Canada Day celebration on Parliament Hill was good, packed full of people and the fireworks were fantastic. Most of the entertainment was a little too American Idol for me but Feist was great. Too bad she was only allowed three songs.
Hey happy Canada Day everyone, even if you don't happen to be of the Canadian persuasion. I'll be down around Parliament Hill today gathering data for Operation Don't Get a Hangover. I will report my findings.
June 29, 1888: Handel Oratorio Becomes First Musical Recording - it was called Israel in Egypt and Biblelicious.
Scott has some great ideas for Music 2.0 services. I've been meaning to write up mine for a while as I've learned I'm too busy to launch any new sites.
My big idea lately is one I've been meaning to pitch to Magnatune:
Independent record labels should provide hook-ups to their artists for services such as graphic design, manufacturing, merchandise, booking, bio-writing, press kits, photography, advertising, PR and more. These are all things artists will pay for but it's hard to weed through the scams and overpriced poor quality services out there.
The record label would find quality professionals to perform these services at a reasonable price. Record label makes itself valuable to the artists by simplifying their lives, record label takes a cut or referral fee from each service transaction, artist has access to quality resources to improve their career, sells more music, everybody's happy.
Woke up this morning to my desktop machine frozen on the Windows boot-up screen. I hit a key and it rebooted. What the. Let it go through, it froze again. Tried safe mode, froze again. And a second time. Uh oh.
Tried some rescue LiveCD rescue stuff, maybe my Windows install was just barfed. My hard drive seemed to be gone. I fearfully checked the state of my backups -- was pleasantly surprised to see they were intact. Also Gmail meant my email still worked and Google Browser Sync meant I had all my bookmarks and cookies on my laptop. Sweet.
I started going through the motions of getting a replacement hard drive, rebooted the desktop again for kicks and everything worked fine. "Windows has recovered from a serious error." I'll say.
Hard drive on the way out? Power supply dying? Heat? I don't know but that was a dumb way to kill a couple hours.
And the award for "most annoying music loop used in a Flash product demo" goes to Creative for the Zen Stone Plus! Way to go guys! You've driven me insane!
Seriously though, you make audio products. Let's show some hustle.
Scott asks where Touring 2.0 is. Eventful's okay but he's right: it could be so much better. Things that suck about Eventful:
- It hassles people to sign up for Eventful accounts. People tell me it's required, but like for Louisville, Kentucky there are 13 demands but I can only see that 3 Eventful users are demanding it.
- Regarding the above -- how am I supposed to contact those other ten people if I wind up in the area? Why don't I see their email addresses? It can't be a spam thing -- they signed up!
- The Eventful interface is cluttered as hell, I never know where the hell I'm supposed to be looking for things. Could use some serious streamlining.
If it didn't annoy me in those ways I'd think about running my whole gig list off of them. But not if they're going to be all stingy and into the lock-in.
Peter Kirn has a good article on the Internet Radio Day of Silence, which is today. There's a huge service-killing hike in the pipe for web radio royalties.
I want to care about this but I don't listen to web radio, I'm not American, I think big music screwing themselves creates great opportunities for musicians like me, and I don't think protesting will do much good if they're determined to do it.
So I guess I'm a web radio dick, I'm sorry.
The 23 John Henry Bonham Drum Outtakes - I'm not sure how to verify these are actually him, but they're some nice drums regardless.
Holy crap: musical tesla coils. This would be a sweet live show. Here's the Super Mario Brothers theme on solid state musical tesla coils:
The theme from Weird Science:
Beetlejuice:
And here's the introduction and explanation:
13 Great moments in the co-option of hip-hop - seems like Run-DMC/Aerosmith "Walk this Way" should be on there, but a lot of great (awful) videos on this list.
The history of Vinyl Data has some surprises. I didn't realize there were artists encoding Sinclair ZX Spectrum programs into their records as far back as 1983 such as Pete Shelly from the Buzzcocks and the Thompson Twins. That's awful hardcore for 20+ years ago. I would say it beats the crap out of manipulating spectrograms.
Even more awesomely The Thompson Twins included an adventure game (called The Thompson Twins Adventure) where you wander around beaches and caves for no real reason:
You can actually play it online here. OH GOD I FOUND A BOTTLE OF SPICE.
My favorite of course is Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Uresei Yatsura' album:
Examining the source for the program reveals the following comments:
"Hi Nick, is Robin there?""Judas Priest Satanic Message #3"
"What is sadder: a.) finding this b.) writing it"
Lick his cloven hoof.\m/ (via kotaku)
SOUNDTRACK - Rob aka thehipcola's new album set to drop October 31st.
Why I Love Power Chords - First issue of guitar teacher Rob Hampton's newsletter. His blog's packed full of info and I expect the newsletter will be the same. Worth checking out.
Here's a weird one for y'all: Brad Sucks - Tracker Array [10mb MP3].
As I've mentioned in a bunch of interviews I took classical guitar lessons when I was 8 or so but got bored of it. It wasn't until I came across trackers on the PC around 1993 that I got hooked on making music (and realized that song files were the future) and it's been downhill ever since. The trackers I spent the most time in were Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, though I did my time in Composer 669 and Farandole Composer as well.
Recently I came across one of many stashes of tracker files I had converted to MP3 years ago. I thought about putting some of the songs online as a joke -- some of the ideas are okay but the sound quality of the samples is so low it makes me gag. Instead I compiled them into one retro audio highlight reel. These songs are all from around 93-98 I think. You can picture me working in DOS, chatting on BiModem, running a Telegard BBS (Renegade is for lamers) and not getting much sun or healthy social interaction while you listen to this.
The show last night (first as a three-piece) at the Live Lounge was super fun, thanks to everyone who came out, especially Brad Sucks Live Show MVP Donna (I think) for dancing almost through the entire set!
Richard's bass amp died right before the show so we had to improvise, which sabotaged him for the entire show which I believe was the Lord's plan.
The three-piece was cool. Having only one guitar thinned out the sound, which I liked but some people didn't. But then other people had previously complained there was too much guitar before compared to the album. So I think I'll just... go die.
Getting ready for the show tonight, regular nerves, tequila shots, etc. Tonight will be the first show I've done as a three-piece, where I'm the only guitarist. My new bassist Matthew is unavailable so the previous bassist Richard is filling in. Our one rehearsal went really well so I'm feeling good about it.
I miss Rob, but so far it's been pretty fun to be the only guitarist. I mean I can't tell if it sounds good or anything but it's kinda cool when all the guitar noise that's being made is yours. Unless of course you're totally fucking up and then it's lame as hell.
The show tonight is being recorded though I'm not sure if it's a soundboard recording or what.
My Eventful page is going okay but the numbers are pretty thin and spread out all over the universe. Regardless I've been dutifully checking out airfare. Is it worth $600 to rock 5 people in Seattle? Maybe if the tickets are $120 each. They should have an Eventful exclusively for millionaires. How many millionaires would like to see a Brad Sucks show in Seattle? If it's one, here I come!
Guess I should post this here also (already in the forums):
The title of my next album, barring mind-changes, will be "Out Of It". I'm looking for album art & ideas.
I want to go with a different style from I Don't Know What I'm Doing, so nothing too cartoony or that looks like a kid drew it.
Stuff you've made (that I can use) or things found through the Creative Commons search would be sweet. Thank you!
Figure I should get a jump on it. Thanks!
MediaMonkey Review - found this great write-up on MediaMonkey (my MP3 player of choice) geared towards power-users and people wanting to trick out their MediaMonkey.