I guess we're worm composting now.
Kind of weird that our first house pet was a pound of red wigglers, but that's life.
Hey hey, Making Me Nervous is track of the day on CBC Radio 3, sweet! Thanks to Steven for letting me know.
If you're coming here from the CBC website, I have nothing brand new to sell you, which is unfortunate. There are only buttons and digital downloads or real CDs you can hold in your hands. I also have no shows coming up, but I hope to book some.
And I uh... I love you.
Hey, the new Frontalot album Secrets From the Future is out and I'm totally on one of the tracks (Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe).
There's a new section on the site called You, an organized directory of all the remixes, lyrics, videos, tabs, frets on fire projects and so on that people have made to go with my songs. (For example here's Making Me Nervous.)
I know I'm missing a lot of stuff in there so please submit if you notice something missing. Also let me know of any credits and credit urls you want updated, I did a fair amount of guesstimation.
Also: newer songs are not in there yet but will be soon. Just upload stuff as "other" for now and let me know in the notes what it's for.
By the way, I stole this idea from Jonathan Coulton.
Thank you to everyone who's contributed stuff, it was awesome going through it all again.
I've been looking forward to CD Baby's SNOCAP integration so I can sell songs direct on MySpace. It's now up and running and it seems all right. Here's the player/purchaser thing:
It's not the most glamorous player, but it gets the job done. From what little research I've done it seems to sell in DRM-free MP3 format which is cool. It would be nice to allow longer previews and replace the default MySpace player with it.
I ask all you Ableton Live experts: is there a way to dynamically change the tempo in the arrange view?
I'm trying a different way of laying out my set and everything hinges on this. (PS: I may throw up in rage if there's not a way to do it.) Thank you!
I've been loading all user-submitted stuff (remixes, tabs, etc) into a database so I can display and maintain it better. I loaded all the remixes people have done of my songs into it today and spat out this chart:
Interesting, I always figured Making Me Nervous and Dirtbag would be way up there as they're my most popular tracks, but I'm surprised to see Overreacting in the top three.
It's been a few weeks of trying micro-blogging with Twitter and Tumblr and here are my reviews.
I've been back and forth about Twitter (my page is here). At first it was neat but useless to me. Then I had a couple of friends in there that I was interested in keeping in touch with. Then I lost interest in it, then I went back. Sometimes I can't believe I'm bothering with it, other times I wish I had more friends. Kind of like real life.
Twitter's certainly a decent idea and I believe it's on to the next evolution in IM. But if you can't convince all your pals to get a Twitter account and deal with the hassle of updating it, then you're not going to get much out of it. Which leaves only hardcore net nerds talking to themselves... to each other.
Tumblr
Tumblr's been fun and I'm still using it (my page is here). I don't know if anyone's reading my tumblelog but I feel like I'm creating a little meme repository that I'll be interested in looking back on in the future. So it has some inherent value to me as a user regardless of whether my friends sign up.
It's desperately lacking tagging. I like its simplicity but the addition of tagging wouldn't overly complicate it and would add so much to the service. Different ways to view my data, ways to view site-wide tumblr entries under tags, etc.
Conclusion
While both sites are nice, ultimately I'm exhausted with new services and would like to combine them. I was originally thinking that Twitter and Tumblr would go great as a combined service, which touches on my semi-obsession with a temple of ego or Mugshot style service.
Steven Garrity pointed out Jaiku to me last night, which (I'm assuming) is a European Twitter clone. But instead of simply being a one-off status posting service, it also merges all your feeds (del.icio.us, flickr, picasaweb, blog, lots more) into one timeline that unifies your online identity.
Maybe the best headline ever, brought to you by Keith Richards:
"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated, and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow," Richards said in the interview, which was posted on NME's Web site.
"My dad wouldn't have cared," Richards said, adding, "It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."
Also in the article is him bashing some modern bands:
"Everyone's a load of crap," he said. "They are trying to be somebody else and they ain't being themselves. Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party? Load of crap, load of crap. Posers, rubbish."
I'm not sure how that's any different than the Stones emulating Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley back in the day, but I guess it's stupid of me to point out logical inconsistencies to a guy who snorted his dad.
Update: aw man, it's apparently not true.
Well, the month of free buttons for digital downloads is over and I thank you all for participating. My digital store seems to work fine and I hope you all like your buttons. (You can still get them by donating.)
For all you entrepreneurs out there, here's something I learned: if you take an envelope with a button in it into the post office to find out how much it will cost to mail, they'll feel the envelope and say "hey is there a button in here?" and charge you several dollars. But if you put the stamps on yourself and drop them in the mailbox, they get there just fine and it only costs a dollar or so.
Also several people reported that their envelopes had been opened by the time they got there. I guess making sure I wasn't mailing you a button and a note commanding you to stab yourself to death.
Hell has frozen over, pigs can fly, etc, etc. EMI and Apple have announced they're offering its entire digital catalog encoded at 256k and free of DRM for $1.29 per track (a 30 cent increase). Other info:
Entire album purchases will stay at the same price, but have the higher audio quality and will be DRM free.
EMI music videos will be available DRM free with no change in price.
