I'm not sure if it's related to the lightning storm the other night or what, but the right input channel on my Echo Darla24 sound card has taken to cutting out all the time, making it really rough to record anything. If I play around with the breakout box enough I can temporarily get it working, but it cuts out shortly afterwards and then I cry and cry and cry. I've been having this problem on and off for a couple of months, but I always assumed cables were dying and I replaced them and that seemed to make things a little bit better for a while. But I've now tried three different sets of cables and the right input continues to cut out. A loose connection inside the breakout box? A message from god? If it dies completely I'll have to start researching what the hell I'm supposed to replace it with and who I have to kill to get the money and how I can really make it look like an accident and maybe what sort of Canadian arts grants might be available to assist me in all this.

If that all fails, I plan to escape into the woods with my four track, acoustic guitar and enough canned goods to keep me alive and I'll record some sort of all acoustic guitar anti-technology concept album that will be so full of pain and sadness that I'll be inundated with cards and letters and money from apologetic engineers for the rest of my life. I'll accept the money, but not the apologies.

My 56k modem (Which only ever worked at 28.8k due to my rotten phone lines) was fright Wednesday night in some sort of freak Canadian lightning storm. I was forced to go out and spend $150 on a new retardedly slow modem Thursday morning because I'm a slave to the Internet and I had given away all my backup modems to friends and family over the years. I will never be nice to anyone ever again, especially my friends and family. I also tried to install Movable Type because while I like to think of myself as a slick web programmer who doesn't need no prefab scripts, this weblog package I wrote for Brad Sucks could use an overhaul and various sexy features (such as commenting, a posting form that works, RSS feeds, and decent category archiving), but I don't have the time to spend on writing them lately. Installing cgi-bin managed to screw up just about everything that was good and pure about this server and I've given up for now because I don't have the time to waste on that either. All in all, time to waste has hit an all time low in the Bradiverse, which is unfortunate because it's one of my strongest skills.

Here's an interesting rant. In it, a woman named Shannon Campbell takes swearing issue with me and my stupid idea. There are a lot of things I'd like to say about this, but I'll try to keep it brief so I don't bore the tar out of you. Some replies to specific things she wrote:

I offer a great deal of my music for free - but all of my songs are copyrighted. The difference between Brad and myself, that I can see, is that if both of us were to get heard by some huge recording industry mogul on the same day, and said mogul wanted to record one of our tracks, said mogul would have to buy my track and pay me a royalty every time that bastard saw the light of day - but he could take Brad's track, completely fuck up the arrangement, change the lyrics around to better suit Brittaney or NSYNC or Pink, and then sell a billion copies of the single without ever giving a dime (or a writing/arrangement/etc credit) to Brad.

That seems like kind of a silly thing to worry about, the odds of that happening being as poor as they are. In the absolute worst case -- and least likely -- scenario, I may miss out on a staggeringly huge paycheck and credit for songs I've written. That would be a drag, but I'm not playing the lottery here. I'm pretty sure that if I'm doing work good enough for moguls to steal and good enough to sell a billion copies, I'll be okay in the long run.

To quote Eminem: What the fuck, is you stupid?

I think I'm about average.

The RIAA is never going to be able to stop an artist from distributing their own material, because the artist is the copyright holder. Brad's distributing music that doesn't belong to anyone (which I guess makes it public domain) and relying upon the kindness of strangers to give him a leg up somewhere down the road.

I always hope for kindness, but I don't rely on it. It's not like I'm mortgaging the house on this principle. What can anyone honestly expect from people? "Wow, a musician is giving his music away for free on the Internet! Honey, get me the checkbook!" It just doesn't happen like that.

If there's a living to be made in this crazy new frontier of Internet music, I think it'll come from building an audience. Maybe touring, maybe merchandising, maybe a lot of other interesting ideas people have had. In the dark cyber-y future of the Internet, I don't think copyright is going to matter much. It's been mattering less and less every day since Napster hit the scene and it doesn't take a genius to realize that that will probably continue.

Brad Sucks was linked on Metafilter today, which means that this site is getting about a billion times the traffic it usually does. Hi to all the new people, I hope you enjoy the site, please come back often, etc. I've gotten a lot of interesting e-mail and comments, which I'll reply to as soon as things calm down and I'm not staple-gunning floor boards down.

In case you're checking this page looking for some stupid new songs, there are a few on the way. I've been busy and briefly sick with some sort of flu I had imported from Norway for me. In the meantime you should play with Viragelic and generate some random songs while looking forward to a time when tempermental (and not to mention lazy) artists are replaced by Flash applications.

