This week I'm trying out micro-blogging: Twitter and Tumblr.

I like the casual approach of both, but Twitter requires more work than I'm really willing to give such a tiny thing. I like how it works as a chat channel via IM though even with only Scoble and Chris on there it got too noisy for me to handle. Google Talk status messages work fine as a "what's up" kind of thing and I don't have to deal with a whole new friend network.

Tumblr is fun for casual blog crap I wouldn't put here or in del.icio.us or over on In4mador!. Adding stuff to it is a multiple page procedure though (their bookmarklet doesn't do chats or quotes) and I'm not quite sure what to do with it or why I'd keep at posting to it.

des at Hometracked has an excellent post called The RIAA is not evil, an even-handed response to Gizmodo's proposed March RIAA boycott.

The article is a great summary of a lot of things that have annoyed me about anti-RIAA tech activism for a long time. I liked it so much I even posted it to Digg, which is something I never do.

This Piracy Kills Music short film is pretty heavy on style:

It's a little short on facts though. I'm not sure I buy that there are less artists making a living off their music than pre-1999 (kinda seems like there are more artists than ever these days) and it also makes no mention of the plummetting costs of recording and distribution. (via Ursi's Blog)

As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).

I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn't even bother releasing an album until a few years later ("people just want to download mp3s!") but I was totally wrong.

I don't have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there's a practical aspect to them. Assuming it's not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I'd rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It's the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.

But I don't see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it's the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it's harder to decide or define what a worthy "single" is. That's what the filtration of the Internet is for, that's why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.

Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album's still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.

For the next month if you buy anything from my digital download store I'll send you out a free shiny Brad Sucks button. Check it out:

(Fingers not included.)

If you've already bought something just email me your mailing address and I'll get one out to you.

Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I'm about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it "Working-on-a-Performance Art".

My mind is blown -- BLOWN -- by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I'm jealous of DJs. It's like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. "You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That's unsanity!"

I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.

It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven't felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you're not setting it up all crazy like I was before you're SOL for program changes.

Guess I'll go kick something.

Zachary builds guitars out of IKEA table tops:

Awesome. IKEA should really sell these guitars. (via ikea hacker)

I'm releasing the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store.

It's a tidied up version of the DRM-free digital download store I use in my store. I made it for myself but realized this was something most artists could use so I give it to you internet.

Please post feedback/bug reports/troubles here or in my forums. 

Oh yeah and I frigging went dog-sledding yesterday:

How legit is that?

Update: Very legit.

I made this Space Invaders themed poster for our gig last weekend. While I was stuck here in -20 weather it went to LA:

Here it is hanging out with a statue of Charlie Chaplin.

Here it is with Woody Woodpecker, totally qualifying for an admission discount.

Here it is hanging out with Michael Jackson's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame even though I warned it not to.

Frank Sinatra. Classier company.

Marilyn Monroe, ooh la la!

Here's my gig poster hanging out with Shirley Temple's foot and hand imprints.

Oh no, Godzilla!

I understand my gig poster was trying to hail a cab at this point.

My gig poster paid this man a dollar to hang out. Money well spent.

Hooray, I have a digital music store now! You can buy DRM-free Brad Sucks tracks in high quality 192k MP3, OGG or FLAC formats. You can also buy my entire album in whichever format you like with the album art and lyrics included. Buy buy buy! I still feel strongly that people sharing my songs is vital to me as a musician, so I have no plans to stop giving my music away for free. But it's clear that many people want to pay for high quality versions of my songs and I'd like to avoid the middle-man and DRM and offer that directly if I can.

formats

Do people really care about audio file quality? I'm skeptical. But maybe digital purchases will act as a donation "with benefits".

I'm also not sure if anyone really cares about OGG or FLAC formats. I get emails asking for them, but we'll see. I could add other formats as well (WAV?) if there's any demand. I'll give it some time and see what's what.

the nerdy stuff

I wrote the store myself. It runs off Amazon S3 (for cheap and healthy bandwidth) and the Paypal shopping cart. A bunch of PHP and MySQL later and kapow. I stole the play button layout from Scott Andrew's store because everything he makes is pretty.

There are probably bugs, so please forgive me. I will fix them as soon as I hear about them.

I'm also considering packaging this whole sucker up so other artists can use it to inexpensively host and manage their own digital stores. Any kind of file would fit in there, not just music.

If you've got any feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Can I say that Paypal has the slowest, most poorly organized and frustrating website of all time? Because I just did. I'm basically at swear level 8 at this point.

