Stevie rips it up for kids in the 70s:
Daaamn.
The 3.0 update of popular social tech news site Digg went online today. I've been reading Digg for a while now and have gradually been drawn into actually participating -- mostly in the form of burying stupid comments -- which is saying something as I normally like to lurk. The big news with Digg 3.0 is that they've branched out from tech and added more categories: Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming each with sub-categories of their own. Given that Digg has proven itself to be a huge force for promoting stories and sending traffic, I'm hoping with its music sub-category it'll be able to draw the sort of attention to new artists that it draws to technology stories.
If you're one of those people who are always asking me "Brad, why is your music not in more documentaries about pot?" You need wait no longer. (via Ryan)
Live-Radio.net - listen to radio stations from all over the world. Because if you're like me, you wonder what they're listening to in their cars in Liechtenstein. [via]
Cringely has an interesting article on how ISPs may actually suffer with the loss of net neutrality:
The result of ending Net Neutrality under this scenario, then, is that the ISPs make money from tiered services but with higher overhead costs and lower priority service levels than one might expect. The ISPs then might try banning BitTorrent to keep it from messing with their tiered services, but we've already establish this can't practically be done on a technical level because torrent encryption can always get around the ban. The only way, in fact, to limit BitTorrent traffic would be to have it made illegal and now we're back again to the clueless Congress that started this whole mess.
I've been doing my best to stay on top of net neutrality lately because I love the internet, but it's difficult to understand what exactly the ISPs really want to do -- probably because even they don't know, short of 'charge more'.
There was an article floating around a week ago (Indie-rock revolution, fueled by net neutrality) spelling doom for independent musicians that raises some interesting points. But I have a hard time buying that because of tiered pricing internet service may degrade to the point where independent musicians like myself can no longer host and sell their own music files at reasonable speeds. If that becomes impossible then just about everything cool on the internet is done as well. So long podcasting, bye-bye online gaming, adios pornography.
100 Awesome Music Videos - I spent so much time watching videos the other day I forgot to blog about it.
I keep meaning to blog all the promotions I turn down so I look cool and counterculture-ish. The reality is that I only turn them down because what they offer is so depressingly small (which is probably insultingly in line with what I'm worth). Here's a snippet from one I received today:
Hi Brad,
My name is [...] and I'm working at [...], a marketing firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. I wanted to reach out to you to see if you’d be willing to help us with a project with Twix. There are only 2 more weeks in which we have to gain several thousand more entrants into a Twix sweepstakes, with prizes totaling an amount of $4800. We were wondering if you’d be able to post a banner up on your website that would link to [...]. In return for you, we have tons of Twix bars to give away and we even have a couple MLB baseball tickets to give away in the Tampa Bay, Houston and Atlanta areas.
It's official Brad policy to not be against selling out. I certainly have lines I won't cross, but for the most part I support the idea of making money. But to slap some ads on my site for some free Twix bars is scraping the bottom of the barrel, even for me. Baseball tickets in another country don't interest me much either unless they come with plane tickets.
But then I thought: "Whoah, he said tons of Twix bars". What could I do with a stupid amount of Twix bars? Why, I could have the most chocolatey live show ever! Just think how they'd pile into the club if the sign said "Brad Sucks Live Tonight + FREE ALL YOU CAN EAT TWIX BARS".
So I wrote back: "How many free Twix bars are we talking about here?" No reply so far. I hope that's not the last time in my life I get to ask that question.
I find this learn to disco video kind of hypnotizing:
I've been testing out Picasa Web Albums and love it. It's a whole different animal than Flickr. It lacks just about everything cool that Flickr has but somehow that doesn't matter much to me. I usually only want quick photo albums to send to friends and family and this does the trick and works nicely from Picasa. Also whatever they're doing with pre-loading on there is awesome because switching from picture to picture is lightning fast, I love it. Here's my guitar painting photo album.
I do wish it had some more hotkeys for common photo actions like deleting and captioning. Also a few more sizes of images that I could link to on the blog (update: or even allow me to link to the images at all) would be nice as well.
Foldable Travel Guitars - guitars that can be folded up to fit inside a briefcase -- freaky. What happens to the string tension?
Besting the workbench, I masked my guitar:
Hope I did a good enough job. It was a pain in the ass to do, lots of exacto-knife work. I also took a tip from Paint Your Own Guitar and attached a 2x1 to the neck joint and stuck a bike hook in the end. This way I can hold it by the 2x1 and move it around when I'm painting it and then hang it up to dry when I'm done.
The 2x1 works well except that the body flops around a bit as I move it, bending at the bolt I put in. I'm too afraid to make any new holes, so I taped some thick cardboard to the sides of the 2x1 to protect the neck socket as I throw it around.
Also I made a painting area in the garage. A lot of tape and country newspapers went into the making of this:
And I applied the first coat of sanding sealer. I read a lot of guitar painting tutorials (well, like four) and some did this and others didn't bother. Luckily I found some sanding sealer at the local hardware store so we're on. I'm sure I'll make up for this in the sanding stage as I can't find any sandpaper with grits over 320 around here.
Pianolina - a Flash music generator. Deploy cubes of various sizes and colors to make music.
I got annoyed sanding on an overturned recycling bin (aka my workbench) and there happened to be some Father's Day sales on workbenches. So I bought one of these for $20:
I've spent the past week trying to set this up in intermittent spurts. Turns out not only am I retarded and stupid, I am also inept. Here's what my assembled version looked like a couple days ago:
Sickly. Looks like it needs to be put down. Since then I went and bought some more nuts (you can just buy them) and have stabilized it somewhat, but now the wood for the top doesn't fit anymore. So I really don't want to talk about it anymore.
I finally found some Krylon paint in a craft store. There was a sale on so I think all the sexy colors were taken. Here's what I got:
I think I'm going to paint it "true blue". I really thought about bright yellow or pink, as I like those colors, but then I thought maybe I should go for something more conservative as those loud colors seem like ones you could get sick of real easily. And blue's still a nice non-standard guitar color. My little logo falling guy will be in black.
Also my order from Stewart MacDonald showed up today. Here are my Golden Age pickups:
Getting these has made me regret tearing my guitar apart because I really want to try them out, but I can't until I paint the stupid thing.
Electric Kool-Aid Amp Test - guitar teacher Rob Hampton has posted some videos from his amp building project. Very nice!
Grant Robertson has a good article on The Digital Music Weblog about Weird Al Yankovic's cut from digital distribution:
King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.
"I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."
This is one of the reasons why I get so tired with a lot of the music industry criticisms out there: a lot of them depend on the idea that artists make nothing worthwhile from CD purchases, which may be true in some cases, but not in all.
I get asked the same question occasionally and for my indie-self I make about the same whether you buy a CD direct from me or via a digital music store. (Update: except for Magnatune actually, where I only get 50% of what you pay.)
Google launched this Google Browser Sync tool for Firefox. It's mean to keep your settings in sync between multiple copies of Firefox. At first I was excited because only weeks ago I had the idea for something like this as setting up Firefox on new Windows installs is annoying. But it doesn't sync your Firefox extensions! Weak.
The 50 Dumbest Rock-Star Extravagances is a fun read. I don't know if bailing yourself out of jail should really be considered "dumb" though. Also check the rock star finances sidebar with Harvey Gettleston. [via]
Apparently if you buy a new Renault Megane car it comes with a built-in mp3 player. And included on that mp3 player you will find the song Making Me Nervous by yours truly. I believe that's the most expensive way I've ever seen to get a copy of my song. Sweet! [via]