Virtual Piano Chords - I spent about an hour looking for the best online piano chord finder yesterday. THIS IS THE ONE. My search is over.

I'm doing an interview on on10.net tomorrow talking with Laura Foy and Tina Wood about music, remixing and uh how I'm not totally boring. It'll be my first combination webcam + voip interview so I'm sure it'll go great and not be completely awkward. Anyway I'll update here when it's online, I have no idea how quick the turnaround is on these things or if it's live or whatever the hell. Update: interview's done, it went all right I think. Laura and Tina were real nice and didn't ask me to take my top off on cam so I'm relieved I wasn't sexually exploited. I'm told the segment should be up in a week or so.

Testing the limits of my attention span today I continued trying out the Edirol UA-1EX. Though I originally bought it only for softsynth use on the laptop, I thought I should at least give the inputs a chance. I loaded up REAPER today and did some recording with it and it worked way better than I expected. The first test: direct monitoring was fine. There was a small amount of latency at first. Not enough to hear an actual delay, but enough that there was a slight doubling/chorus effect as I listened to the vocals from my mic. I reduced the buffer amount in the driver control panel to the absolute minimum and it sounded better, though I did experience a few dropouts while playing around. Some tweaking in there to find the right level will be needed.

I went from the MXL v67 mic -> Bluetube -> Edirol UA-1EX and it sounded good to me. I was monitoring using my Sennheiser HD 280 headphones and not my Event 20/20 monitors so I can't tell exactly how it stands up yet compared to other audio, but in the headphones it certainly sounded good enough.

I'm a little unclear about how to properly use the input gain dial. I'm enough of an audiophile to know that I probably want my fancy Bluetube preamp doing the amplification and not whatever's in the little $80 UA-1EX. But is setting the dial all the way to the max (poorly) amplifying things or is that just providing 100% of the signal from the input? There's no medium notch on it to indicate where it begins amplifying which is what I'm used to on mixing boards. Guess I'll check the manual.

So the conclusion of all this nerdy gear talk is that the Edirol UA-1EX is staying and may actually get used as a makeshift mobile recording unit along with lugging around my Bluetube. The preamps on the Presonus Firebox are disappointing however and it's getting returned. I can't justify paying for preamps that won't totally replace the Bluetube.

It sounds like the preamp limitation on the Firebox is due to Firewire's power constraints so I have no idea how it stacks up against other Firewire audio devices. I assume they all have similar limitations and will need external power for beefier pre's. I will say this for the Firebox: it sounds really good and it's a sturdy little unit. Latency wasn't an issue, the drivers worked great, they have fantastic support and they pretend to like my music.

I may think Firewire itself is a little stupid now though, which was my suspicion all along.

Just got a really informative response back from Chad at Presonus support about my -6db clipping/low gain issue with the Presonus Firebox:

Yes, the FB pre's are a bit on the low gain side, although they shouldn't clip too easily.  Unfortunately, if they don't provide enough gain with the digital boost engaged (and you may try disengaging it to help with clipping), you may want to couple them with the Blue Tube or use the Blue Tube with line in.  The BT has about 20db more analog gain than the FB. Sorry.  As I understand it, they had to make the FB in a way which was bus-powerable even under the most extreme conditions (daisy-chained w/ other FW devices, on laptops, etc.) which probably compromised the voltage that the preamps could run off of.  The BT gain circuit runs off of about 16v rather than the 6v or so that the FB runs from

That's some good information for your ass right there. Awesome support from Presonus.

Unfortunately the goal was to replace my Bluetube and Delta66 with a portable firewire thang. The Presonus Firebox would handily replace the Delta66, but replacing the Bluetube with a quieter preamp that doesn't go above -6db kinda blows. If I'm going to keep using the Bluetube, then I'm not sure why I'd pay a bunch of extra money for a device with preamps I never use on it. So much to think about.

I like being in press releases. Podcast Network Releases Indie Album by Brad Sucks:

TAMPA, Fla., April 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Release of the indie album, "I Don't Know What I'm Doing" by Brad Sucks, marks the debut of Slo-Monkey, the music label behind the Emergency Podcast System (http://www.emergencypodcastsystem.com). The quirky, witty album's release is backed by a TV campaign on Former Vice President Al Gore's cable network, Current TV. Current TV serves over 20 million households nationwide and has an energetic youth audience.

Smart lyrics and danceable tunes made indie band Brad Sucks an obvious choice for the Slo-Monkey label. Says music contract guy Lil' Dawgg, "If we find ourselves singing the tunes around the office, we know we have a winner."