Customers who purchased tracks previously can upgrade to DRM free tracks for $0.30 per track.
Jobs says they are trying to do similar deals with other labels, and expects that 50% of all of their tracks sold will be DRM free by end of year.
I figured this was on the horizon, but that's some seriously fast turnaround. Here's a list of musicians signed to EMI (though not all of these are available in EMI's digital catalog.)
Have I blogged about SellaBand before? Basically an artist signs up and then tries to get 5,000 people ("believers") to donate $10 towards the recording of a CD.
It's been getting some decent press so I was wondering why I'm not doing it. I went to sign up tonight and read the following in the conditions:
- Once an Artist has officially reached the Goal of $50,000 he/she is obliged to fulfill the recording commitment with SellaBand. Of the $50,000, $30,000 will be used for recording the CD. SellaBand will assign an A&R- manager who will book the producer, studio and mastering facility. The rest of the budget will be used for manufacturing, packaging and posting the 5,000 CDs for your Believers.
- SellaBand will own the Album Master for 12 months after completion of the recording of the CD. After one full year you will get the full rights to the Album Master.
- Only for the songs you will record with SellaBand you must sign a Publishing Agreement with SellaBand. In this agreement 60% of the publishing rights of these songs go to you. 10% goes to the Production team. The rest (30%) goes to SellaBand.
That seems crappy to me. So I raise $50,000 and SellABand decides who my producer, studio and mastering facility is? So the artist has no input into that? And no doubt they're not paying them the full $30,000. ($30k is a shitload of recording and I assume they're only going to refer you to studios and producers they have previous deals with.)
SellaBand owns the masters for 12 months so you're not doing jack with it outside of SellaBand for a year. And then you're tied to giving SellaBand and the production team 40% of your songs forever.
I dunno, I want $50,000 as much as the next guy, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.
This is probably a nightmare a lot of electronic musicians have had. (via GetLoFi)
Way back I posted my hesitation about using a Firewire audio interface. While I love technology, years of abuse at the hands of SCSI, USB and many other acronyms has made me scared and wary. After dual booting my laptop and stripping XP down to its most efficient, I wrote to M-Audio asking why my Firewire 410 inputs kept hanging whenever I, like, used them. This was the reply:
Hi,
You've seen a lot of problem with the newest Dell laptop. The new dual processor have made computer to go faster than ever, but when there is IRQ sharing (or if the IEEE 1394 adapter is on a virtual IRQ), the chipset seems to be less robust with resource sharing.
I would recommend you to try a PCI firewire card (or PCMCIA or ExpressPort Firewire cards) to get rid of any IRQ conflict.
If I give a hundred dollars to everyone on the planet will all my problems go away?
Set this up in the living room last night:
The neighbors can clearly see it from the living room window, so I'll be expecting the police any day now.
PS: You're all invited over to get wasted on some 100% organic salad in a few months, dudes.
That is my hip-hop name. Some stuff:
- I've been hearing that Making Me Nervous is playing on Sirius Satellite channel 24. I declared that to be sweet.
- I bought a wireless monitor and transmitter (PSM-200) for live shows.
- Brad Sucks Magnatune ccMixter compilations are in the can, just waiting to get all the remixers' tax forms into Magnatune.
Things I'm trying to avoid working on because I have a lot of stuff to do:
- New songs.
- A WordPress page-to-wiki plugin so awesome people could update my guitar tabs page for me.
- Turning temple of ego thing into something usable for other humans.
- A to-do manager that looks and works almost exactly like Gmail.
- A better Google Desktop email (or Gmail) gadget that updates faster and doesn't show me all my sent mail and MySpace invites and other crap I don't care about.
Today I re-partitioned my laptop and stripped Windows XP down to its bare essentials. That took a frigging fortnight and a half but it's dual-booting now so I can have my nasty regular laptop Windows XP and then my stripped down Ableton Live only XP.
I would like to see many Beatbots dancing in unison. Possibly I would set them to my music, film them and call it a music video. Everyone would love it because Beatbots are so awesome.
So bands on MySpace are limited to posting 4 songs. Lame in this age of massive affordable bandwidth but OK. I can't change my songs around because lots of people have them added to their pages and I'll break those. But OK. Then there's this Myspace announcement today:
You know how you can list four songs on your band's MySpace page? Well, thanks to the fine peeps over at Bodog Entertainment you can now add a 5th song. More music means more ears, more ears mean more plays, and more plays mean way more exposure. Add Bodog Entertainment as a friend and up your band's song list to five on your MySpace Standalone Player. Get your 5th song heard.
Wow, that's ballsy. I mean it's one thing for everyone else to treat the MySpace friend system as the dumping ground of the internet, but for MySpace itself to just whore it out like that takes some nuts. They must really not care.
Update: Ryan points out that when you Google your new "friend" Bodog you find out he's really into online gambling. Check their Wikipedia page. I'm still surprised MySpace did this and now even more surprised News Corporation (MySpace's owners) are cool with potentially being accused of marketing gambling to the kids.
Maybe we can all add Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man as MySpace friends for a sixth and seventh songs on our musician pages! Hooray!