I've been told that the video footage for the Overreacting video is being picked up today. So that's pretty cool.

On Friday night I made the decision to quit taking lessons with my particular vocal teacher. She was very nice and a very good singer, but I felt like I was paying $20 a week to just hang out and sing for half an hour. Very little direction or advice or instruction was given, which kept frustrating me as I felt I could do all of that on my own. Each time I'd get frustrated I would try to push the lessons more in that direction, which would help temporarily and then kind of peter out. I felt like I was way more concerned with goals than my teacher was.

So I decided to quit, which is a drag and makes this my second somewhat failed attempt at getting a vocal coach.

I'm going to continue on with the scales I was taught beceause I did feel that practicing them was improving my voice. I did confirm that I was breathing properly, which was something that concerned me. So it wasn't all a loss.

Probably when I work up the nerve and vocal angst again I'll go and look for another teacher. La di da.

I've been meaning to complain here about books on mixing and recording not including audio example CDs. I don't understand why they don't all come with them. They don't cost much to include and it seems stupid to even try to talk about audio concepts without audio examples to illustrate what the hell you're talking about. I own a lot of books on recording, and yet for some reason Sound Advice on Developing Your Home Studio is the first one I've bought with an included audio CD. This is just one book in the six book InstantPro series and as the name implies, it mostly covers things like cables, monitor positioning and room acoustics.

It would be a good book without the audio CD. For a small book (79 pages), it has quite a bit of detailed and practical information for the beginner. But with the CD, it's fantastic. You can write pages and pages about why it's a good idea to worry about your studio acoustics, but one good audio example will get the job done better.

The book covered a lot of stuff I was already familiar with and didn't have a lot of new information for me. However, the audio CD was well worth it and I'm really interested in checking out some of the other books and CDs in the series, particularly Compressors, Limiters, Expanders & Gates, and Equalizers, Reverbs & Delays.

Thanks to my sworn enemy mAAk for putting together this link button for me:

Now you all have no excuse for not linking to me all over the frigging place.

Work Out FineGenre: Rock/Folk Length: 4:03 Date: 04/24/03 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Here's a song I wrote the other day while having various retarded life issues. My voice is all low because I had a cold at the time. I had to remove all the takes with me coughing in them. I didn't realize the cold was affecting my voice until I listened to the recordings and apparently I'm too lazy to re-do them.

Cortisone shot went okay. Everyone keeps telling me they hurt really, really badly. At Easter my aunt was explaining how incredibly painful hers was. This one was even better than the first one and the first one was OK. My arm didn't do that crazy seizing up thing for hours afterwards either, so that's a bonus. It's just a bit sore.

And the roid rage is a refreshing change of pace.

For your records, today I get another cortisone shot in dee arm at 1:15pm.

Madonna Has Choice Words For Music Pirates:

The Madonna camp is looking to clamp down on online peer-to-peer piracy of her new Maverick album, "American Life," by flooding file-sharing networks with decoy files. Those who download tracks from such services as KaZaA are greeted by the voice of Madonna asking, "What the f*** do you think you're doing?" The new album is due April 22; the title track is No. 37 this week on the Billboard Hot 100.

Sick as a DogGenre: Rock Length: 3:12 Date: 04/16/2003 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I wrote and recorded this pretty quickly. Coincidentally, right after recording it I got a cold which I am suffering from as I write this.

Tuning Windows XP for Audio/Music Applications may be of interest to some of the PC home recordists out there.

Tori Amos has a cool contest idea. Basically, you make and submit a video for a Tori Amos song and possibly win some money and video equipment. I wonder what will come of the video once the contest is over. Will there be significant publicity given to it or is it just going into a vault somewhere? Will it actually make it into rotation on any video stations?

Being not the least bit visually artistic, I find these sort of collaborative things very interesting and neat. If I had two grand and a bunch of gear to hand out as prizes I'd definitely try something like this with my songs.

Despite the cold in my head and throat, I've had a chance to play around with my new Behringer UB1204 mixer and so far everything seems great with it. It turned out I didn't need any extra cables, I just needed to use my brain. It was a little different to set up than my Mackie but I pretty much have everything working the way I want it right now, I think.

Using my amateur hearing, I can detect no difference in quality of the mixer. The preamps sound a tiny bit different to my ear, but I can't really tell if that's a good or a bad thing. I'll probably have to use it a bit more to be able to make some sort of decision on that. I'm assuming that they're probably fine.