Here's the ad that'll be running: (.MOV) Looks like they paid that girl to dance to my music. Right on.

Anyway it's a non-exclusive deal and they seem like nice dudes over there. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

More notes from the blunderground:

• craig lets me know that even buying a 6-pin pcmcia firewire card for my laptop won't let me go power adapter-free. the pcmcia firewire cards need external power instead of being powered off the laptop. LAAAME
• justin tells me i can buy 6 to 4 pin firewire cables. so at least i don't have to buy a stupid adapter. still buying additional crap though
• justin agrees that the -6db clipping is weird. this alleviates my loneliness somewhat, i resume daily functioning.
• i emailed presonus support about the -6db clipping issue. i was told a year ago that they're "big fans" of mine. we'll see if i can ruin that with my inept complaining and unrealistic demands

Hoo-ha.

Things I learned from reading the Firebox and UA-1EX manuals:

• you only need to use the power adapter for the firebox if you're connecting it to a 4-pin firewire port. if it's a 6 pin, it powers itself off that. the firewire card i installed has 6-pin. nice.
• my laptop only has a 4-pin firewire input. i'll have to use the power adapter when using it with the laptop AND i'll need to get some sort of 6 to 4 pin firewire adapter as the included firewire cable is 6 pin. i was not aware of this different firewire port size situation. weak.
• the mysterious driver switch on the edirol ua-1ex switches you between normal windows drivers and ASIO drivers. neat i guess, though i've never had a problem with regular windows stuff working on ASIO drivers.
• i still don't understand what "plug-in powered" on the mic input means even though i read the description, for now i remain afraid to plug anything into there.
• the ua-1ex actually has dipswitches on the bottom i hadn't noticed for selecting the recording source, input monitor, kHz and sample rate. dipswitches are hardcore.

Then I tried recording with the Firebox. Here's how that went:

• plug my microphone into it
• flip the phantom power on
• check the input levels
• looks like i have to crank the level up to the max (+30) to get a decent signal when singing into my condenser mic (MXL v67.) guh?
• switch the XLR cable just in case this one's flaky
• still need to crank the input to +30 to get a decent signal
• even cranked at +30 the preamp's nice and quiet though. no hiss or buzz.
• notice that if the input exceeds -6db the preamp clips. so i can't record anything over -6db? should i even care about that? christ i hate audio, why do i bother with this
• grab the mixer software off the cd-rom to make sure nothing's set real low but everything's at the max.
• flip back over to record a test with my presonus bluetube + delta 66. doesn't clip when i go over -6db. but does this matter, hmm.
• test out the direct monitoring on the firebox. there's a bit of noticeable latency when singing. i try lowering the 10ms latency in the control panel to 3ms, fixes it up nicely.
• recording vocals at a clipping max of -6db alongside my loud projects makes it hard to monitor. input signal keeps getting lost in the mix. will i have to lower the volume of my projects to deal with the input volume? bleah.

Current Edirol UA-1EX mood: :) pleased

Current Presonus Firebox mood: :? confused and unsatisfied

The low Firebox signal is bothering me but I'm not 100% sure if it should or not. Clipping at -6db seems goofy as I always try to record with the hottest signal I possibly can so I have as much data to work with as possible. (You can always lower the volume later without audio consequences but you can't boost what isn't there.)

I don't have another condenser to test it with. Maybe my mic sucks. I'll go read some Firebox reviews and see if actual professionals have the same issues as I do.

Here's how installing the Presonus Firebox went:

• it takes me about a century to pry the dynex firewire card out of its plastic package but i manage not to cut my hands open. i pray there's no driver cd in the back.
• i install the pci card into my desktop
• i make a note to buy some compressed air to clean this thing out soon
• i reboot, windows detects and installs the firewire card. sweet!
• i open up the firebox. ah, a power adapter. for some reason in my dreams of mobile simplicity i forgot that this thing needed power as well. no big deal i guess
• i plug it all in
• "Can Windows connect to Windows Update to search for software?" dude, go away.
• it's not automatically finding the drivers off the cd-rom, probably needs me to run an installer or something
• find the installer on the cd, run it
• "Before you continue, please disconnect your IEEE 1394 audio device(s) from this computer system." aw man, i just hooked it up.
• i disconnect it
• continue with the install
• successfully installed and i have a new thing in my tray. this is what it looks like: what's that supposed to be?
• control panel thing says i'm at 10ms latency. nice.
• i hook a set of headphones up to it, audio's working, sounds good
• i disconnect the behringer mixing board i was using only for the headphones and monitor gain control and hook my monitors up to it, sounds good there too. no real difference from the delta 66, which is fine by me
• first annoyance: sitting on my desk, the main level knob is awkwardly low and hard to get at with the fingers. not as convenient as the fader situation with the behringer i had going on before. why'd they put the main level knob on the bottom where it would be more awkward to get at?
• i realize i'll miss the quick mute channel button on my mixer for when i need to shut my monitors up for recording
• i think about recording some audio, decide to go to bed and read manuals

I'll continue this tomorrow and may try to drag my laptop and new sound card to band practice.

