I am gently reminding everyone that the deadline for submissions to Outside The Inbox, my songs about spam compilation is August 1st and JESUS CHRIST IT'S RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHAT TO DO THIS ISN'T HAPPENING!! Oh. Whew. I already finished my contribution, so I have nothing to worry about.

NSKit, some really good and free acoustic drum samples:

the aim: to create the best sampled acoustic drum-kit available on the net for free. or maybe just the best sampled drum-kit, period.

I just went through hell for several days because my co-located web server was apparently overheating. Dear god, I just want to lie down forever.

I have been busy and tired and annoyed. My modem, which half blew up a month ago, blew up the rest of the way this morning. It seems like every time I leave here and come back, something is a little bit more broken. I'm beginning to suspect people are breaking in here and using my stuff just a little bit too hard. I've been trying to put my little album compilation together, which has been about 50/50 good experience and neurotic waste of time experience.

I had a three day addiction to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City which is now thankfully over.

I've been reworking the forums on Stripcreator to deal with community issues. The forums really get only a fraction of the traffic compared to the rest of Stripcreator and yet they are a million times more annoying to maintain.

I keep almost posting things here, but they're all links stolen from Scott Andrew.

Here's a post I made on the Home Recording BBS:

I've been looking around for information on writing vocal harmonies but haven't been able to find anything decent. Anyone I ask seems to say "you just do them" but that seems scary and wrong to me. Can anyone share any tips or guidelines or anything?

Do you just work them out methodically based on the key or do you feel your way towards them and practice eventually makes it intuitive? It seems to be hit and miss with me. Sometimes I can come up with a harmony line and other times I'm just lost.

Some interesting replies.

I've been working on tidying up some of my older songs for an album compilation thing and I think it's driving me a bit batty. Generally I try to work real fast so I don't have time to get all neurotic and indecisive about things. I have an almost unlimited propensity for just screwing around and worrying about tiny pointless details.

Here's a link to some free one-shot drum samples for Muzys, Reason and/or DR-008.

There's a great description of Scott Andrew's drum sequencing technique over on his weblog here. It's really interesting, some great insights into drum sequencing.

Well, I can't remember what entries I lost on this here weblog during the hard drive crash, so here are a few points of interest: 1. I bought a Shure SM57 microphone. So far I'm pretty happy with it. I was told it would be louder than my SM48 but I haven't noticed a significant difference. Anyhow, I like owning the industry standard all-purpose dynamic microphone. I'm now giving some thought to maybe buying a nice-ish pre-amp.

2. My Cubase SX Complete book arrived in the mail. Despite some nervousness about buying a book from the author and rather than from a faceless online store like Amazon, I've been pleasantly surprised. Shipping was real quick, billing was easy (through Paypal) and the book is excellent so far. I'm about two thirds through it and am hoping to finish it off this weekend. So far it's vastly superior to Cubase SX Power, the other Cubase book I bought a while back. I almost don't want it to end because I feel like I'm learning so many awesome things.

3. Work slowly progresses on my little album thingy. Trying to spiff up my old tracks may eventually drive me frigging crazy.

4. Sumday, the new Grandaddy album, is fantastic.

So the hard drive in the server that I run all my sites off of fried itself the night before last. It cost a hundred dollars to replace and lost a bunch of data both of users and my own personal stuff. I had pretty recent backups so it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, but it still was zero fun for all. Things are slowly getting reinstalled. I'm still assessing the damage on this here weblog. Images and some MP3s may be lost. It will take a little while to get all things back in their places, if it can be done at all. But we're back on the air.

Derek of CD Baby reports on a meeting with Apple regarding indie music and their iTunes service here. The article has a lot of interesting and exciting information. Particularly this bit:

* Apple has hired an editorial staff with backgrounds in music to decide what gets featured. * Editorial team makes decisions every day as to what goes where. * Big labels don't get preferential treatment. * "We pick music we like, and we think everyone else is going to like." * "We've had a lot of people offer money", but Apple refuses money, and has no plan to ever accept money for placement. * Even what looks like a banner ad at the top of the screen is put there by Apple. * When an audience member doubted they'd stay with this policy, they pointed to their 20 years of selling Apple computers, and never selling icons on the desktop or any of the other things that companies have offered to pay them a lot of money to do. * (Plus Steve Jobs reminded us they have $41 billion in the bank and are not in debt. They're not desparate for cash.)

