A Modest Proposal To The RIAA. Kevin Aylward writes that casual music swappers could be persuaded to run a piece of software that certified their computer as free of copyright violations if given free music by the music industry. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not really sure how such a piece of software would work. How could you keep it from being cracked wide open and abused?

The end of the Pet Rock Star^S Blogathon. You can check out the two songs that were recorded in 24 hours, raising $1,120 for the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation. All pretty awesome, congratulations Shannon and Scott!

Scott and Shannon have finished their first song. It's been pretty awesome watching it all unfold and also having Shannon's mom call me a bitch. Rock on!

Blogathon 2003 is a-go and I'm finding it pretty cool. I posted this thread to Metafilter to find out what other Blogathons people are watching and to get the word out about my favorite at the moment, Pet Rock Star^S. From Metafilter I have found out about Crushing Krisis, who is, apparently the original song blogger.

If I have the stones, I may try this myself one day. I'm not sure I could condense all my retarded artist angst into a 24 hour period however.

Robert X. Cringely has come up with a pretty interesting shit-disturbing music industry scheme he calls Son of Napster. It's a lengthy article with a lot of stock talk I don't understand, but the general idea seems to be: someone starts a public company and buys all the CDs on the market. Then Brad comes along and buys one share in the company for $20, making me part owner of all of the CDs currently on the market. Under Fair Use, allegedly I should be legally entitled to copies of all of those CDs.

Clever idea. I'm not sure how possible it is, but I'd really like to see someone try it.

Everyone should be paying attention to Scott Andrew and Shannon Campbell's Pet Rock Star^S blogathon project:

For 24 straight hours on July 26, Shannon Campbell and Scott Andrew will be co-writing songs online as part of Blogathon 2003, to raise funds for the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation.

Shannon and Scott will be posting every step of the songwriting process here on this site — lyrics, melodies, rough mix MP3s, everything.

Very cool project for a noble cause. I'm real interested to see how it goes and have made my small pledge. Good luck Scott and Shannon!

I begin physiotherapy for my arm next week on Tuesday and Thursday. I'm pretty jazzed to hopefully get this retarded arm juiced back up to full nerding and rocking capacity. I am also getting dangerously close to finishing the compilation of my music, which I will call 'my album'. I'll be glad when that's over with.

Assuming I would be crucified for making a song that sounds, well, like it does, I posted Making Me Nervous to Somesongs. To my surprise it's not being bashed as quickly as I assumed it would. You can check it out here. As of this posting it's rated 9.29 with 7 votes and some nice comments. I assume as more people check it out the rating will go down (there's always a 'bad' vote in there somewhere to ruin the day). But that's still far better than I expected it to do.

DM2 to MIDI adds the delicious power of MIDI to the previously almost useless Mixman DM2 turntable controller. I secretly wanted one of these last Christmas, but after I found out it had no MIDI support I blew it off.

Making Me NervousGenre: Dance/Rock Length: 2:26 Date: 07/23/03 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Well, this is what happens when everyone tells me that I should make more rock songs. I go off and make a dance track. I was actually just playing around with synths and sequencers and it all just kinda happened.

I go to doctor. Doctor say "surgery or physiotherapy". I say "physiotherapy". Now I make appointment, hope insurance cover it. Also I got my electric guitar back and it is way better now.

After I saw Saturday Looks Good To Me on Saturday, I was shamed by Fred Thomas's guitar work. The neck on my electric guitar has been warping, screwing up the action and my dumbass arm is still in pretty much constant pain. So I took my guitar to the guitar doctor today and tomorrow I'm going to the body doctor to get my arm looked at again. Woo woo.

This was a post about how good Saturday Looks Good To Me was when I saw them live, until some blogging software overwrote it. I explained that Saturday Looks Good To Me kicked ass but that the albums I bought at the show don't really do them justice. I went on to suggest that you too should see them live if they happen to be visiting your area. I posted a link to the tour dates, which are here. But of course all of that too was overwritten by some blogging software.

I've been using a piece of software called GT-Manager to manage the patches on my Boss GT-6. Following is the story about how I tried to buy a copy of it and it has all (so far) gone retardedly wrong. The other night the software stops working, the evaluation period expired. During the evaluation period I couldn't save, once it was up I couldn't even trigger patches from it anymore. This happened in the middle of recording and was a hassle and I decided that I should register the program finally and get it over with.

I head over to the website and I find out that it's $30 US to register. No problem. I order it through Kagi. At the end of the process it says it's going to forward me to another page where I can generate a key to register my software. Apparently it was supposed to open in another window and my popup blocker ate it. I viewed the source, tried to get at the page manually but that didn't work. I tried to reload the page, but then I guess because it was a secure connection, it had expired and was gone forever.

So there I am $30 poorer and with no registration key for GT-Manager. I immediately send an email to the company explaining what had happened and gave them my product ID number (the number that your unlock code corresponds to).

No response comes right away. In the meanwhile I am frustrated by not being able to use GT-Manager when I need it, especially since I just put money down for it. I remove the program from my system, registry keys and all and reinstall, which puts me back in evaluation mode so at least I can trigger patches from it again.

Days pass with no reply. I finally am wondering if maybe the author has died and I should see about getting my money back. I send an email to Kagi and the author saying that I hadn't received my registration key from the company and wasn't sure what to do.

Right away the author of the program wrote back, apologized saying he was out of town on business for the past couple of days and gave me my unlock code. I punch it in and it doesn't work.

Turns out that the product ID changed when I reinstalled the evaluation version. So now I am an idiot and need a second unlock code. I write back to the author explaining my situation and give him the new product ID. It's been a day now and I'm wondering if I'll get a reply at all. Seems likely he'd think I'm trying to rip him off and get two unlock codes for the price of one. And I have no way to prove otherwise.

It's a very stupid situation. I should have disabled my popup blocker (I generally do when ordering things), and I should have known that the product ID was in the registry and thought about it before I got impatient and started fussing around. I think I assumed it was machine specific instead of installation specific, if I thought about it at all.

All in all, a pretty weak experience. The idea has occurred to me to try to set my product ID number back to what it was so that I can use the key I was given, but I really don't want to screw around with it anymore until I hear back in case I screw up the ID again. If he's kind enough to give me a second key I really don't think I'd be able to find the nerve within myself to ask for a third.

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.