Here's how the Edirol UA-1EX install went down:

• plug it into the laptop
• windows detects it. "can we search windows update for drivers?" sure. "nothing found". ok.
• install the drivers off the cd
• "device installed successfully." easy.
• fire up REAPER
• selecting the Edirol ASIO device device hangs everything.
• asio4all's fault maybe?
• uninstall asio4all
• fire up REAPER again
• success! audio is going to the headphones! sounds all right.
• find the usb cable for my Edirol PCR-50 midi keyboard
• plug it into the laptop
• windows detects it. "can we search windows update for drivers?" sure. "nothing found". does this ever do anything?
• hunt around for my pcr-50 drivers cd. lost cause.
• search the roland/edirol site for it
• downloads section "under construction". awesome.
• google search "drivers edirol pcr-50 download"
• find a download
• install it
• "device installed successfully"
• fire up REAPER
• no VSTis installed, doh
• download & install Triangle II
• fire up REAPER
• success! we're playing softsynths with my midi keyboard with no noticeable latency.
• should test inputs and outputs
• maybe later. on to the firebox

So far the UA-1EX gets a thumbs up from me. Cheap little ASIO gizmo that works as advertised. I'll have to actually read the manual though. There's an "Advanced Driver" switch I don't get and the mic input says "MIC INPUT - PLUG-IN POWERED". Ruh?

Nearly a month after buying my laptop, I've moved onto stage 2 of Brad's mobile recording adventure: buying sound cards. Today I bought the Edirol UA-1EX for softsynth and general low-latency use on the laptop. And the Presonus Firebox for recording on the desktop as well as the laptop when I want to move it around. This is my first time using USB or Firewire audio devices so I'll try and record my thoughts and feelings as I set it all up and try it.

The Doctor Sings - Tom Baker (the most famous Dr. Who) recorded over 1500 words and phrases for BT (the British phone company) to be used to read people's text messages out loud. Now folks are making songs out of the clips.

Thomas Dolby’s got a blog going on and it's a real good read. Particularly I liked the entry about his shed slash recording studio and how he likes it more than the swanky studio he had at the peak of his music career. [via Aaron] Update: gearheads out there might be interested in reading a list of what gear Thomas Dolby uses. [via]

Stick Figures in Peril is a Flickr photo pool of over 2,000 warning signs with stick figures on them. As I seem to be fascinated with these lately, it's totally awesome to me. I haven't gone through all of them yet, but so far I love this one the most:

You can almost see the joy of the illustrator in that dude retardedly falling.

I read this Lifehacker article about becoming a Gmail power user and it really appealed to me so I decided to try making the switch. I'd been using Outlook 2003 Professional for years and it's slow and bloated and awful. Two weeks ago I redirected all my email to Gmail and now I mean to report my findings. First here's the good stuff:

• It's of course great to be able to get my email from any location. Especially handy now that I roll with the laptop.
• The search is much faster and more intuitive than Outlook.
• I don't have to run Outlook anymore!!
• I like the way Gmail groups my mail into conversations. I find it easy to keep track of ongoing conversations without even using the search.
• Labels are great and handy.
• UI is infinitely quicker and more responsive than Outlook.
• Keyboard shortcuts are great.
• I like how simple the contact groups are. I never figured that out in Outlook.
• It was easy to import my contacts from Outlook.

