One of the behind the scenes benefits of being a net musician is a whole new type of spam: Greetings! I was just browsing through and had to tell you how awesome your music sounds! I don't know how your promotional efforts are going, but I know I can help you get the exposure you need. My name is Michaelantonio, and I am a talent scout who makes people famous. Below is my personal recruiting website, where you can get started on your journey to STARDOM! I look forward to working with you. Michaelantonio

They usually then ask you for fifty bucks to look at your stuff. Then you start thinking that if so many people are trying this scam, it might actually work and maybe you should quit the whole music thing and start trying to scam money out of musicians fifty bucks at a time.

So as a test of my ability to record a song in Cubase SX, I put together this short little rock track called Quit Complaining. My first problem with it was that a few friends of mine had issues with the ending, which I'm not sure how to fix. So I'll wait until someone gives me specific instructions.

My second problem with it is that I just recently found out that the verse guitar riff is almost exactly the same as the riff in "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd (which I like a lot). They're fairly different tracks, but yet I'm still apparently accidentally a hack, which sucks. I usually prefer to deliberately be a hack instead of having it surprise me like this.

So I've uploaded it. You can check it out and judge me. It'll be fun.

Quit ComplainingGenre: Rock/Pop Time: 1:48 Date: 10/25/2002

I wanted to test out my Cubase SX and threw this quick track together. Then there was a little bit of internal drama afterwards, but then that seemed to fade away somehow, as though I were too lazy to continue caring.

For the past month I've been thinking about selling my sampler and buying one of these things:

It's an electronic drum pad/kit thing. You hit it with sticks and it makes drum sounds.

But I'm not 100% convinced I'd actually use this thing and I'm not sure it's worth $250 US to find out.

So I'm like "okay I want to apply reverb to the whole stinking track" and Cubase is like "no way man" and I'm like "come on man, I need reverb! totally! on the whole stinking track!" and Cubase is like "sorry, were you talking to me?" and I'm like "OF COURSE I WAS TALKING TO YOU! WHAT THE!" and then like there's a long pause and then a huge fist fight which I lose and then I decide to go to bed.

My few songs are back online for your downloading and listening pleasure. I'm having some issues with style sheets, so the site kind of freaks out when you resize it real narrow. Hopefully I can get that fixed soon for all the narrow-browser having folks out there.

Well, how about that. After half a day I seem to have gotten it going. Movable Type is pretty sweet and definitely a great deal better than that bastard system I wrote for the last incarnation of this site and also less work to maintain, hopefully. There's still a lot of screwing with it to be done, but all of my previous entries were imported and I'm pretty impressed with how slick everything is.

Tomorrow is going to be the day that I begin to try and switch bradsucks.net over to Movable Type. Hopefully it will work and everything won't break and so on.

So I think I've decided to abandon Acid and switch to Cubase SX. Acid's been kind to me, but after being frustrated with mixing the other day for the kabillionth time, I tried to mix some of my old tracks in Cubase and sweet Jesus was it ever nicer. I had gotten used to having a one second delay every time I change an EQ setting in Acid and in Cubase it's instant. INSTANT! But the interface is batty. I just have no clue what's going on. I managed to import some old audio files and horse around with them, but the idea of actually writing a track in there is a little daunting. The simplicity of Acid was mostly what I liked about it and Cubase seems like Acid's more complicated older brother that's been translated into German and back a couple of times.

RIAA: Stickering Program Weakened By Downloading. This is the most hilarious thing in the world.

I've been kind of busy, but have about four tracks I've been working on and struggling with recording. There's something about mixing electric guitars that makes me want to write techno.

I bet you are all still in deep suspense about my Acid 4 cliffhanger the other week. What happened? Is it the greatest thing ever? What's going on? Well, I've been kind of let down, but I'm not sure by who. I installed Acid 4 and it seems to work. But there's a big stupid delay whenever I start or stop playback, which makes it a little cumbersome to zip around at the speed I'm accustomed to.

After having no luck playing with any of the settings in Acid or my sound card, I looked around the Acid forums and some people seem to be anticipating a patch for Acid 4 quite a lot. Sometimes in poem form:

Trust in SOFO to bring us the light, a new child is born out of the ashes of version 4.0, 4.0a brought to life by the spirit of SOFO brings us relief from all the pain and darkness, when will this tidal wave hit and drown us in fulfillment and joy ? when will it finally see the day ?