All in all, considering the price and quality of it so far, I'm very happy with the unit and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a mixing board.

I bought myself one of those Behringer UB1204's. It cost $304 Canadian, which isn't too bad. So far I've only just set it up quickly and played a few things through it and it sounds very good. Not noticing much, if any, difference between it and the Mackie. Except that the right channel is strong. Hooray. The EQs also seem very nice, possibly even nicer than the Mackie ones.

I also apparently needed to buy more cables. Just when you think you own all the cables in the world, apparently you need two more.

I'm also not really sure how to hook this thing up in the optimum way.

Also I have a cold and my throat is sore. That is not awesome.

Turns out my first choice of cheap replacement mixer, the Behringer Eurorack MX1604A for $220, has been discontinued.

I was told the new equivalent unit is the Behringer UB1204-PRO for $264.

I'm not sure what the hell the 12 in UB1204 is supposed to stand for because while I'm no mathematician, I only see eight inputs on there. Unless you're being retarded and counting the XLR inputs as an additional 4 inputs, which as I mentioned in the beginning of this sentence would be retarded. But the channel numbers on the board only go up to 8 so I don't even know if I buy that explanation. Dumb.

It also only has two stereo pair inputs which is right on the line of adequacy for me. I'd happily give up two of those preamp mono ins for one more stereo pair.

Just buy a mixer with more inputs, you might say to me. Okay no problem, but the next model up is the Eurorack UB1622FX-PRO which while having two extra stereo inputs and channel inserts also has all this effects crap I don't want on my mixer at all.

Getting back to complaining about the UB1204 -- the assumption seems to be that I, Brad extreme budget musician, am going to be doing a whole hell of a lot of microphone work -- up to four at once even. I've never used more than one microphone at a time and I don't see it happening any time soon. I'm not all that different from your average cheap-ass geek musician. Less micing is going on and way, way more DI. Why aren't mixing boards reflecting this?

The other annoying aspect is this all-in-one preamp and mixer business. Honestly after having my Mackie die I'd like a less expensive mixer that has all the same features (clean signal, ALT-3-4, mute buttons, simple EQ) but didn't bother with preamps. It seems like it would cut the price down considerably and you could go off and blow your money on a nice preamp. And when one of the two died you could save a bit of money just replacing that part. But there doesn't seem to be any option for that either.

So it looks like unless some better option turns up I'll probably grudgingly (and desperately) pick one of these UB1204's up on the weekend and hope I can live with the input situation.

The right channel on my mixing board has been wacky for a couple of months now. Whenever I turned it off for a while and then turned it back on, the right channel wouldn't work. After leaving it on for a while and playing at loud volumes it would eventually come back. I decided to never turn my mixing board off again.

This worked well until yesterday when the power company replaced three hydro poles outside. The power went off for an hour and a half and since it came back my mixing board has been much worse than before, cutting out randomly no matter what I do. That is what we call lame.

It would probably cost about $150 Canadian to get it repaired and I'd have to ship it to Montreal and the knobs are all wearing out too and bleah, and it would cost $500+ for a new one. Or I could go with one of these small Behringer Eurorack things (or any one of the other models, I'm not sure which ones right for me).

Or I don't know what. I feel I am at a crossroads. A very stupid crossroads.

Dirt BagGenre: Rock/Hip Hop Length: 3:45 Date: 04/09/2003 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Here's another one of my diddly damn songs. I'm not really sure how this one turned out, but online it goes regardless of quality control. I was very pleased with myself up until about about the eight millionth listen. I hope you enjoy it.

Holy Jesus hell, I finally put together an Extras section for miscellaneous Brad Sucks items. I apparently only had two things to throw in there, but at least it's done and when all y'all send in your drawings, graffiti photos and garage remixes I'll have a place to put them. I also finally updated the little faq thing with information about the gear I use, which seems to be of interest to some people.

Apparently the auditions went well and the video is going to be shot on April 18th. I am a curious little kitten re: how it will turn out.

Apparently auditions for an Overreacting video are happening this weekend, which is a neat and exciting thing to think about. I'm really interested to see what comes of it.

Brad Sucks seems to be the pick of the day on www.coolstop.com for some reason. That's pretty cool. Thanks to everybody who has linked to me, by the way. It makes me feel all nice in my soul.