I'm not morally against ads or product placement, but I do think that in this particular case the iTunes service has the potential to become so much more than another bloated, useless mp3.com type bullshit music portal thing. Developing and maintaing the trust that they're actually trying to sell you music that you'll enjoy rather than forcing label interests on you will be so much more valuable in the long term to them. Imagine Rolling Stone magazine with a "click here to purchase this song or album" button after each review and they make money every time even one person follows their recommendation.

If you ran a system like that, why would you ever want to pollute up your reputation with trying to to foist a bunch of garbage on people?

I hope it all goes well for them.

The other day I received a reply from Neeru at the Creative Commons to the scenario which I posted here. Some folk were interested, so here's the reply:

The intention of the license is to give person X and Y a clear understanding of what terms they are agreeing to, hence the license, and the contract. The Creative Commons license carves out an exception to a full copyright, and is a contract that is agreed to by two people, and therefore, if used correctly, should stand up in court.

I'm not really sure what I think of this. On one hand, it sounds good and nice and fair and sensible. On the other, it seems awfully optimistic that everything will just work out for everybody. Perhaps it's just my complete lack of understanding about the law that makes it seem that way.

But I still wonder if the people (rightfully) taking advantage of the exceptions in copyright law specified by the licenses are going to wind up getting their asses handed to them at some point for taking it seriously.

I spent some time this morning looking for some good Freeware VST distortion plugins. I've been interested in making my mixes sound messier and a little wilder and I find the distortion plugins that come with Cubase a little weak. They either don't mangle sound the way I'd like or they sound like a cheap metal distortion pedal, which always sounds lame to me. Anyhow, after trying out a whole bunch of them, the best distortion plugin I've found so far is Cyanide 2.0. It's really a vast improvement over the effects that came with Cubase, so I'm pretty happy.

I have been told that you can now trade Brad Sucks shares on Blogshares. I apparently currently have two shareholders and I take my responsibility to them very seriously. battybaby and Pete, I will not let you down, whoever you are.

Here is a funny comic called Recording Artists Safety Guide To the Beach.

I ordered Cubase SX Complete on the weekend. I wasn't terribly impressed with the Cubase SX Power! book I bought and am hoping this one is better. The folks in the Cubase forums seem to indicate it is. You can never own too many manuals would be my motto if I didn't own too many manuals. Of interest on the site to other Cubase users though, is the Cubase SX Complete Beginners' Guide, which is a stripped down PDF version of the book with all the advanced stuff cut out.

I also found the Cubase SX Key Commands template in Excel format to be pretty handy, though I need to get them printed out somewhere, I think.

This guitar was built by Linda Manzer and is the craziest I have ever seen:

In 1984 Pat Metheny asked me to design and build a guitar with " as many strings as possible" The resulting collaboration was the Pikasso guitar. In 1992 I was asked by the late Scott Chinery to build a strictly acoustic version of Metheny's Pikasso. Thus, Pikasso II. This second Pikasso was recently on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in a show called "Dangerous Curves".

It's Raining Men A short film done by dcomposed, with my Pope Song as the soundtrack. He says:

It is a dramatic reenactment of the events that transpired on 9/11/2001 filmed in my back yard.

I think it's quite wicked.

Well, I think the time has come for me to pack up my little songs and put them on an album. I don't think I'll sell many, but it seems like a good idea if only for categorization purposes. "That's my old stuff where I was indie, this is my new stuff where I totally sold out." I haven't decided yet how I'm going to do this. I've been wondering for a while now whether I should just slap better quality versions on a CD in chronological order and call it a day or if I should make an attempt to revise and edit the songs and try somehow to make a more cohesive package out of them.

Just putting the songs as-is on an album feels a bit like a cop-out and it's also troubling how bad some of the recordings sound to me now. However, trying to fix up my old songs seems like it might be a big fat waste of time that I could be spending making new music. Also it might drive me totally insane.

I am posting this mostly to shame my future self if I wuss out or for some reason don't follow through with this simple goal.

Bowie Bonds Under Review:

Moody's Investors Service says it may downgrade about $55 million of bonds backed by music royalties of rock icon David Bowie in light of the sales slump in the recording industry.

Interesting to see the effects of waning sales in this area of the music industry as well.