I just ordered the book Cubase SX Power! from Amazon because I am a book ordering chump. I was trying to back up some of my Cubase SX projects and wound up stumbling around retardedly in VSTi windows and other dumbness and got to thinking about what a goddamn ignant monkey I am. So a book has been bought. It will take a week to ship, which sucks. I like immediacy.

I totally went to my second singing lesson on Saturday. I stood in the middle of a room while a sassy woman sat behind a piano and yelled at me to open my mouth wider. If that sounds exciting, you are mistaken. I am now armed with scales that I'm supposed to practice for half an hour a day. I'm a bit worried about this because historically I absolutely suck at practicing anything that isn't fun.

My classical guitar lessons when I was a kid consisted of me constantly having to lie that I had practiced during the week. I pretty much have to be tricked into practicing by it being a lot of fun, which is how I got to be a decent typist and not too bad at Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4.

We will see.

Lately the thought of making albums has been on my mind. Not the actual physical pressing of them, because I don't think I could sell any. But the idea of putting together 10-12 songs with one theme in mind kind of appeals to me. ie. This is my sad acoustic record, this is my dancey party record, this is my experimental noise record, this is my eclectic "look how all over the place I am! Imagine what my personal life is like!" record. I tend to like to screw around with a lot of different styles and also take really long breaks in between recording songs and I'm wondering if this would focus things a bit and provide some direction and clear goals when I'm writing and recording a new track. And it seems like it might be fun.

Never Get OutGenre: Pop/Dance Time: 1:54 Date: 01/09/2003 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I have this thing I do where I work really, really hard on a song for weeks and weeks, slowly re-recording parts of it, changing lyrics, adding and removing parts and overall torturing myself about it. Then at the last moment I throw it out and write something silly in half an hour that makes me laugh. This is one of those.

Hey Brad,I've spent some time on your site and had a good read. Im looking at setting up a similar sort of studio but am unsure of thec omponants that i will need to get my up and running. I also have come to the conclussion that the event 20/20bas are the way to go and i am tossing up between them and the behringer truth b2031 monitors. Any advise?

if you could help me at all with info on your setup etc i would appreciate it. adam

Hi adam,

The main components of my setup are my Echo Darla24 sound card, my Mackie 1202-VLZ mixing board and my Event 20/20bas monitors. Everything else I have -- guitars and microphones and so on -- plug in to the Mackie and get recorded by the Darla24 and played back through the mixing board and on the monitors. It's pretty simple and straightforward, but it took a while to figure out.

I'm unfortunately not much help on deciding between monitors as the Events are the first pair I've ever had a chance to use extensively. When I was shopping for monitors I did look into the Behringers a bit, but the hype was better on the Events. I'm very, very happy with them and would haphazardly recommend them to anyone with a similar low rent home studio type set up.

Hope this helps.

I finally got off my lazy ass and posted my EMU ESI-2000 Sampler on eBay. Hooray! I hope it sells for a million kajillion dollars so I can retire and get all freaky eccentric!

They sawed off the edges of my teeth today! With a diamond-edged saw apparently!

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.