And now here are my damn complaints:

• All the wonderful Greasemonkey scripts that Lifehacker talked about are indeed wonderful. Except that when Greasemonkey's enabled it crashes my Firefox about 25% of the time when loading Gmail, which is a serious bummer. Still looking into whether there's a fix for this...
• The Greasemonkey scripts like Label Colors and Gmail Macros make me annoyed that Google doesn't include these features in the service. They're great, add them! Especially the popup label macro. I'm having a hard time living without that one.
• The spam filter is decent but not perfect. For the first week and a half it seemed like anything with MicroCap or SmallCap or Stocks in the title breezed on through the spam filter no matter how many I marked as spam (and I marked a LOT as spam.) I made a filter to move those to a junk label and after a while longer of marking them spam, Gmail is taking care of them. Now about 10 to 20 Russian and Japanese spam get through a day and I have no idea how to stop those. If there were a way to junk all the emails that come to me in a language I can't read that'd solve it. I'm trying to collect all those emails in a folder to find some commonality to filter on but it's a hassle.
• The contact manager does the job but it's cumbersome to add people to your contact list and group them which is a habit I picked up last year that's been helpful. You have to click "More options" , "Add sender to Contacts list", click "Contacts", search for the person you just added, click beside their name, use the "add to group" pulldown.
• I want to import my old email archives from Outlook so I can search them easily but there's no official way to do it. There's Gmail Loader and gExodus, but neither of them work for me and it looks like there's no way to preserve your original message dates. Lame.
• I also use Google Talk and I'm annoyed at the lack of integration. I wish there was a way to send emails quickly from Google Talk without launching a browser. Picasa has this ability for emailing pictures. Seems like it'd be trivial to add and it would be drastically faster than having to load up Firefox, log in, hit C, etc for quick mails. The "email" button in chat windows only seems to work for Gmail users.
• It's kinda creepy having all my info on Google's servers. But luckily I'm boring.

Despite my complaints, I'm fairly happy with Gmail and I'll probably stick with it. There's no way I'm going back to Outlook, that's for sure. Though I can imagine a service that threw a few more bones to the power users. Of course that'd be taken care of by Greasemonkey if it weren't for the Firefox crashing issue.

Devo - Live on "Fridays" Girl U Want & Gates of Steel - A Devo TV performance from 1980. Rad.

There's a big wave of video remixing services rolling in. Jumpcut is one I checked out today and it's pretty nifty with an online video editor and so on. I only checked out a couple of the videos on there. White Wedding (some dudes with distorted faces lip-synching to Billy Idol) and Things on Kittens (which is mostly just pictures from the awesome stuffonmycat.com.) If you do anything with my music on there, let me know -- I'd love to check it out.

Oh yeah I quietly put some forums back online a month or so ago. Then I didn't realize I had to check back and approve all the people who applied for membership. Anyway, it's all fixed now and there are upwards of ten posts in there. I'm using Vanilla as it has Atom feeds so I don't have to remember to keep looking every day but yet can keep a hawk-like eye on all the activity. I think I'm going to start posting demos in there, probably in a super secret private section like Scott Andrew's Demo Club or something rather than clutter the main site with my unfinished crap.

My music gets compared to Beck a fair amount. Sometimes it's kind of a drag because everybody wants to be original of course. Anyway this Seattle Times article doesn't call me the "poor man's Beck", it literally says I'm more affordable to license than Beck:

If your neighbor's daughter's garage band isn't quite the sound you were seeking, you can explore rights-cleared music on sites like Magnatune (magnatune.com), which offers speedy commercial licensing for music in a variety of genres. You may not be able to afford the Beck tune you were hoping for, but you might find a serviceable "ironic electro-pop" substitute in a one-man band called "Brad Sucks" for a significantly reduced cost (depending on the type and scope of the project, this could be as low as 50 bucks).

Guess I'll add that to the ol' press kit: "A serviceable [Beck] substitute" - The Seattle Times

How to feel miserable as an artist - a helpful guide if you're having trouble. [via]

BitTorrent + Donations = Viva la revolution? is an interesting question on Ask Metafilter about providing a service that makes it easy to share music and donate to the artists (which I was actually just talking to someone about the other day.) Metafilter user scarabic suggested that the Internet doesn't need any help with the trading but to stick to the  facilitating donations aspect. Which made my wheels turn and I posted this:

The idea is decent but I think scarabic might be right. Why not find a way to hook donations into all the trading activity that's going on right now?

It would be interesting if someone would build a verified directory of where to donate money to artists. Have an open API so torrent trackers and other music trading sites could implement it as a feel-good gesture.

That way if someone's on some torrent tracker and is grabbing my album they could have a little link that says "Hey, like the album? Click here to donate to the artist."

I think that'd be neat and have the potential to catch on and also potentially put a nice spin on all the trading that's going on if it were to actually work in artists' benefit.

Not sure if it's actually doable though. If a big paypal directory's not possible, you could turn yourself into a collection agency, hold and distribute the money or something. (Then turn evil and crook all the musicians out of their cash of course.)

I haven't thought much about the technical aspects of it but I think it's an interesting idea.