I went into a music store the other day thinking I'd buy a Shure Beta 58A mic for live vocals. They didn't have any and I got talked into picking up an Audix OM2. I tried it out with the band last night for the first time and I was seriously impressed, what a huge difference over my SM48 and 57. I can't find many reviews of the OM2 online but so far I'm really happy with it.
Roomba hacked into slightly cruddy musical instrument - the next step I hope is to hack the Roomba into an unstoppable killing machine.
R-F-T Telefunken M16 and Apex 460 Bench Test - two microphones: one $1400 and the other $230, both with basically the exact same insides.
LyricWiki - a wiki of song lyrics. Wondering how long until they get hassled by the feds, but it's a nice resource for now.
Worst gear purchase? - a fun thread full of audio gear regrets. My worst was probably the EMU ESI-2000 sampler where I tried (and failed) to convince myself I was wrong about soft-samplers being the future.
Google Music - word on the street is that Google Music is on the way. I'm wondering what interesting things they could bring to the table.
80s videos - a huge list of links to 80s videos on Youtube. Not just mainstream stuff either, lots of neat alternative stuff. [via]
I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for ordering in over 2400 records stores worldwide thanks to CD Baby's new In-Store Distribution. If you need any info on what stores near you will order my album, drop me a line with your location and I'll look it up.
As a follow-up to my recent live sound and Google Notebook posts, I give you my Google Notebook about live sound. I've been researching how to process live vocals as well as microphones and if you care about that then I guess you could read my notebook and follow me around and we could be boring together.
So far I think the consensus is that I need to try my Digitech VX400 again and maybe actually spend some time working on the sound now that I sort of have an idea what I'm looking for.
Google Notebook is still weird. Any page with more than a paragraph of good information I bookmark, so it's got a really narrow focus. Still no tagging bothers me. It's hard to move lots of items between notebooks. The notebooks display your oldest entries first, which isn't what I expect. The URLs aren't friendly. But Google's so smart, it must be a problem with me.
Last night I recorded our practice onto my laptop. I threw a couple of the recordings online here. They're not our best takes of those songs but they're fun.
A billion months after I put I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed online for download you can now buy a $5 homemade CD-R of it in the little Brad Sucks Store. That's the kind of organized businessman I am -- ruthlessly capitalizing on every opportunity at my own lazy pace. I actually was toying with the idea of pressing it up or digitally distributing it, but in the end the task of getting permission from everyone, signing agreements and making sure everyone wasn't angry with me seemed like hell on earth. Oh yeah: and if you're a remixer on the CD, drop me a line and I'll send you out a copy. Thanks again everyone.
I have Guitar Hero on the brain. Here are some videos:
These two dudes rock pretty hard.
Ace of Spades is an awesome song, but that's not Lemmy singing, is it? Sad.
A guy gets hit in the head with the Guitar Hero controller and everyone enjoys it.
The Last Guitar Hero: a docu-drama about the dangers of Guitar Hero addiction.
I want to love Google Notebook but it's not doing it for me. The best part is the little browser plugin. It's awesome and functional but makes me annoyed that the other Google services don't use something like this to make them quicker to use. I can manipulate my Google Notebook without manually logging in, but I can't do that for my Gmail or Google Calendar? Lame. And I'm really kind of lost as to what to use the Google Notebook for. For serious info-hoarders the lack of tagging is hard to overlook. Sure I can cram all my little snippets of text into "notebooks", but how am I any better organized than jamming that stuff into a text file (or a blog if I care about accessing it via the net)? And once we get over 10 or so snippets, it gets rough to find what I want. Very weird choice.
the jerker has a posse - Scott joins the Jerker club. I still love mine. And I think I'm about to buy a Dave for my laptop.
Freetar Hero - a fella from my hometown is working on a free version of Guitar Hero that you can use any music with. I still need to try that game.
The other week I did an interview with Mike from GarageSpin. You can check it out here and here.
Free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada - wow, voice over IP just got extremely interesting.
MC Hammer Blog: May 12: Chapter 11 - MC Hammer (on his blog!) recaps his history.
Red wine may fight deafness - "Moderate consumption of the popular drink, or aspirin, could delay the onset of age-related deafness and reduce hearing loss caused by loud noise." I'm way ahead of you, science.
Just as I was about to ditch del.icio.us for Google bookmarks, del.icio.us beefed up their social networking. So now I want to stay with it rather than move to lonely ol' Google Bookmarks. But Google Bookmarks has some great features, so I'm torn. I wish there was a service that would synchronize all my public data between all these services. They all want my data and I'm more than happy to give it to them. Why can't I do this? This ties into my previous complaint that there's no way to import my Wordpress blog entries into MySpace. A synchronizing service would also help a lot of smaller services get the amount of data they need to develop and compete on a feature level. Ho hum.