I wonder if there's anything worse in life than recording vocals. It seems hard to believe that there could be anything worse, but some people that I know insist that such things exist.

Boy I hope I never run into them.

Thankfully the days of recording vocals are coming to a close now that Vocaloid is on the scene:

VOCALOID allows song writers to generate superb authentic-sounding singing on their PCs by simply inputting the words and notes of their compositions. The software synthesizes the sound from "vocal libraries" of recordings of actual singers, such as those being developed by Zero-G, and retains the vocal qualities of the original singing voices to reproduce real-sounding vocals. VOCALOID also features simple commands enabling users to add expressive effects, and as it runs on Windows-based PCs, amateur enthusiasts as well as professionals can now enjoy creating music with great-sounding vocals.

There's a demo MP3 here of Vocaloid synthesizing a line in Japanese. It's pretty damn impressive. I'd like to hear an English demo though, I can't tell how badly it's mangling the language.

Good to see folks other than me are still interested in replacing all artists with robots. I will name them artbots.

Here's a fun thread from Homerecording.com which illustrates an interesting songwriter phenomenon I've encountered. In my experience, when you start talking about structures and formulas and tricks and techniques around musicians and songwriters and music fans, everyone who cares enough about the subject to hear you out almost always goes totally insane.

I don't really understand why that is, but I've never found a songwriter forum anywhere that had people who seemed interested in figuring out how you make songs entertaining for people. I secretly believe that the people who know about such things purposefully fill up songwriting forums with crazy ramblings about muses and souls.

Now that I have outed the conspiracy I believe I will be assassinated.

Courtney Love signs with Virgin. This is kinda interesting because of Courtney's sorta famous 2000 speech re: the music biz. A clip:

In the same speech, you said, "We don't have to work with major labels anymore, because the digital economy is creating new ways to distribute and market music." Did you think about offering your music solely on a digital basis, and, why, ultimately, did you decide to go the most traditional route possible?

When I made that speech in 2000, there were a lot of people worth a lot of money who wanted to change the music business. In the end, though, no one had a business model that made any sense to me. I wasn't going to fund my album by making a deal with someone who had no idea how to distribute music to fans. If someone had made a real effort to sell music online (by the song or by the album), maybe those opportunities wouldn't have been blown. Most every one of my Internet friends either went bust in the crash or bought sports teams. For whatever reason, none of those ideas worked out.

She also comments on iTunes.

Just in time for the Outside the Inbox compilation, Metafilter has a link to and a thread about the Top Ten Spam Subject Lines. Interesting read. It also pointed me to this contest by The Washington Post to come up with the worst spam subject line.

My most recent spam subject line is: "Free Golf Wedge - Best in the World!" which I found a little surprising for some reason. I get so many ads for penis enlargment and hot sex and free money and drugs that I guess it takes free golf wedge spam to surprise me now.

Almost every time I start to do anything creative I look around to see if a decent generator is available to help me out. I don't know why, but this is how I wound up writing and running a comic strip generator, which turned out to be about a kabillion times more work than just coping with putting clipart together in Photoshop. Lyrics are one area where I'm constantly looking into generators and tools and toys for some automated inspiration and am almost always disappointed. The Google searches have been the same for years, and even before that, the same group of DOS programs were kicking around the public domain BBS scene.

The best one I've ever used is Babble by Korenthal Associates in 1991. It's really almost perfect as far as I'm concerned. It allows you to load text files in and then mix them on the fly as you would audio on a mixing board, controlling the levels of the text files in the generated output and at the same time its overall coherence. It has logging, display speed control, even a whole bunch of goofy fun text effects if you want to make your generated text sound like Elmer Fudd dialogue.

The only problems are the limitations. You can only load four text files in at a time and they can't be very large. I'm not sure what the actual memory limit is, but one 100k file analyzed at high resolution won't even fit in memory. Twelve years ago that was an understandable limit, but I have a massive amount of memory on this machine and I'd like to use it to generate crazy nonsense, please.

But yet since 1991 nothing else interesting seems to have come along (on the PC at least). William S. Burroughs and David Bowie have both brought cut-up technique to reasonably mainstream attention and it seems like language nerds should have been all over this by now. I can't be the only person interested in this.

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.