Making Me Nervous remix by Justin McGonigle. Visit him here. Thanks Justin!

So I'm thinking about getting one of these suckers for my impending live shows:

It's a DigiTech Vocal 300 Vocal Effects Processor Pedalboard. It seems pretty fun and would let me jazz up my stupid voice a bit, but it appears to totally lack decent patch management. There's no way to copy patches, there's no way to import or export them to a computer, and you can only scroll up and down through the patches.

For a live show this seems pretty limiting and difficult. "Oh man, my verse effect is on patch 1 and my chorus effect is on patch 20, best get stompin'". And if I want to move my patch 20 to patch 2, I have to re-enter the patch manually as there's no copy patch function. STUPID.

For $100 more I could get the newer DigiTech VX400 Modeling Vocal Processor with USB which has a copying function and some more effects, but also has a drum machine and two-way USB audio interface and a bunch of other crazy crap I don't need.

I looked around for alternatives but there doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile. I wish Boss would do a voice version of the GT6, with the awesome bank/patch selection, MIDI patch management and more foot pedals. But it looks like if I want to sing all my songs sounding like a chipmunk or a space alien or a monster, the DigiTechs are my only choice.

A batch of indie albums I need to mention:

• State Shirt's Don't Die - donate $10 or more to The Brittany Foundation to help dogs and get his CD for free. You can also buy it for $12.97 at CD Baby
• Profits for Josh Woodward's Here Today album also go to the animals via the Humane Society of Hancock County.
• Victor Stone of fourstones has released Chronic Dreams, available on Magnatune. He says: "I'll be sending a free imprinted CD with artwork and everything to anybody that buys the digital download from MT."

This blog entry on Maury Povich is an even better example of the craziness I mentioned in the last post.

Matt points out a funny blog phenomenon with the replies to this Overhaulin' post, where people are acting as though the author of the blog is actually somehow related to the TV show. I don't have anything as cool as that, but I've been meaning to point out that, judging by the comments, my blog seems to have become the #1 resource for disgruntled OfficeMax customers and employees due to this rant I posted back in January.

Couldn't sleep, so I played around with vocoding and my Making Me Nervous source. The result is Making Me Nervous - Vocoder Remix.

I've been using Movable Type for a while and all this hysteria over Movable Type 3.0's new pricing plan is pretty interesting. There's a very deep negative reaction going on and it's hard to tell if it's due to people not wanting to pay one cent for software or if Six Apart made a whole bunch of bad decisions. Personally I think there was probably a way they could have rolled this all out without ruffling as many feathers. I'm not too worked up about it though and I hope Six Apart does well, Movable Type has been extremely helpful to me. That being said, I've been checking out a lot of the alternatives people have been talking about. So far WordPress seems the most interesting with the main features for me being that it's in PHP (which I am decent at) and there's no rebuilding (which is really slow in MT). Not to mention that I joined the WordPress IRC channel and they knew who I was:

* Now talking in #wordpress
* Topic is 'WordPress: http://wordpress.org || Latest: 1.0.2 Blakey || Beta: 1.2-epsilon-RC1 || Code is Poetry. || Warning: channel logged'
* Set by crw on Sat May 15 02:43:58
<pressbot> Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome bradsucks, im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret
<Jesuit> LaughingLizard: thanks
<michel_v> hey bradsucks
<bradsucks> howdy
<michel_v> bradsucks: I loved Outside the Inbox :)
<Jesuit> you're making me nervous is a great song

So like I basically have to switch now. Maybe once my net connection stops going out every five minutes I'll get a chance to take a crack at it.

The Central Source for the Fight Against the Destructive Practice of Unsafe Mastering Levels (via J-Walk) is interesting and kind of funny due to the amount of anger the author seems to have about the issue. I'm no expert, but I do actually have a lot of the albums in The Big List of Squashed CDs and can't say the mastering has bugged me on any of them. There's a contingent of people I've run into who are dead set against the trend of louder and louder mixes in pop music. Then there's everyone else who basically couldn't care less but will complain when your stupid song is the quietest one on their mix CD.

