Busy busy busy. Had my first singing lesson today finally, which went well. No actual singing, just getting a rundown of what the lessons are going to be like and what goals I want to achieve, etc. Next week I start with learning how to breathe from my diaphragm and doing scales. I'm wondering if I'm disciplined enough to practice for half an hour five days a week, but I guess I'll find out.

New songs are being worked on, holidays are almost over, things returning to normal, hooray.

Tonight, sick with a cold, I'm mulling over the idea of getting a Primesounds account. I had been thinking about blowing some money on sample CDs lately so I can have royalty free ill fresh drum sounds at my disposal for whenever I want to be a lame whiteboy hip hopper, but I'm afraid of spending $150 Canadian on a CD and it being garbage.

Primesounds offers a huge amount of samples and loops for download. A yearly subscription costs $150 US, which is a little under the price of two sample CDs. I've run through the library a bit and previewed some loops and liked a kit if them.

I may get one of the Megabyte accounts and give it a shot. $15 for 50 MB downloads, $50 for 300 MB, with various flavors in between.

Still, the idea of robbing someone with a lot of sample CDs does seem more awesome somehow.

Creative Commons is a pretty cool idea and actually something I've been thinking about for a while now (though admittedly not nearly in such detail). Essentially the Creative Commons is a set of licenses intended for artists to use to clearly specify which elements of their copyright they wish to enforce. I think it's an interesting idea and I may look into it further when I have a bit more time to spend staring at license agreements.

While I think the icons they provide are very useful for creators to communicate their copyright desires to other people, I'm unsure of how useful such a license would really be if a copyright dispute went to court. Would a judge take the licenses seriously?

I've finally updated the FAQ with how to get the source files for Brad Sucks songs. Basically, I'll mail you a CD with the source for the songs you want for five US dollars. That's shipping and everything.

Today I finally got off my ass and set up singing lessons for this weekend. My girlfriend bought me a gift certificate for lessons on my birthday (which was on November 14th) and I've managed to put them off until today (which is December 12th). That's because I rule, baby! I tried taking lessons one time before but the instructor had some stability problems so I only got one lesson out of that. I'm hoping this one goes a bit better. I'm thinking it will. Then I'll be like the singingest jerk there ever was.

Despite being busy beyond my means as it is, for some reason I've decided to put together a Stripcreator CD Swap. I'm hoping it doesn't get too annoying or I'll have to hide and cry.

I finally got the about page back online which explains a few things about the site as well as a more detailed list of my songs. Thanks to the coolness of Movable Type, you're able to leave comments on the songs as well.

My songs have finally been approved and put online on my MP3.com page so if for some reason you really want to hear streaming crappier versions of my songs, you now have that option.

Slowly I modify this website, hooray for me. When I sat down to figure out a web design, I wanted something really colourful, with hearts and rainbows, but grey was the best I could do. Maybe in the next design when I'm rich and can pay someone to do it for me.

The new song notification list is back on the sidebar. Now I have to get the faq and other crud back online and the site will officially be back to normal. Hooray for me again!

I've been thinking that maybe instead of bothering to deal with redesigning this site I should consider a more long term solution, such as building a giant, deadly robot that I can use to destroy other webmasters, leaving their vacated web designs up for grabs. The other bonus of this method is that I could probably adapt the robot to get other things for me like original artwork, recording equipment and food, whereas web design skills are pretty much useless in those areas.

It is the 26th anniversary of my existence today. How about that.

Over the weekend I updated my page on mp3.com so that I could receive more spam from them. The songs are still awaiting approval. The only noteworthy part of the whole process was my retarded difficulty with the genre options I was given. I don't like to be a wuss about categorizing my stuff. I realize labels make things easier for people, so I'm okay with that. I have a bit of difficulty deciding where my stuff fits even when I can make up my own genre names or cobble two or three together.

While adding it on mp3.com, I was trying to categorize my song “Overreacting”, which in my head I think of as some sort of funny/sad ballad kind of thing. It has a guitar solo in it too, complicating matters a bit. Okay, I'll put it down as a “ballad”, I think.

But there's no category for 'ballad'. There's nothing even remotely sad, except maybe under the Easy Listening category (Mood Music? Love Songs?). I could re-do it with acoustic guitars and put it under Folk, maybe. Hmm.

So I'm thinking this over, wondering where all the other soft piano-y (sort of) songs go and I scroll down to the Metal category and see these listed:

Metal – Alternative Metal, Black Metal, Dark Ambient/Noise, Death Metal, Doom/Stoner Metal, Gothic Metal, Grindcore, Heavy Metal, Industrial Metal, Instrumental Metal, Metal Cover Songs, Metalcore, Nu-Metal, Power Metal, Progressive Metal, Rapcore, Spiritual Metal / Christian Metal, Thrash/Speed Metal.

Jesus Christ, man! I enjoy metal as much as the next jerk, but save some genre names for the rest of us, guys. I'm just trying to find somewhere to put my gay piano song over here.

It's been a busy week here at Brad Sucks headquarters. My website Stripcreator reached its 100,000th created comic strip, which despite my best efforts has triggered some sort of wave of nostalgia in me. Almost two years of running that site, over 100,000th comics. Very strange. I spent more time than I should have reworking my other site In4mador and I'm not quite done yet, though I think it can probably coast as-is for a little while.

I still need to whip this Brad Sucks page into shape, what with its default web design and all.

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.