Joyfully awaiting 4.0a, i gratefully thank the SOFO team for this achievement.

I also checked with my awful, awful sound card manufacturer's web page and they have nothing to say about driver revisions or anything awesome like that.

This sort of thing happens a lot in computer music stuff. It usually means you need to buy something.

Life's been a little hectic lately. Between little contract web jobs and trying to learn Flash so I could do some projects I've been thinking about for a while, I haven't had a chance to finish any of the songs I have lying around. If you don't believe me, click here for shocking, undeniable proof.

Also slowing me down are my almost exactly year-old braces, which have recently been tightened and modified so that I have elastic bands keeping me from opening my mouth more than a centimeter or so. Also they hurt. Pretty damn bad. With luck I'll be getting the braces off in six months. So here's to that and all the chewing and biting that will follow.

So I've been anticipating the release of Acid 4.0 for oh, about as long as I've been using Acid 3. And it's finally out! Hooray for everything! You should download the 27 meg demo and play with it! It promises various sexy things that I've wanted for a long, painful time such as plug-in effects automation, ASIO driver support, MIDI piano roll, and VSTi plug-in support. Not to mention there are a whole bunch of other things on the new feature list that I'm sure will impress the pants off me as well.

The main thing I worry about is stability. One of the great things about Acid is that it rarely crashes, which is fantastic because nothing makes you want to hurt adorable little animals more than losing your work. Even if it's just the last ten minutes, it's still awful. As I've learned from previous crashes throughout my computer-using career, I can do a surprising amount in ten minutes.

I'm installing it now. More as it happens.

Neat! Philip Jones of the BeatBlog I mentioned the other day did a nifty remix of my song Difficult Situation. I've put it online here. There's also a link to it on the sidebar and I plan to eventually do a page specifically for remixes so I can offer a bit more information about the people that send them in. If you've got a remix or something based off of my stuff, please e-mail me a URL where I can check them out. Large e-mail attachments get eaten.

Difficult Situation Remix This remix of Difficult Situation was done by Philip Jones, author of the BeatBlog. It is noisy and experimental and neat.

In between work and hiding from work I should be doing, I've gotten the chance to talk to some people who are doing some very interesting musical things on the net lately. One is Philip Jones, who sent me a link to his BeatBlog, a very neat project where he creates and gives away beats he makes. Philip is also holding a contest you can read about over here. He's also made this neat program called Gbloink! which generates neat music in handy pinball format which is worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Everything is GreatGenre: Stringy acoustic ballad Time: 3:42 Date: 8/14/2002

This one was written on the piano and turned into an acoustic guitar track and then I got all crazy with the strings and synths. It was written and recorded over the course of about five days, complicated by my sound card half dying. I have no other fun information about this song.

So the site was down over the weekend because apparently I'm a huge idiot. Despite being a l33t net veteran web programmer cool dude, I managed to assume that my registrar would remind me that my domain was about to expire (other registrars for my other domains always have), but instead they only sent me an e-mail a week and a half after it had expired for some reason. My bad for assuming they'd compensate for my laziness. I have received my nerd demerit points and set my Palm Pilot to remind me next year. I have a couple of songs almost ready to go online -- I'm just waiting for the planets to align in such a way that gives me some time and relative quiet for recording. There is sawing and hammering and nail gunning going on one floor above me. If it goes on much longer, I may wind up going in a more experimental direction. I could record ten minutes of the noise, title it Construction/Deconstruction in the Key of Hate (Crickets, Faint Talking and Footsteps in the Background Remix), MP3 it, slap it online and call it a day.

I seem to be able to get my Darla to work for limited amounts of time before the it craps out on me. I recorded most of a song yesterday, having to occasionally re-record stuff because the left channel just didn't show up sometimes. Today I've started looking around to see how much a replacement card might set me back. So far it's looking kind of expensive and complicated. I found this sound card benchmark comparison, but a lot of the top of the line cards are a bit fancy for my needs. I don't need a ton of outputs or inputs, I just need two ins, two outs, excellent sound and hopefully really good Windows XP drivers.

The search continues...