I had seen most of the guitars in this Top 20 Strangest Guitars list, but the new one to me was The Wangcaster:
Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. [via]
CBC Radio 3 made a list of the top 11 declarative band names and Brad Sucks is in there, right on! Here's the list and I'm in great company:
11. I Am Not a Manimal
10. God Invented Mustard
9. A Spectre Is Haunting Europe
8. We Are Wolves
7. You Say Party! We Say Die!
6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor
5. I Love You But I've Chosen The Darkness
4. I Am Robot And Proud
3. Brad Sucks
2. This Band Goes To Eleven
1. I Can Put My Arm Back On You Can't
Personally I have a soft spot for any band name with an exclamation mark in it. You Say Party! We Say Die! is pretty classic. [via]
James Carey converted a toy guitar to a USB Guitar Hero style controller suitable for use with Frets on Fire. Check it out along with a video here.
He took an Early Learning Centre toy guitar (you know, the ones that play annoying bleepy sounds) and ripped its guts out. He then stuck some guts from an old Logic 3 joystick into the body, did some wire magic and hey presto, insta-USB Guitar!
Apparently the next issue of PCFormat will have instructions on how to do it. Seems like it'd be pretty easy to do. Just cram the guts of a USB controller in the toy guitar body. [via]
This morning I went through all the demos I've recorded over the past while. Some I've finished enough to post on the site here and some are still too embarrassingly sketchy. To my surprise I found I've got 12 tracks I'm relatively happy with and I think it's time to quit writing for a while and start finishing these suckers off and call it an album.
Right now I'm unsure about the amount of perfectionism to lay down on these. Do I re-record everything Should I record them at a studio with expensive gear? I'm thinking I may need some outside ears to give me some perspective. The heart says yes, the budget says no.
And I know that for me there's a dangerously thin line between absolute perfectionism and total laziness. Both result in not finishing anything. It's in the middle where the magic happens.
Whoah, freaky. So Google released a new version of Google Talk today -- though the beta's been around for a few weeks. Among file sharing and voice mail is the ability to display the song you're currently listening to as your status message.
I thought it was a silly feature and I can't use it because half the time I'm listening to testmix-02.wav or something boring like that. But they just released Google Music Trends which shows you charts of the most popular songs that users of Google Talk have been listening to. Also, news flash: the Internet really likes Coldplay and Thom Yorke.
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.
I've finally added a guitar tab section. Thanks to everyone in the forum thread who's been contributing.