After scamming around on the net for a while, everybody's choice for some sort of affordable flat-response monitor solution seems to be the Event 20/20's. I had to wade through an awful lot of stupid arguments about monitors, but this review by Sound on Sound is pretty encouraging. The only other possible option I've been able to track down is the Mackie HR824's, which seem to blow the 20/20's out of the water, but with an understandable price increase that I probably can't manage at this point in my music and web design career.

Over the next week or two I'll be getting a nice sound-proofed studio room built, which will hopefully be a vast improvement over the current "really reflective and cramped bedroom" thing I've got going on right now. Also, I think I'm going to shell out the dough for real live monitors so I can actually attempt to learn a thing or two about mixing. But first I have to learn a thing or two about monitors.

I accidentally knocked my (apparently) glass guitar slide off my desk and it shattered on the floor into at least seventy-five pieces. I had always assumed it was made out of some sort of clear plastic but never tested it. Now I have. And now I have nothing to play slide guitar with. And instead of working on a new song tomorrow evening, I'll be attending WWF Smackdown! and will attempt to win the Hardcore championship on behalf of Brad Sucks and my fan. Watch for it!

There's now a music page with little notes on the three tracks I've got online. The next Brad Sucks track will probably be up in the next week or so. Possibly delayed by me going to WWF Smackdown! on Tuesday, which I am actually doing regardless of what you think of me for it.

Eventually I'm going to put some of the shady record deal offers I've received just from my three little songs online so you can all enjoy them as much as I have. They are numerous and trust me, they're nothing worth bragging about or I'd be bragging about them. I figure if I could get a nickel for every "SEND US YOUR DEMO AND SIXTY DOLLARS AND WE MIGHT SIGN YOU!!" e-mail I've gotten since I put my songs online, I'd be living on the moon right now in some sort of transparent Brad-dome equipped with a billion dollar recording studio and enough guns to protect me from the government and any space aliens that might come along. I'd spend my days working solely on experimental compositions using only empty beer cans, prescription bottles and a ten dollar Radio Shack microphone, you know, for art. But no nickels.

Here's what Lockergnome Digital Media had to say about Brad Sucks:

Brad writes songs that sample from all the best bands and artists of the 90s. "Overreacting" sounds like a mixture of REM and The Flys, "Difficult Situation" wouldn't sound out of place on any early Sebadoh album, and "Gangsta Love" resembles Mellow Gold-era Beck. Hell, even William S. Burroughs said it was okay for artists to steal: "Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them." Brad doesn't rip off other artists, he just knows what works and what doesn't. Besides, his sense of humor permeates every song, and that's quite original. All hail the Canadian paradox.

I skimmed this after I had just woken up and thanks to sleepiness and my negative worldview, the following words were the only ones that registered in my brain: 'sample', 'steal' and 'rip off', which was a little shocking. I read it again and then I felt fine. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I injured my left thumb two days ago shelling peanuts while watching wrestling and drinking beer. Playing guitar or keyboards makes me cry like a little girl with an injured thumb and no pride. You can extrapolate this anecdote into some sort of lesson if you'd like.

IUMA (the site where I host my lovely mp3s) seems to be mentally ill right now. A friend has volunteered some temporary bandwidth to the Brad Sucks cause and I've uploaded some 128k versions of the songs (IUMA only allowed 96k). Part of the pain of being a net musician is finding a decent place to host your large, stupid music files. IUMA has been pretty nice, but apparently has some stability issues. The interface is very clean and easy to use and the pages it renders look pretty sharp. You get the feeling that you're part of some sort of elite music library, even though you're absolutely not in any way.

The alternative, MP3.com, is frightening and the administration interface is full of confusing text ads that get in your way for the first while. Also, MP3.com forces visitors to log in to listen to your music, which is a big fat hassle. And when you're on MP3.com, you get the feeling that you're in some sort of musicians-only ghetto, which you are.

If you know of any other decent alternatives and for some reason you're reading this, drop me a line at brad@bradsucks.net.

The links on the right side of the page now download the MP3 instead of trying to stream it. Streaming seems to only work for me and two other people it seems.

OverreactingGenre: Ballad Time: 3:17 Date: 2/27/2002 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I wrote this one as a simple little sad acoustic guitar song and completely failed at recording it that way. In the process of recording this thing, about four other versions started to surface and had to be beat down. There was a big rock guitar version (I kept the solo from it), a funk version and a version with my dog barking in the background. In case you were wondering, I'm using autotuning on my voice because apparently it's in style. And now, by proxy, so am I.

Difficult SituationGenre: Rock Time: 3:05 Date: 2/11/2002

Written and recorded real quick and was the first thing I wrote with my brand new Boss GT-6. The track also shows off my tremendous bass guitar playing skills which do not exist. The two voice samples used were from two anonymous people who were kind enough to be recorded while saying my name.

After a significantly annoying amount of programming and testing, it looks like the Brad Sucks website is ready to "go live" as they say. There's next to nothing to see at the moment. There's one song, no articles, nothing in most of the sections and only one news entry (this one). But it works well enough for me to start filling it up with glorious stuff, and that's all that really matters.

My e-mail address is brad@bradsucks.net.

Gangsta LoveGenre: Funk Time: 2:58 Date: 4/12/2001

I get asked who the voices are in this song a lot. It's all me, baby. I was going to fix up some stuff in this track before I put it online as it had been sitting on my hard drive for about a year, but I lost all the source files. So there it is.