Man I want a Chumby so bad.

Music Thing has some first Cubase SX4 screenshots. Looks all right I guess, though I don't care much about what all the stock plugins are going to look like. My biggest wishes are 1) make it easier to import audio and then stretch/manipulate it, 2) some sort of sample (and maybe preset) organizer so I can tag my loops and find them easily and 3) make it easier to render VST instruments.

So from the shots available I'm mostly interested in the media bay:

And this SoundFrame Browser, which looks like a VST preset organizer:

My biggest problem in any sequencer is feeling all disorganized and not being able to get at what I want quickly enough, so these additions could be cool.

So the guitar painting summary: I'd say it was a success. Here's what it looked like before:

And here's the "after". Me using it on stage at Riverpalooza:

 

While I can point out imperfections in my work until everyone gets totally bored, I think it looks good enough. Definitely learned a lot about guitars and painting and general craftsmanship along the way, which was the point.

I like the guitar. I installed new pickups which sound a lot better and a new switch (the old one was broken). I'm noticing some possible intonation problems which I may have to go get my local guitar guy to look at, though I've gotten cocky enough to adjust my own truss rod and bridge now, so we'll see if I can fix it on my own.

A lot of people have asked me for advice as I've done this project, so here are a few things I'd do differently if I started it over again:

• I would make sure to sand the sanding sealer down better. I wasted a lot of time by not sanding it properly and then the primer didn't adhere to it. I thought shinier was better. Also any nicks and dents that are visible now were certainly visible at the sanding sealer stage.
• I would be more careful around the edges when sanding. Everything I read said to be careful around the edges when sanding and I still wasn't careful enough. The edges are where you can see the biggest imperfections on my guitar.
• I'd sand the inside of the "horns" better. The two pointy things at the top. In there I did the lamest, laziest sanding job and it looks bumpy and gross. No big deal, who can see it, right? Well, whenever you look down as you're playing it, you'll see it and you'll remember how lazy of a sander you are.
• I would put more than 10 thin clear coats on the guitar. Can't hurt to have the extra coats if you're unsure about wet-sanding. I managed to sand through the clear in a few points and strip off some of the paint. Extra clear would have given me some extra protection and it doesn't take that long to apply.

Sanding, sanding, sanding. If I had to do it over again it would be way easier just for the experience in sanding that I've picked up.

Want to do this yourself? Here's the reference material I used:

• Paint Your Own Guitar - I bought this eBook -- it and the free videos you get were a huge help. My only complaint is that the book is geared more towards copying various famous rock guitar designs and solid colored guitars are considered afterthoughts. But really, about 90% of what I did I learned from this book.
• Project Guitar.com - Great site with a lot of excellent tutorials. This is the site I got the heat stripping idea from, which was a fairly painless way to strip the guitar.

And thanks a lot to everyone who emailed and commented with helpful advice and suggestions. Part of my motivation for blogging the whole process became knowing that someone out there might be able to help if I boned things up too badly.

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

Been having troubles lately with my capo throwing the tuning out on my guitar. I put the thing on at a gig and about 70% of the time it's squelch city. The thing is just a clamp so I feel mighty dumb not operating it correctly.

From my quick reading on the net it seems this is a common problem and (I suspect) is made worse on my crappy blue guitar due to different string tension or something probably more technical.

I was looking around at all the different types of capo and found the G7th capo which claims to be the greatest capo in the world:

I want to believe the hype of course. But it's like fifty bucks! Maybe after I get my iced grill and pimp cup.

Apparently there's a peeping tom in my neighborhood. Got word someone three blocks away broke his hand on the peeping tom's face the other night after catching him looking in his window for the second time but was kicked in the nuts and the p-tom got away.

p-tom is the slang term I'm trying to invent as I don't think there's anything lamer than being called a 'peeping tom'.

Our next gig is at The Rainbow on Wednesday, August 30th. Sojourn are opening for us. Feel like plastering Ottawa in posters this weekend?

Here's a PDF for easy printing. And here's one without the falling guy in case you need it.

A compressed version (sub 500k) of Making Me Nervous is now the default project of REAPER as of v1.0 release candidate 2. That kicks ass as I'm obviously a big fan of the program.

Update: also Justin just posted a neat series of screenshots demonstrating the evolution of REAPER.

I finally got fed up with updating gig listings in multiple locations so I did a little php voodoo last night to run all three listings (my front page, live page and MySpace) out of one file.

First I made a data file with all our gigs: giglist.txt.

Then I wrote a php script to parse that file and display the html data in the two different formats I need for my site:

front page format

live page format

Then I stole and hacked up this great tutorial by Bill Dickerson: How to Generate Dynamic HostBaby Calendars on MySpace that Scott sent me, to generate the third format, a dynamically generated jpeg image:

All I did really was skip all the Hostbaby specific stuff and then had to fix the object constructor and destructor to work with PHP 4 as there's no PHP 5 on this boat.

I'd like to add RSS or iCal feeds though I have a suspicion that'd be a lot of work and then nobody would use them. Anyway, if you want the source for any of this, just let me know.

There's a fascinating Wikipedia page on hip hop rivalries. I don't know where they get the energy. Also I enjoyed this Wikipedia warning:

The neutrality of this article or section may be compromised by "weasel words."

Weasel words? According to Wikipedia:

Weasel words are words or phrases that smuggle bias into seemingly supported statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. Weasel words give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide if the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand on its own without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed.

For example, "Montreal is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Montreal is the nicest city in the world."

Good information.

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.