I would like Clell Tickle to be my manager:

"We're talking about a man who uses violence and intimidation to secure promotion for the bands that he works with." Right on.

Now this is more my style -- I've been reading about it for a while, but Wired has a good musicians-in-Second Life overview called Second Life Rocks (Literally).

For those who don't know, Second Life is an online virtual world. Kind of a giant 3D chat room. I've popped in there a couple of times and it was sort of chaotic, but the music angle is interesting and appeals to the lazy person in me.

Suzanne Vega has already gigged in Second Life and Duran Duran will be performing on their own island -- which had better be called Duran Duranistan.

Even the front page of secondlife.com has this on it:

I think I may need to call a Brad Sucks Live meeting to suggest that our live show could benefit from an increased heavily armed robot and minotaur presence. 

According to the article there are lots of gigs going on all the time, I guess I'll try to check one out. Any recommendations?

Songs are pretty:

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web.

Neat looking, but since it's limited to MIDI files it's not as much fun as it could be. (Though obviously getting musical information out of audio is super duper hard.)

Adam emailed me to let me know he did up Look and Feel Years Younger for Frets on Fire. You can grab it here. It's got settings for Medium and Awesome modes. Pretty sweet. (Other songs are here.)

You know, it's bad enough that I'm forced to use MySpace because it's where all the people are at. Bad enough that I'm stuck replying to fan mail in their awful little inbox manager which is cluttered with ads, slow, inefficient and totally unable to search emails for later reference. Also bad enough is that every page I go to is an all-out assault of audio visual battery, violating at least two of my senses at all times, not even including my sense of good taste. It's bad enough that with each "connection" I make with a fan I'm entirely dependent on MySpace to contact them in the future as I have no email address for them. Not to mention that I will certainly lose and forget about them in my hundreds of friends. Who were those dudes from around here who wanted to come to my next show? Uhhh.

I also can't import my blog there and on top of that I can't import a gig list, so I have to maintain the one on my site at the same time. I can't change the four songs I've uploaded there without breaking all the pages that people have linked them on. Blah blah blah, on and on.

So on top of ALL of that, keeping in mind it being bought for $580 million dollars: COULD IT AT LEAST STOP BEING BROKEN ALL THE TIME:

"Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred." Man, don't surprise me like that. I nearly fell down.

I probably see this error four times a day and I'm by no means an avid MySpacer. I just log in to approve friend requests and reply to emails now and then. WHAT IS THE DEAL.

Riverpalooza was fun. The stage was ten feet high and the wobbliest I've ever been on. I'm basically as tired as can be.

Good thread on Ask Metafilter:

Songs about the end times: tell me about songs whose lyrics give a sense, either overt or oblique, of the world ending, civilization collapsing, etc.

88 replies and counting.

InfinityX did up my new demo Fake It in Frets on Fire. You can grab that here. I've only gone through it twice and my high score is 46,360. Shameful. I wonder if there's a way to hook the PS2 Guitar Hero controller up to the PC.

Jeff's got a beta of his new album The Weak Moment online. Sounding great.

Mike wrote me a few nights ago telling me about Frets on Fire, a Guitar Hero clone for Windows and Linux and asked about doing some Brad Sucks tunes for it. I gave him the rendered guitar parts to Bad Attraction (the most guitar-y song I have, I think) and he went to work on it. Before he finished though, InfinityX showed up in the forums with, coincidentally, a completed Bad Attraction project for Frets on Fire. That's pretty cool. Anyway you can grab that in the forums here.

I've never played Guitar Hero, but Frets on Fire is fun and worth checking out. I'd love to see more of my songs in there.

We'll be playing Riverpalooza next Saturday (August 12th). I'm not sure what time we'll actually be going on yet so you'll just have to chill and white water raft or something until the magic happens.

The first shareware release of REAPER is out! Congratulations to Justin and Christophe. Go try it out, seriously.

