I Think I Started A TrendGenre: Rock/Folk Length: 3:02 Date: 05/14/03 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Here's a simple folk/rock sort of song made by me. It has some crummy slide guitar in it. I'm not really sure how it turned out.

Junk email. Spam. Art? Outside the Inbox will be a compilation of songs inspired by the often bizarre and intriguing subject lines of unsolicited junk emails.

Some examples from my inbox over the past month:

• Your Urgent Attention Please
• Do You Remember Me?
• No Pumps, No Weights, No Surgery
• Haven't Felt Like This For Ages
• Bonnie Forgot Her Clothes
• Re: Your Bowels

Interested in contributing a song? All submissions are welcome! The only rule is that the title of your song must be an actual junk email subject line. You can choose them from my list or you can provide your own (please be ready to provide the email).

The deadline for submissions is August 1st, 2003.

If you've recorded a song for submission, please email the URL of your 192k encoded MP3 to me at outsidetheinbox@bradsucks.net. Links only please. If you send the MP3 it will bounce and be lost forever.

This is a non-profit compilation. The CD will be sold on Café Shops or Mixonic at cost and all rights to the songs will remain peacefully with the original artists.

If you'd like to be notified when Outside the Inbox is released, please send an email to oti_notify@bradsucks.net.

Update 08/15: The compilation is almost complete, just waiting on one or two other tracks and then we should be good to go. The submissions I received sound fantastic, thanks to you all!

Reason 2.5 is out today! Advanced Reverb, Vocoder, Scream 4 Sound Destruction Unit, Unison and splitters & mergers for audio and CV.

I'm looking forward to playing around with the new additions, but the main thing I'd love to see would be for them to open up the whole annoying proprietary Refill format. That would actually increase its usefulness as a product and strip out a whole level of stupidity users have to cope with. I know that will never happen, but it would be nice.

Remix Marillion's latest album Anoraknophobia. I've been a big fan of this sort of thing for a while now. I've been offering the source for my dumb songs for five American dollars and zero prize money for a year or so, but so far no-one's all that interested. Cool move by Marillion. They have fans and stuff.

Groove Agent just shipped the other day. What Groove Agent is:

Groove Agent is a stunning new VSTi that provides you with ready-to-go drum rhythms in only a few mouse clicks. Groove Agent can play the hottest, most popular and influential styles from the past 50 years of music history - inside your VST host application. Based on quality drum samples most of which were recorded especially to analog tape, Groove Agent puts a top studio drummer at your fingertips.

This may be the death of music, but I really want it.

While driving home tonight thinking about all the spam waiting for me in my inbox, I had an idea that made me laugh. The idea would be to put together a compilation of songs by independent musicians where the title of the song was a subject from a piece of junk mail. I went through my spam folder when I got home and here's an idea of what the tracklist would look like: 1. Bad Credit Need Money 2. I'll Make Your Dream Come True 3. VIRGIN BABES LOOKING FOR PARTNER (ON NEW HARDCORE PARTY) 4. Get Your Pills Now 5. Ready to Enlarge Your Penis 6. Bonnie Forgot Her Clothes 7. We Can Pay Off Your Debt 8. Is Your Woman Satisfied Today 9. Viagra, Soma, Fioricent, Prescribed Online for Free 10. Women will flock to you 11. Are You Sick of Spam 12. Toner Cartridge Prices You Requested 13. Brad Feel Happier About Your Appearance

For some reason I'm actually giving some serious though to putting a collaborative project like this together and selling it for cost on Cafe Press or something. I think it would make me happy to turn junk email into art somehow.

Lately, while thinking about putting together a CD compilation of my tracks so far, I've been struggling with trying to understand mixing. It's one of those things that I don't think I get the worst results in, but I feel I don't really understand what the hell I'm doing. I always feel lost. So I've been trying to use spectrum analyzers to understand what's going on with the frequencies in my recordings. The one in Cubase is okay but I find it a bit complicated and cumbersome. While reading through the kvr-vst forums I came across this thread where Jonathan Ayres of ConcreteFX posted this excellent QSpec spectrum analyzer plugin that he made.

It's pretty cool and is something I've wanted for a while. Just from running one of my tracks through it and watching the activity of the track and the individual channels I feel like I have a little bit better idea where various instruments sit. Which I assume will be helpful when it's time to get them to stop clashing.

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.