I've been wanting a nicer design for this site for a while. I'm okay with the navigation and coding, but I'm basically colorblind and have little time to fight with it anymore. So I'm trying out another pay-for-design contest. I've posted a $100 contest for a new blog header incorporating my new logo and some sort of sexier color scheme on Sitepoint. The contest runs until April 7th.

Sitepoint's contests work differently than Worth1000. You pay $10 to post a contest and then it's kinda free-form. You're encouraged to give feedback and request changes as entries are posted (in fact I think they close your contest if you don't post anything.)

Also I don't think you have to choose a winner if you don't like anything that was entered. So it seems like a good deal. They have logo contests as well which might be of interest to you guys.

Anyway, if you're a into design feel free to enter or contact me privately or something. And in the meantime I will not be looking at color wheels or trying to determine what the sexiest shade of grey is.

Just got this in the mailbox:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased Audio CDs by Nine Inch Nails, you might like to know that Every Day Is Exactly The Same will be released on April 4, 2006. For the next few days, you can pre-order your copy at a savings of 0% by following the link below.

What could be better than 0% savings? Besides anything I mean. On the bright side this email finally motivated me to turn off Amazon's mailings.

What Happened To Dynamic Range is an article that's been making the rounds lately. Bob doesn't give any examples of modern bands or recordings that he's talking about so it's hard to make much of his opinions. And it's hard not to blow off the entire article after this statement:

The music available today isn't musical at all.  It's best described as anti-music.  It's anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages.  It's simply, non musical. It's no wonder that consumers don't want to pay for the CDs being produced today.

Beep beep cranky old man alert. The music you kids listen to isn't music. There are certainly a lot of styles these days that leave me cold (such as the alterna boy-rock super compressed pitch-corrected and computer harmonised stuff), but I'm also heading into being a cranky old man myself.

I was going to pass this article by and not mention it at all except that I've been listening to a lot of albums from the 70s lately and almost across the board I wish they were mixed and mastered more aggressively. Led Zeppelin sounds kind of weak when it should be knocking my head off when it rocks out. I'm listening to Dancing Days here right now and want to run the whole thing through iZotope Ozone and crank it to the max. In particular, the re-master of Fun House kicks so much more ass than the original.

I spent the weekend painting my office (which I guess you could call a studio if you wanted to be romantic). It was a kids' room before I got here and the colors were pretty nuts. My main functional goal was to stop having my guitars lying around and instead mount them on the walls. This mission has proved a success:

You can see some progress shots here. Once I get my desk put back together I'll get some pictures of that online as well. I have further tricked out my Jerker desk with an additional shelf that they now sell at IKEA.

I did an email interview with Teo Zilla a while back and the article is online now: Brad Sucks, harbinger of a dark-age? Mom always said I'd be a harbinger of a dark age. (Part 2 is here.)

REAPER has added Acid-style time-stretching (alt+drag to stretch.) I already raved about it before but it just got even better. Also a media explorer and a bunch of other great stuff. It's hard to even keep up with the rate of development on this thing. Well worth checking out.

I tried out the sound on my Inspiron 6400 for softsynth playing. Can't get the latency low enough to make it not suck. I think my plan now is to get the laptop sound good enough for live playing and then (maybe later) replace my current desktop recording rig with some sort of Firewire deal (leaning towards the Presonus Firebox, still not sure though.) That way I can use the laptop for live playing without having to dismantle my desktop audio setup every time I need to add some blorp sounds to my live songs. But I still have the option of yanking the Firewire device out of my desktop and taking it with me to record on the laptop. Trying to cheap out of buying a better low-latency soundcard for my laptop led me to ASIO4ALL last night which is an attempt to provide low-latency audio drivers for even the most craptacular of audio cards. It didn't work, but I sent off a debug report to the author so maybe something will come of it before I cave and blow another hundred dollars on something retarded.

Anyone out there know if it's worth caring about the quality of PCI Firewire adapter I put in my desktop? They range from $11 to $108 or so. The expensive ones have a lot of bonus features like USB ports and Firewire 800. But I feel a little dirty buying an $11 card to attach my expensive sound interface to. Though it occurs to me I never think about the quality of my USB adapter.

No Revolution: Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose - a lot of this rant rang true to me, especially the label-as-VC idea which I've been thinking about for a while. [via]

Fossil Ivory Guitar Pick - Pure Alaskan fossil ivory guitar pick. $25 for it. $50 more if you want it scrimshawed. [via]

Got my new laptop today. I forgot to blog about it but a better deal actually went on the day after I ordered my Inspiron 6000 so I upgraded to the Inspiron 6400 (which is duo-core, twice as much memory, 20gb more drive space) instead. I got it today, opened the box and this was staring at me from the bag the laptop was in:

Still trying to decide on a Firewire audio interface. The Presonus Firepod would be great but seems like overkill for what I need. The Firebox might be more my style. This MOTU Ultralite is very nice looking but pricey and I'm laptop-poor now. But then I think about how M-Audio has been so good for drivers compared to my horrifying Echo experiences in the past. Then I think maybe it'd be cool to put this bag over my head.

