I bought the new computer junk and spent most of yesterday setting it up. It all went relatively smoothly except for various panicked moments of anxiety and stress + anger * stupidity. So far the 2600 and the new memory seems to be a nice speed increase over the 1600. Not tremendously different as far as the desktop goes, but I'm anticipating more dramatic changes once I get some actually demanding applications on here. Right now there are two problems. One is the noise of the fan (the Thermaltake Volcano 11). It's just stupid how loud it is, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I can't believe anyone could tolerate this noise level. I have a few options here, such as installing the manual fan control dial and seeing how slow I can run the fan without the chip exploding. A fan also came with the chip which I may take a shot at. And then if that doesn't work I can try my Zalman flower cooler in non-quiet mode (as I've been told quiet mode will not be enough to cool this processor). If none of those options pan out, then I guess I have to blow more money on something like a chump. I have no idea what it would be, but we'll see.

The other problem is my Echo Darla24 which is just a complete jackass of a sound card. I installed it and everything was working fine. I was all impressed and happy and listening to mp3s right away. Except it seems about once every half hour the system would lock and the sound goes EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in a high pitched whine.

I've experienced similar stuff with the Darla before so I'm hoping through a series of strategic yet random beatings to it I can get it to work with some stability again.

So now I'm sitting here installing programs with the Darla uninstalled listening to this new computer howl to verify if it is in fact the sound card causing these problems. This right here is rock and roll, baby.

Just thought I should mention that sometime soonish I'm going to be reorganizing the MP3s that I have online, probably replacing them with the album versions. So if there's anything that you want to keep, I'd grab it now before it's gone.

So I'm almost 100% sure I'm going to upgrade my main computer this weekend. The only reason I can find to upgrade these days is audio. On my AthlonXP 1600+ with 512MB there's almost nothing I do that taxes the system other than when I get all hardcore with music. My maybe new system: AthlonXP 2600+ CPU, Abit NF7 Nforce 2 Motherboard, a gig of DDR400 PC3200 RAM and a Thermaltake Volcano 11 CPU fan. This will cost me $635 Canadian before tax. Factor in an additional $100-$130 for another power supply if I decide I want to get this 1600 back up and running again as a secondary audio machine.

This upgrade has, as usual, spiraled stupidly out of control. It started out as "hey, I should buy a new motherboard and processor. that'd be nice". Then it didn't seem worth it if I didn't also upgrade to newer faster RAM. That doubled the price. Then I wondered if my Zalman Quiet CPU Cooler CNPS3100-Plus (which I love) would work with this new chip. I wrote to QuietPC and they told me it wouldn't work in quiet mode on it. So I'm buying what looks like a new quiet fan but I may wind up getting hosed on that as well.

The big question right now is how badly do I want this 1600 back up and running right away. It may be useful as a secondary audio machine which I could use to play soft synths off of. But one of the things I'm hoping for with the upgrade is that Cubase will be better able to do all of this stuff inside it rather than having to dick around with other devices and software and computers. Ho hum.

Dicer is an exciting new VST plugin from ConcreteFX:

Dicer is a PC VSTi beatslicer which can load in samples and then splits it into slices, each slice has it's own audio properties and can be triggered separately. Dicer can do everything from simple tempo alteration to complex phrase synthesis

I've played around with the demo a little bit and it's a lot of fun. I'm pretty intrigued by the possibilities it opens inside Cubase. I had looked around for a plugin that did this a while back but only found Phatmatik Pro which I found to be buggy and kind of a pain to deal with.

Author Orson Scott Card wrote this column about copyright. If you're like me, you have a real short attention span, so probably the best summary came from the Slashdot thread:

Maybe you pirate one of his e-books and you like it enough to buy the print version for the "feel."

Maybe you don't buy that one in print, but buy others either in paper or electronically because you like his writing.

Or maybe you decide he sucks as an author and never read anything of his again.

In any of these cases, what has he lost? Nothing. You weren't going to plop down $7 for his paperback anyhow.

The only way he loses is if you decide he is a great author, so you pirate all his books.

Even then he doesnt, technically, lose, he just doesnt gain, it's as if you never read his first book to find out how good he was.

I think it's difficult for most people to make the switch to this way of thinking but I'm pretty sure it's where things are going.

Brad Sucks patriot Kaddar did some Brad Sucks shirt designs which you can now get on Cafe Shops:

Click the images to take a closer look. Thanks Kaddar!

The Unhappy Clowns Society of Frankston has made a Barnyard Fun remix of my song Making Me Nervous:

I wanted to do something with farm animals. Then when I found out there's laws against that, I decided to stick a bunch of animal samples over a Brad Sucks song instead. I thought it would be funny. And maybe, just maybe, someone, somewhere might actually enjoy the song.

