Aaaand I'm back

Well, back from the live thing. Survived! It was actually a battle of the bands deal for tech industry people, because I guess I needed my first live experience to be competitive and in front of an awful lot of people to make it more relaxing somehow.

Six bands played, two were chosen to advance to the semi-finals finals and Brad Sucks was one of those bands. So we are victorious for now! Hooray for now!

Live thang

So I'll be doing my first ever live thing later on this evening. It's only a three song set but I'm pretty nervous as I don't like change, trying new things or danger. Wish me luck!

Remixes

Remixes:

A bunch more have been added over on my ccMixter page.

  • John Bintz has done a short film called Reginald Smith: The Cookie Meltdown. I'm told there's a remix of my song Dropping Out of School in there about a third of the way through.
  • Simon David put Making Me Nervous in a video diary for the feature film he's producing.

As far as podcast play, I've kinda lost track because I'm disorganized. My Podsafe page tells me I've been played on Unsigned podcast, Tower of Song, RSM Robert Smoove Music, Radio Free Cruze and IT Conversations lately. Thanks!

Google Base rumors

The Google Base rumors are interesting but it seems to fall short of what I was hoping they'd do: let blogs and forum software (and other web apps) drop their data straight into Google and then offer webmasters a free Google search in exchange. This'd get Google a ton of data that's difficult to index and organize (particularly forums) and provide a much needed service to the web community. Looks like they're looking for specific sorts of data though. We'll see once it launches.

Garage practice

Garage practice Rob took this pretty awesome panorama photo of the Brad Sucks rehearsal last night. Table saws, empties, recycling bins. I don't know how much more legit a band could possibly be.

Brad Sucks collaboration contest

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.

Remix cover

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.

Brad Sucks: Podsafe

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.