A while back I thought it would be cool to install one of those LED belt buckles in my guitar. And now my dream has finally become reality:

It was easier to do than I thought. Take one slightly abused guitar:

Take one LED belt buckle:

Flip the LED belt buckle over and there's a piece jutting out that's supposed to go into your belt:

Drill a hole in your guitar (not too big or the buckle will flop around):

Push the belt buckle into the hole.

Video:

It's pretty sturdy but I'll probably tie it to my guitar strap hook to make sure it stays attached to the guitar if it falls out. Also I may install a switch so I don't have to pull it out to turn it on and off.

Scott's got a new music store. I'm jealous, setting up something like this has been on my to-do list for months. The options seem to be PayLoadz and E-Junkie. Any others out there?

Update: Oh yeah I forgot about Kagi's Digital Download Service.

John Buckman has the details on putting Magnatune streams into your Second Life land. This is a great idea. Users get royalty free music for their lands, Magnatune gets promotion. Very cool. 

Something I was thinking of: is there an easy way to stream podcasts into Second Life lands? That'd be another huge source of royalty free audio and would be pretty interesting. Virtual radio stations.

There were some great replies to my CDM question about configuring a laptop for live performance. The best stuff:

• Autoruns - I hadn't heard of this program but I'll certainly be using it from now on. You can monitor and alter your loaded drivers, DLLs, services, startup programs and much much more. Great stuff.
• MusicXP.net - This site has a lot of great tuning techniques for audio.
• XPLite - I mentioned this in my question along with nLite but one person recommended XPLite.
• Process Explorer - I've been using Process Explorer for at least a year now and it's fantastic, I can't go back to the default Windows XP task manager.
• Process Monitor - I haven't tried this one but it looks useful.

And there's this awesome tip from art:

Ableton Live custom windows interface

When I use Live in a live environment, I run it as a ‘Custom user interface’ or ’shell’ in Windows XP Professional. Basically what this is if you aren’t familiar with it, is replacing Explorer with Live as a shell. This means there is no desktop environment, no taskbar, no start menu, no applets running, etc.

There are many advantages to this when using Live - improved stability, free memory, improved performance, etc. The disadvantage is you lose a practical way to multi-task. (But who needs multi-tasking when you only need to run Live live?)

To accomplish this in Windows XP Pro, type ‘gpedit.msc’ in the run command. This brings up the ‘Group Policy Editor’. Under ‘User Configuration’ / ‘Administrative Templates’ / ‘System’, there is a setting called ‘Custom user interface’. By default this setting is ‘Not Configured’ (meaning Explorer).

If you select ‘Enabled’ and type in the path to Live (or any application), Windows will boot into Live upon startup without anything else running.

You must include parenthesis if the path to Live contains spaces - ex. “C:\Program Files\Ableton\Live x.xx\Program\Live x.xx.exe”.

Restart computer!

If you do the above & wish to change the setting back, just hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager, hit New Task (Run), type ‘gpedit.msc’ and change the setting back to ‘Not Configured’. Restart and you’re back to Explorer. If you use a sound device that requires an applet to be running all the time, then I don’t really know what your success will be. I used to use an Emagic EMI USB card that installed itself as a system service and always ran at boot-up. I never had any problems running Live as a shell. If you decide to give it a shot, it won’t mess up your system in any way. If for instance you enable this setting & the path or program is not found upon boot-up, Windows$ will load the default Explorer shell.

Hardcore! This is an awesome tip and the sort of thing I was looking for. I used to use Litestep and some other Explorer shell replacements so I know how bulky just having Explorer running is. And pointless if all you're doing is running one program.

I do wonder if it'd be better to use that approach but also dual boot to protect against whatever crap is already in your registry, pointless drivers and services, etc.

Thanks to Peter for posting my questions and for the readers for dropping knowledge like bombs

For those of you who can't make it to the show Saturday night, I managed to film the end of us rehearsing our Search and Destroy cover:

 So glamorous!

Peter from Create Digital Music was nice enough to ask his readers a question for me about potentially dual-booting my laptop.

I use my laptop for regular stuff but am wondering if it might be better to have a separate XP install with minimal services, applications, no internet, etc. for live performance. Or maybe I'm just worrying too much.

I've been trying to think of something thoughtful to say about Steve Jobs' anti-DRM essay.

There's a good analysis at Daring Fireball.

I think it's cool and all but I don't get why Apple can't offer DRM-free downloads for those labels (or artists) that want them. That'd give people who reject DRM a competitive advantage and put the squeeze on the majors.

Last show with Rob on guitar! He will be missed! But not by you if you show up!