief History of a Song” where I tell the story of one of my songs -- from the initial idea to its recording and release and to some of the crazy adventures it gets up to when it's out of my hands. It's been something that's been on my mind for a while so I'm looking forward to getting it out. of my system.