I installed the new Golden Age pickups and pickup switch in my blue guitar. The switch and the neck pickup worked fine but the bridge pickup gave no output. I sat here switching from the new pickup to my old one and there was just nothing coming out of the new one. It had been a while since I bought them (as I was waiting to finish my guitar) so I was wondering if Stewart MacDonald would still replace it. I sent off an email and they replied quickly and within 24 hours had air-mailed me a replacement free of charge. Awesome, awesome customer support. I will absolutely buy from them in the future.

I was supposed to wait a month but I made it two and a half weeks. I wanted to have two guitars again so I could have a backup for gigs and honestly I had lost faith that this paint job was going to look good enough that a couple weeks of dry-time settling would make much of a difference. So I took off the hook and off I went wet-sanding:

I went from 320 grit sandpaper all the way up to 1000. It was looking pretty scuffy -- which was the point -- though I wasn't sure if I had sanded the clear enough as there were still some semi-shiny spots. Eventually I managed to strip the paint off a couple of the edges. Now I've read that when this happens to paint the area and re-coat it with clear and wait a week or two and start again. But forget that noise, I'm finishing this bitch.

I went at it with the 3M Perfect-It Rubbing Compound and then 3M Swirl Remover:

Holy LORD is that shiny. Instantly the guitar starts looking like a professional job if you ignore all my screw-ups. I clean it off and bring it inside, take the masking tape out of it and put the neck on, partly out of fear that it wouldn't fit anymore. I managed to get it into place and everything seems cool:

It's looking fairly swank if I do say so myself. I then start to put everything back together. I decide not to put my new switch or pickups in yet, that I should try and put the guitar back together in its original state first as I've never done that before. It probably took me an hour and a half -- but all the electronics worked first try! Woooo!!

Re-assembled, I hang it on my wall and take a cruddy picture in bad light:

I'll try and take a nicer one tomorrow.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. There are many flaws if you look at it up close, but from even a slight distance it looks decent. There are lots of things I'd do differently if I had the chance, but I'm happy it's done and the idea of re-doing it makes me feel tired and lonely.

Other parts in this series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I've finally added a guitar tab section. Thanks to everyone in the forum thread who's been contributing.

For some reason my Officemax post is broken. Possibly due to the 470 comments by disgruntled Officemax employees on it. I wonder how to fix that. As BmcC points out, at least we have the black metal post to keep us company in the meantime. Update: Installed this comment pagination plugin for Wordpress and it's fixed for now, though viewing all still breaks the page.

I got psychologically suckered into signing up for Bebo this morning (everyone else was doing it), which in my circles has been getting the reputation of being a more music-oriented MySpace. The feature that intrigued me was playlists -- users can create and display playlists on their homepages of songs that Bebo bands add to their pages. Why MySpace hasn't added that, I have no idea. Here are my thoughts as I signed up and created my beautifully lame Bebo page:

• The username "bradsucks" was taken. Weird.
• You seem to be able to upload an unlimited number of songs which is way nicer than MySpace's limit of four.
• Drag and dropping the order of my top 10 songs is sweet, though arranging the songs on my album was done with cumbersome "up" and "down" links, which I gave up on.
• I still swear to the lord god above something needs to be done to make it quicker and easier to sign up for these sites. All of my music and data are available for the taking -- why must you force me to upload and label everything manually?
• You have to have a regular Bebo account and then you make band accounts inside them, unlike on MySpace where you have to set up a separate type of account. I guess this is neat but I have no interest in having a non-musician account.
• Instead of allowing the type of eye-gouging HTML customization that MySpace does, you're restricted to using Bebo-approved skins. They're pretty but they're not customizable in any way, which sucks.
• I now have two Bebo blogs (my regular user blog and the band blog) that I will not use and I can't hook up to this blog I have here. Get some RSS going or allow easy cross-posting or something.
• The search sucks, it's just a full text Google search of the public pages. So there's no way to search by location or interest in musicians or playlists or anything cool that would help me find people who are or might be interested in my music.
• Crazily there seems to be no way to link to my home page here. The profiles don't allow HTML and there are no fields for pointing to external band home pages. Additionally you can create albums of your music but can't provide a link to any place that the visitor could download or buy it. What in the sam hell.