I found it pretty funny.

Reviews I write on this humble weblog will now also be posted on Blogcritics.org which is a self-described "sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, and technology". My last review is over here.

You would think that a book called “How To Write Songs On Guitar” would be relatively simple and straightforward, but you would be wrong. Maybe you would notice that it's sub-titled “A guitar-playing and songwriting course” and would think that it's instead a more rigorous step-by-step guide to playing and writing songs on guitar. That would be wrong too.

This book isn't a course or a “how to” guide, but instead a grab bag of ideas and observations about songwriting, mostly expressed using a lot of music theory. If you don't know much about music theory, this book probably isn't going to give you much help. While I personally can figure out various musical things on paper if pressed, I don't tend to apply it much in the normal course of songwriting. I'm open to learning, but what explanations there were in this book were very brief and not much help.

There are a lot of chord dictionaries and big lists of progressions from other songs. And while the author does touch on some classics and the occasional more modern pop hit in the progression lists, I wasn't familiar with the majority of the songs he held up as examples. And for some reason in most cases only the title of the song is provided as well, making it difficult to track them down the songs if I wanted to.

Perhaps I am biased by being a music dummy, but the sections I enjoyed the most were the ones that talked clearly about songwriting techniques without a lot of theory. The chapters on songwriting methods and song structures were interesting and had some ideas in them that I might not have come up with on my own, but they were very short and probably not worth the price of the book.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend this book to beginners thinking about giving songwriting a shot. I might recommend it to people comfortable in music theory who have no idea about songwriting, but I've never met anyone like that before.

Since I have no budget for videos, you will have to use your imagination. The video for my new song There's Something Wrong is this little guy here:

During the intro he just stands there and then he begins to dance. He pauses at 1:57 during the little break and begins again at 2:14 and does not stop until the very end.

If you watch it backwards there is somehow additional meaning. Good luck.

"I just got the CD today...oh my, does it ever smell reallygood - can only hope that it sounds half as good!!" - Becky Campbell

There's Something WrongGenre: Rock Length: 3:20 Date: 09/08/03

Here's a happy little number maybe about mental illness and maybe about Usenet and maybe about both.

If you felt like it, you could now order Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing on CDBaby. You're really better off buying it from me because it will be cheaper. It's $6 on CDBaby (without shipping) which is as low as I could get it without me actually losing several dollars on each sale. If anybody felt like writing reviews of the album on CDBaby, that would be really great.

Here's a PDF describing what's new in Cubase SX 2. You can also take the tour of some of the new features here. So Cubase 2 is apparently skinnable or something. I wonder how messed up that's gonna be. The Freeze feature looks like it could be most dope. The new mixer is crazy to look at.

I am humbly presenting my middle finger to the RIAA: RIAA to give file swappers amnesty

Every day I try to give the RIAA the benefit of the doubt. Hey, I'm a wannabe musician. If I was living off of it I'd probably defend that as hard as I could too. But I honestly think that machines have taken over their brains and someone dropped a cup of water on a computer in central command. Now the RIAA has gone haywire and needs to be taught a lesson about human friendship by a small doe-eyed child.

Anti-RIAA Flyers from Downhill Battle. I'm just a big softy for civil disobedience.

Universal Lowers the Cost of a CD from $17-$19 to $13.

UMVD President Jim Urie said the move will benefit consumers and the company's retail customers, while invigorating the overall music industry. "Music fans will benefit from these price reductions. Our new pricing model will enable U.S. retailers to offer music at a much more appealing price point in comparison to other entertainment products."

I've been sitting around wondering a few things and then I realized that the people who read this weblog are probably the best source for the answers. Here are the questions: 1. Are there any net radio stations worth sending my album to? I'm on dialup so I have no idea about that whole scene.

2. Are there any independent music magazines/blogs/sites worth sending my album to? I think it would be nice to get it reviewed and have people say mean things about it officially on the record but I have no idea where's hip.

Inquiring artists want to know! Thanks!

I am really really excited about Cubase 2 which was announced the other day. You can watch the kinda lame Flash movie but here are screenshots of the new Project window and Mixer window. The sweetest thing is that it's apparently out on September 4th! That's like totally soon! I'm still looking around for a full list of features.

My mother says that track 9 (Overreacting) is "it" and "could go far" and my dad says that with some more instruments, track 4 (Bad Attraction), "could be a good song". It's also worth noting that while my mother offered to pay for the CD, she made me deduct shipping from the $5 price and I have yet to receive payment. My father, on the other hand, just asked to borrow a copy and then didn't return it.