New CD Baby digital distribution agreement - Major changes: 1) now specifically non-exclusive and 2) ringtones. Go buy 10 second clips of my songs for $5, dogs.

Had a chance to play with REAPER yesterday. That thing is impressive as hell. It's still beta and lacks MIDI capability, but even without that it's very over the top. In a less than 1 meg install (700k without the sample project included) it offers a lightweight, rock-solid multitracker with:

• multiple takes per event
• group tracks
• ASIO support
• sends
• track automation
• punch-in recording
• cross-fading
• direct-x/vst/jesusonic plugin support
• effect chaining (as well as rearranging on the fly)
• ability to export all tracks

And a lot more. Interface-wise if you're familiar with Sonic Foundry's Vegas or Acid, you'll find it easy to jump into. I think once MIDI's in there, I'll be giving it a shot for a full project. It's extremely competitive with software that costs hundreds of dollars.

Justin Frankel's multi-tracker REAPER is up to v0.91 now and is on my list of things to try out. The samples page has my song Look and Feel Years Younger on there too for you to download and try out.

Acoustic Guitar Pickup - how to convert your acoustic guitar to an acoustic/electric. I really want to do this but fear that I'll destroy my guitar.

KEN FLAGG: Paralysis & Denial - my buddy Ken has a new CD out. He'll apparently be playing with MC Frontalot when he goes through Long Island San Francisco.

Jeff Price, the CEO of spinART and Tunecore, who I met at Canadian Music Week, posted his Tunecore pitch in the comments over here. If you're an indie musician interested in or already doing digital distribution it might be worth your while to check it out. Jeff's busy at SXSW right now but I'll be getting some more info out of him such as what the fees are like for musicians who might want to jump ship from CD Baby to Tunecore. I'll let you know what I find out.

Rolling Stones Rice Krispies Commercial - from 1964. Not a bad song, except that it's about Rice Krispies. [via]

Canadian Music Week (the one day of it I experienced at least) was fun. I went there, they had cancelled my hotel room, I wound up getting upgraded to a deluxe room which was hella swank with the double TVs and lounge area and walk-in closet and so on. I went to the panel and none of the moderators showed up and once we were on I felt I was mildly to relatively obnoxious which I consider a personal victory. I recommended that a woman violate the Alzheimer Society of Canada's copyright, said the word "bullshit", drank a lot of complimentary water and made a suggestive comment about Jeff Price, the CEO of Tunecore.

The panel actually went quite well, our impromptu moderator Jay Moonah did an excellent job especially considering he was only told he was moderating about five minutes before we went on. There was a decent crowd but an hour really wasn't long enough to get into answering everyone's questions about RSS, online radio, file-sharing, podcasting, promoting music online, copyright, remixes, blogs, digital distribution, generating buzz, Myspace and more. I felt we only scratched the surface and could have gone a lot longer but that's conference life I guess.

The main gist of my message whenever I opened my big mouth I think was that new artists need to rely on the internet to spread their music for them, that it takes crowds of people sending your songs around to come even close to competing with what the major labels do with millions of dollars, promotion-wise. I told the story of the recent Toy Story 2 Requiem mashup trailer that's been going around with an Israeli remix of my music on it and how that would never have been possible had I been tight-assed about my music rights and had a "media" section with 30 second clips rather than mp3s and slutty rights.

My fellow panelists were a real interesting and friendly group and it was great to meet them. They were all extremely knowledgeable and from different internet paths, which was fun. There was Jeff Price from spinArt Records and Tunecore (a service I'll be looking into more in the next week as it promises an even better artist cut than CD Baby for digital distribution), Dan Beirne from the mp3 blog Said the Gramaphone, Eric de Fontenay from Musicdish, Joe Gallagher from mvyradio.com and Will Evans from Soul Atomic (whose website doesn't seem to be working right now.)

After the panel I was thinking about going to check out some bands but instead got taken to an adult clown show called Lunacy Cabaret. Various clowns (and clown burlesque) and five dollar Bohemian beers. Very fun. Unfortunately I was too tired after the show to head out to the bar across the street for clown karaoke, which may be a decision I regret for the rest of my life.

Well, I'm off to Toronto for the Blogrolling panel at Canadian Music Week tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how much of CMW I'll actually wind up attending as we're like the second last event. Regardless, I will lay down the bomb knowledge and the dope secrets. I'm getting lots of spam from bands that are showcasing there so I might try to check out some of the more belligerent ones and pretend I'm someone important. "I can tell by the five press releases you've sent me in the past week that you kids got moxy."

If I had my new laptop I'd probably try and blog it or something nerdy like that, but I don't so I'll just drink.