Not sure what the story is on this Flash video for Come Together by The Beatles but it's pretty damn awesome.

A Million Love Songs is a blog posting, I guess, a million love songs. Descriptions plus MP3s that stay around for seven days after the postings. Pretty awesome.

Scott Andrew sent in this Making Me Nervous (Sunken City Mix) which is quite cool. He says on his weblog:

I wanted to do something reminiscent of early 90's industrial rock, a la Filter/Stabbing Westward/Gravity Kills. Most of the beats and sounds are stock samples that came with FruityLoops Studio, stretched and beatsliced beyond recognition (I'm too lazy (and inexperienced) to create my own loops). Except for the guitar; that was my Telecaster through a Fender Cyber-Twin (great studio amp, stupid name), sampled and converted to groove clips in Sonar.

Kick ass.

Fellow Magnatuner c. layne sent in the Making Me Nervous (c. layne Anasthetic Mix) which I think turned out really nicely.

15-16 puzzle did this Making Me Nervous WireCandyLips Remix (also possibly could be considered one of those trendy 'mashup' things). It's pretty trippy.

Allen Henderson of Maedes Production is working on a video for my song Making Me Nervous and wants your face for it:

Some "Doom"-spoofed video segments will include virtual extras in the style of 3-D sprite animation. And they need faces! Get converted to pixels and then shot with a gun without having to put down your sandwich. Who could ask for more?

Send 2 digital portrait shots of your face, head-on and in profile, to production@maedes.com subject line: Making me Nervous Extras.

More details here.

Beats 101 is a series of beat making videos with Domino of Hieroglyphics. Online School Tour by the SampleKings also has some beat making videos over there.

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!