When the images load properly, this is a freaky page for me to look at.

Ken Flagg AKA Melody Generator AKA Da Hikk did this Space Funk remix of Making Me Nervous with the source files I released last week. Thanks Ken!

Pop music is apparently fifty years old this year. Fifty years of pop is an interesting Observer article listing some of the high and low-lights.

Total BreakdownGenre: Rock Time: 2:04 Date: 05/03/04

Ah being creatively blocked is awesome, don't let anyone tell you any different. Here's a demo of a little pop-rock song that my friends claim to like. Three things I've been playing with: 1) harmonies, 2) multiple guitar sounds, 3) playing more parts "live" to get a rougher sound.

Last week I decided because everyone seems to be into mash-ups and remixing all of a sudden that I'd start releasing the source for my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing and see what happens. I had been offering the source files on CD for $5 for a couple of years in my FAQ but people didn't seem too interested in that. I always thought it was a pretty cool and cutting edge idea that never got much attention, but it was an idea I had back when I was on dialup and bandwidth was less plentiful so it wasn't as convenient as it could have been for potential remixers.

I'm not sure what the interval will be on releasing these source files. Basically if interesting things happen with the source I'll be eager to chop up more of the songs and put them online. If nothing happens, I'll probably lose interest. We'll see how it goes.

Here are the source files for my song Making Me Nervous. I'd like to post as many remixes/whatever as I can here, so please let me know if you do anything cool! Thanks!

I went to Montreal this weekend to see Apples in Stereo and despite the heat and the dodgy sound, it was an awesome show. Their energy and happy songs had me smiling through the whole set. I was introduced to the Apples maybe a year ago by a friend who said their lyrics reminded her of mine. She sent me their album Tone Soul Evolution and I was totally blown away by it and have been kind of obsessed with it ever since.

So after the show I was a bit tongue-tied when I got to meet Robert Schneider, their vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter. He was very friendly and funny and gave me two manly one-armed hugs when I tried to express what an impact that album had on me and pretty much came up retardedly short. I think I excused myself only a moment or two away from asking "so where do you get your ideas from?" so it wasn't a total disaster.

Anyhow, I had a great time. If you get a chance, you should check them out. Their remaining tour dates are here.

itv.com reports on a poll on the top 20 guitar riffs. And here they is:

1. Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns N' Roses
2. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
3. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
4. Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
5. Enter Sandman - Metallica
6. Layla - Derek & The Dominoes/Eric Clapton
7. Master Of Puppets - Metallica
8. Back In Black - AC/DC
9. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
10. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
11. Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne
12. All Right Now - Free
13. Plug In Baby - Muse
14. Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
15. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love - Van Halen
16. Walk This Way - Aerosmith with Run DMC
17. Sunshine Of Your Love - Cream
18. No-One Knows - Queens Of The Stone Age
19. Paradise City - Guns N' Roses
20. Killing In The Name - Rage Against The Machine

I revised this humble weblog a bunch. Things should hopefully be a little easier to navigate and a little tiny bit prettier. There are probably broken and unfinished things kicking around, feel free to point them out, I'll get to them as soon as I can. I gave up on CSS for layout because it's a total pain in the ass. I couldn't get it to do what I wanted in any of the browsers despite the finest minds in the world working 24 hours non-stop on my dumb border problems, so I'm not buying that it's Internet Explorer's fault.

Anyhow, back to trying to be a musician again.

I bought the Cubase SX Complete PDF and it's real nice. All hyperlinked and searchable and indexed and good. I recommend it highly.

Looks like me and my bad CD image made it onto NPR's All Songs Considered. Thanks to Scott for urging people to request me and thanks to any of you fine folks who actually wrote in.

I own the book "Cubase SX Complete" and it's fantastic. You can now buy the PDF of it for $11 US right here. I had been anxiously awaiting "Cubase SX2 Complete" for months and the page says "For a variety of reasons we have decided not to publish this edition." That is a huge drag because the first book was the best Cubase resource I had found on the net or otherwise.

I've been working on a very slight redesign and thorough rewrite of this website. I pretty much want to kick whoever invented CSS in the nuts.