A belated happy Canadian thanksgiving to everyone. I ate too much and need to lie down forever now.

Interesting musicians who weblog - cool Metafilter thread listing blogs by musicians. Also nicwolff scored Brad Sucks a first post, sweet! Now for best answer...

Paul Pena has died - you should watch Genghis Blues if you haven't already.

Hey look, it's the Brad Sucks Online Collaboration Contest, brought to you by KillYourFM Magazine and MyVirtualBand.com. Here's how to participate.

MyVirtualBand.com is a site I think I've talked about before. Its main goal is to hook up potential musical collaborators and get them working on songs together. For this competition thing, I've provided the source to my song Dirtbag. People can now collaborate with it or re-record everything or do whatever the like with it. Entries will be judged and so on. Here's how to participate.

Donate $100, get a call from Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson will apparently call you on the phone if you donate $100 or more towards Katrina relief efforts.

People are still downloading the hell out of the remix album and my album source, which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who's been spreading it! Here's some remixed cover art that the original I Don't Know What I'm Doing album artist Allen Henderson did:

In retrospect I probably should have asked him to draw that before I beat him so badly in Scrabble.

And here's an I Don't Know What I'm Doing cover remix that Michael Brewer did:

Thanks Michael! If you've got a remixed cover, send it on in.

Kid Beyond on Ableton Live - Quicktime movie of a beatboxer and how he uses Ableton Live. Pretty awesome. [via]

After a few people told me to do it, my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is "Podsafe" now. You can find it here. Complaint #1: there seems to be basically an unlimited number of sites for musicians to upload their music to and they rarely, if ever, allow you to specify URLs. You have to upload each song individually off your hard drive like a chump. I'd like a meta-submitting/uploading service. Like an automated street team. Or sites should make it less annoying. I have MP3s on my fast website with neatly labeled ID3 tags. Please take advantage of that.

My other complaint is that these sites all have blogging services with no option to syndicate your own blog from somewhere else. I'm not going to start blogging on Myspace or Podsafe or whatever. There's no way. But if you were to syndicate my RSS feed, you'd have the illusion that I was participating and I would possibly build readers on your service (tying me to it, which is what you want) rather than just having a big empty blog there.

The Magnatune article I was interviewed for is in the current issue of the Economist (which is subscription only, but you can read it in Magnatune's press section.) It's some great press for Magnatune and there's also a real nice plug for me in the second paragraph:

You can legally listen, free of charge and with high sound quality, to full albums by any of the 200 or so artists who have signed to the label. (Your correspondent was immediately hooked by a song called "Making Me Nervous" by a one-man electro-pop band from Ottawa called Brad Sucks.)

Sweet! Can't get in SPIN, but the Economist likes me. Hello bankers!

The article also goes on to say Magnatune's goal is to focus on second-tier genres, which makes business sense as really, who wants to compete with the majors? But it's kind of a downer for little old me in the Rock genre.

Hello to everyone coming in from Boing Boing. My server exploded under the weight of everyone trying to download my source files and remix album at once, but things seem better now. I've had to take the remix album MP3 files offline temporarily and I'm trying running everything else through Coral.

If you can, please use Bittorrent to grab the remix album and source:

Here's the I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed torrent. (96 megs)

And here's the I Don't Know What I'm Doing Source torrent. (560+ megs)

Thanks!

I went out amp shopping today as my amp is a tiny hilarious thing and some Brad Sucks live stuff is fast approaching. I tried out a bunch and I think I'm basically sold on this sucker:

It's the Peavey Delta Blues 210. I'm an amp novice so I wasn't sure what I was listening for, but it impressed me when I tried it, it sounded so much better than any amp sim garbage I've been using. Then I came back and looked it up on Harmony Central and it has a 9.4 overall review. So I uh... want it.

I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed is finally online. 18 tracks, 1:04:09 playing time. It was a lot of work putting it together but I think it turned out pretty well. Thanks to all the remixers and to everyone who helped spread the word that I've been giving away the source to my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing. (You can get the full source here.)

Here's the zip file for I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed. Here's the torrent.

Since I've been dragging my gear around for the live Brad Sucks practices lately, I've been getting annoyed at all my cables being tangled constantly. I remembered reading about Velcro Grip Ties that are meant for plants but allegedly work great on cables.

I swung by the nursery tonight and picked up 18 feet of 2" wide Velcro Tree Tie for $7.99 Canadian dollars. So far I'm hella impressed. It's sturdy and my cable bag is far more organized. And I have this compulsive urge to go neatly velcro-tie every cable I own.

The remix compilation is just around the corner (finally), so here's the source for the final two songs off the album: Never Get Out [20mb] and Work Out Fine [43mb]. So now after a lot of cutting and looping and exporting, the source for my entire album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is available online here.

I've also got a torrent of the whole thing: Brad_Sucks_-_I_Dont_Know_What_Im_Doing_(source).zip.torrent. The source to all the songs is in there and it weighs in at 560+ megs. This may crap out if bandwidth gets tight, so get it while you can.

Google launched a blog search service. Exciting stuff! It's sparse and quick and it works decently enough. I like to keep tabs on who's linking to me, so I've subscribed to the search results for my site alongside my Technorati and IceRocket results. Google returns 80 results, Technorati returns "218 links from 157 sites" and IceRocket returns 106 results. I haven't done any research into the additional 26 links that IceRocket returns, but the way it displays its results is still my favorite, with the entries grouped by day.

Harry Shearer launches record label - man, I'd love to be signed to Ned Flanders' label.

iPod nano - Apple announced a line of super thin 2GB and 4GB iPod flash players today. Slick.

More Than Soup live - Video of Starfinger (aka Dr. Kong Balong) performing More Than Soup at Songfight Live! in Boston a few weeks ago. Very awesome.

VSTunnel - a plugin that lets people collaborate over the net using VST plugins inside any sequencer.

I drove by this the other day:

It says "Loving God..." over the exit and "...Loving people." over the entrance. I didn't go inside.