So I like the additional song storage. MySpace users are often asking me to post additional songs so they can add them to their pages, but if I remove any of the original four I put up there, it breaks every page with those songs on them.

The additional songs and the playlisting are probably what give Bebo the reputation as being more musician-friendly than MySpace. But it's worse in that without links back to my site here or to a place they can buy my album it's hard to believe it'll sell any music for me. Not only that, it's unlikely almost anyone will make it back to my site here and sign up for my mailing list so I can keep the relationship going, keep them in the loop on future releases, etc.

The social networks are definitely useful for spreading music and that's certainly cool. But I find them frustrating -- like there's a huge barrier between the fans and the artist and that any contact between the two is almost accidental and always totally fleeting. And with Bebo's lack of external links it's driven home to me that, as a musician, it would be hard as hell to build anything lasting out of my social network "groupies" or "friends".

And I guess I wonder: is that the nature of the post-Napster musician/fan relationship these days or is it just a side effect of crappy web tools?

Stompin' Tom Connors came to my small town tonight and boy were there a lot of cowboy hats in the huge crowd. A Canadian legend, rumor is it this could be his last tour so it was cool to see him. For you non-Canadians here's the origin of the nickname according to Wikipedia:

Connors' habit of stomping the heel of his boot to keep rhythm earned him the "Stompin' " nickname - first announced at the King George Tavern in Peterborough, Ontario. Various stories have circulated about the origin of the foot stomping, but it's generally accepted that he did this to keep a strong tempo for his guitar playing - especially in the noisy bars and beer joints where he frequently performed. After numerous complaints about damaged stage floors, Tom began to carry a piece of plywood that he stomped even more vigorously than before. The "stompin' " board has since become one of his trademarks. After stomping a hole in the wood, he would pick it up and show it to the audience (accompanied by a joke about the quality of the local lumber) before calling for a new one. It was reported that when asked about his "stompin' board", Tom replied, "it's just a stage I'm going through". Stompin' Tom periodically auctions off his stompin' boards for charity.

A friend bought a DVD at the show and on the cover it said it included a genuine piece of one of Tom's stompin' boards. Including a piece of plywood with your DVD, to me, is totally awesome.

I like the idea of Snocap and I hope it (or something like it) catches on. Mashable's got a good write-up on it here:

Artists on MySpace Music (or hi5, Bebo, Multiply and any other site that supports Flash embeds) can post a widget that plays the tracks and allows you to buy them right away. Indie band “The Format” is currently using the widgets on its MySpace page, where you can buy songs from their album “Dog Problems”. Tracks cost $0.79 each, which Snocap automatically charges to your Paypal account.

I checked out the widget and it's not bad, though I found the checkbox interface confusing at first and my stomach turned at the idea of having to make an account on another service just to make a transaction under ten dollars.

What would be nice (for me) is a simple Flash widget for Paypal data transactions with no middle-man. So you can be all wandering MySpace looking for hotties in your area and then BLAM you've impulsed purchased my album for reasons unknown to you. If Apple was on the ball, they'd get an iTunes widget out there stat.

REAPER 0.996 is out and that means v1.0 should be just around the corner. The updates keep coming with amazing frequency. I spent some more time with it today to get in some last minute feedback and it's still a really impressive piece of software. Check out some of the features here. It's incredibly functional and customizable and the entire install is still only one meg in size. Once again it's free up until v1.0 and then according to Justin's post in the forums:

Should be something like $40 for noncommercial use and ~$200 for commercial use. Purchasing 1.0 will give you a license for all 1.x releases..

And after being asked how they'll define "commercial use" he posted this clarification:

as far as what constitutes commercial use, it's essentially if you are a) making money directly from what you're doing, or b) using it in a workplace.We will let you upgrade from the non-commercial license to a commercial license for the difference in price, as well. so if you go purchase the non-commercial version ,make some stuff, then end up making money on it, you can pay $160 or whatnot and be legit.

The important thing about all of this, too, is that we won't take any technological steps to enforce this-- it will be up to you to do the right thing. If you don't feel you're doing something commercially, then you're probably not, etc.

Nice.