Alan Lomax died on Friday. I had heard the name before, but didn't know much about him. Turns out he was one of the pioneers of recording, which makes me like him an awful lot. From the article:

What Alan Lomax did was, in a way, inherently contradictory. He was terrified that recorded sound would eradicate the folk-singing tradition. Who needed to sing when you could play a record?

I'm sure a less hammered individual could probably draw similarities between his dilemma and the current situation with MP3s and the RIAA. So good luck to them.

Reason 2.0 is the bees knees. I picked up my copy the other day and the Malstrom synth is a truly impressive piece of work. So much so that I've cleared off my newly-made Linux box for it and am now thinking about selling my Emu ESI-2000 sampler that I spent a lot of money on and almost never ever use. It's been a year and change since I bought it and I don't think I've ever fully recovered from the expensive and draining multi-month process of hooking it up to my computer. SCSI was very mean to me and I've been unable to put it behind us.

If you're interested in the perspective of an experienced working musician on the entire file sharing issue, you should read this article by Janis Ian. It describes the benefits of file sharing for musicians (exposure) and a number of the current problems facing established recording artists.

And as an interesting side note: I'd now like to check out some songs by Janis Ian, but Audiogalaxy is gone. The other file sharing clients are unreliable on my slow connection, so that's that.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the RIAA's been up to some pretty incredible stuff lately. First of all they managed to get Audiogalaxy (my favourite file sharing service) to block almost all songs available on their service, including mine. Thank you RIAA, that was really fantastic of you. Now that people can't freely distribute my songs on the best service available for it (thereby decreasing my distribution and increasing my bandwidth costs), I just want to buy you dinner and then maybe make out for a while. I'd be far more understanding if I thought that they had actually put any kind of significant dent in commercial MP3 sharing, but as I'm sure you're aware, everyone's just heading off to other clients now to download Eminem's singles. Then there's their hilarious fight against web radio. I keep trying to write a paragraph about this but I keep on falling off my chair laughing hysterically and drooling a bit. I wish this particular struggle had been going on when I was fifteen and hadn't yet realized the nature of commercial radio. I could have had one of those eye-opening experiences people tell me about and stumbled around saying "whoah man, you mean like radio's just like one big infomercial for albums? and they play ADS on it? trippy, dude!" if I had talked like that when I was fifteen.

All in all, it just makes me look forward to the horrible scary future of technology even more. Let's just see how much you appreciate MP3 file sharing when I can clone myself up an Eminem to imprison in my basement and punch and kick into making new songs for me any time I want. Sue me for royalties? Eminem clone army coming your way, suckers. And giant robots. And really, really tiny robots. And maybe mid-size robots with giant knives.

BorderlineGenre: Pop/Hip Hop Time: 3:12 Date: 6/12/2002 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Borderline was written and recorded in about two days and is the first track I've completed after building my new home studio and using my Event 20-20bas monitors. I'm pretty happy with the result. I think the production quality is up a bit from my previous tracks and that makes me feel a bit better about all the money I blew on speakers and drywall. The song is about mental illness and is kind of fun.

The other thing that's been going on while I've been stupidly busy is that I briefly was an official objector to the proposed increased copyright levy on blank audio recording media up here in Canada. You can read about it here if it interests you, but the bottom line from that page is: The current levy on CD-Rs is 21¢ each. The proposed CD-R levy is 59¢.

The proposed levy for MP3 players with non-removable hard drives is $21 per gigabyte.

The first one would affect me far more than the second, though they're equally pretty awful. The money collected from this levy would apparently be distributed among Canadian artists most damaged by the rapid rise of music sharing/copying/piracy.

My arguments were a) that this proposed levy would hurt my ability to produce and sell CD-R's of my music by raising my costs both in duplication and in backups. Neither of which have anything to do with taking money from any Canadian artists (except maybe me). And b) that 21$ per gigabyte is a hilarious amount of money, especially taking into consideration how huge, large, fast and compact storage is quickly becoming.

I was gung-ho about going the distance and attending meetings and maybe yelling "YOU'RE OUT OF ORDER!" once or twice, but I couldn't get anyone to fill me in on how much time I was going to have to commit to Fighting the Man. So I've withdrawn as an objector and instead re-submitted my long-winded rant as a comment which is in the records and will hopefully persuade everyone to give in to reason and do exactly what I say.

I had forgotten to post this bit of news, but my track Gangsta Love is apparently going to be used as the theme for a series about the mob being filmed in Vancouver called "Jimmy Two Thumbs". I've read the treatment and it sounds like it could be pretty fun. I have no other info about the project, so if you ask me I will blink at you.

I finally finished putting together Brad Sucks One, my first open source CD release. On top of getting CD quality versions of the songs available on the site, you also get the audio source and Sonic Foundry Acid project files of my tracks Difficult Situation and Overreacting for your tampering pleasure. You're free to do whatever you want with the source files -- and all for the low, low price of a measly ten American dollars.

Stay tuned for more tracks and the open source releases of those as well. Rock on.

After what seems like a month of dealing with awful hosting problems for both this site and my other ones, things seem to be back online. I have an injured finger and am hoping to get back on track with this whole mad crazy ill fresh Brad Sucks thang real soon.

My little studio room is complete. The Event 20/20bas monitors have been purchased but not set up yet. I am now poor, sore, tired and my complaints about those things are more or less completely ignored by even those who love me. Also: I spent all of today setting up equipment and tomorrow I will continue to do the same, taking occasional breaks to fret about dampening the reflections in the small room and wonder if I'll still be interested in making music by the time everything's all set up. Probably I will, but it seems like an appropriate time to wonder such a stupid thing.

What they don't tell you when you start down the path of rock stardom is how much time you're going to spend in Home Depot.

Brad Sucks tracks seem to be available on Audiogalaxy now. Check it out here. Overreacting seems to be my least popular track, which is pretty neat. Luckily I've only got three songs, I make no money and am relatively unknown, so nobody's bothered to accuse me of selling out or losing my hardcore edge with that track.

Though it was delayed by the celebration of the death of Jesus, work on my little studio room continues. I'm thinking it'll be approaching completion in about a week, though I'm unsure of how miserable insulating the ceiling and installing carpet is going to be, or how much additional sound dampening I'm going to have to do so that it's not the little box of echoes it is now. After that I'll be spending all my money in the universe on monitors, hooking everything up and then, finally, I'll try to finish up the bunch of half-finished tracks I've got lying around and put them online.

My studio construction is coming along pretty nicely and is probably about a week away from completion. I've been out pricing carpet and insulation and sound dampening foam as well as continuing my quest for near field monitors. Researching monitors is pretty annoying and I don't in any way condone or recommend it. Instead, I suggest you make a costly impulse purchase based on whatever speakers seem attractive to you and cost the most you can possibly afford. Rate them based on how heavy they are, or wind resistence properties or their colour or something. That seems to be about where my week of careful research has led me and let me tell you, it's a happier place than talking to other musicians and engineers.

My research has indicated that the Event 20/20bas's are probably the best bang for my buck. But if I were to walk into a room full of musicians and engineers and explain what I was thinking of buying, a riot would break out immediately and I would be torn limb from limb while people screamed brands like KRK, Behringer, Mackie and Genetec at me.

Here's an example of the type of conversations about monitors I've been having over the past week:

Me: Hey, so I'm thinking I'm going to buy the Event 20/20bas's. Most of the reviews are pretty good and lots of people recommend them and I realize they're not top of the line, seeing as though they're "only" $1200 Canadian, but I think they're probably good enough for me right now.

Engineer: [slaps me] They suck and you're an idiot! Don't bother. You're better off mastering your album on ten dollar Radio Shack headphones, you fucking idiot. They suck. You suck. Be a man and buy a REAL pair of monitors, like [monitors that cost ten thousand dollars each]!

Me: But I'm not expecting professional studio quality here, not to mention that I can't in any way afford it. It's just a small home studio and it seems like it would be silly to put myself in tremendous stupid debt paying thousands of dollars per monitor when I pretty much just want to make reasonable sounding demos. I always have the option of selling them later and upgrading when I have more money. Or if I want to get that 100% slick and polished sound, I can invest the money I would have spent on incredible monitors into professional studio time where actual trained engineers like yourself can worry about those things.

Engineer: Fag.

So it's a pretty exciting time. Also, I broke my electric guitar. I tripped over a cable and knocked it off its stand and it fell flat on its face, which snapped the pickup switch off. Rock on!

After going to WWF Smackdown! the other night, I've been trying to figure out how to work my music career so I can eventually be involved with wrestling in some way. Somebody sent me this:

If you nail "Hulk Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band" into Audiogalaxy, you can download all of the tracks and enjoy them as much as I currently am. I recommend "Hulkster in Heaven".

(You could also order it here, if you wanted to.)