I'm pretty far behind on the blogging lately, let's see...

Amazon launched their DRM-free MP3 download service - good news for anyone who hates DRM. The implementation is nice, the player's decent. Things I don't know: a) how my music got in there b) how they decided on $6.99 for the price of my album (which is a dollar more than 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin') and c) how much I earn out of the sales. Seeing as though I earn about $6.50 from each iTunes album sale I assume this'll be significantly less riches for me.

I'm pretty into Hype Machine lately. My friend Ryan's been bringing me up to speed on the blog house scene. I really don't have the time or patience or really anything to keep up with things so I'm relying on aggregators to do it. Of course now I'm thinking about writing my own as making web sites to enable my own laziness is sort of a passion of mine.

I think I could watch this Cadbury ad about one, maybe two thousand more times:

I think this is the first time I've ever been happy to hear Phil Collins.

Hey, Dead in the Water, a film directed by Marc Buhmann that used my music in it, was released on DVD yesterday.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble have it and apparently it's at most DVD retailers. More info on the movie is here.

WordPress 2.3 is out and I'm now upgraded. I'm fairly excited about tagging though I'm not sure if Windows Live Writer supports it yet, which could be a downer. If you notice anything broken (other than my spirit) please let me know.

So last night I met William Gibson. What a super nice man. I was, I think, only slightly to mildly retarded while speaking to him. He said very nice things to me and it was a pretty great and extremely surreal experience. I kept having flashbacks to watching him on Prisoners of Gravity as a teenager.

Aside from the personal meeting, the Q&A itself was inspiring. My ongoing creative struggles seem small and ridiculous when compared with the pressures and ups and downs of a quarter century career largely saddled with the expectations of others.

The only thing keeping me going right now is rainbow puke:

Wow, it's been a week of death and terminal illness in Brad-land. Not sure what brought that on, but I apologize.

At least there's a new c. layne record called SHARK WEEK and it's available for free download. Check it out!

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8, a fine article by The Onion:

"Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably 'Liebesträume No. 3 in A flat' by Franz Liszt and 'Closing Time' by '90s alt-rock group Semisonic," Schreiber wrote. "In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement."

I've known Adam Finley since 2002 when he wrote about Brad Sucks in Lockergnome. We struck up a friendship and stayed in email contact since then. He was a very talented writer and we shared the experience of having large creative aspirations but being stuck in small towns. I encouraged (code for hassled) him to put his writing online, to start a blog, to get into blogging commercially, to get RSS feeds, to fix his RSS feeds, etc, etc. With my nerdy faith I knew that if he got his writing out there, nice things would happen for him as they have for me.

Lately he had been happily writing for TV Squad and updating Raise Your Children My Way, Damn It as well as Adam's Utterly Podcastical Podcast.

Earlier today I received an email from his brother saying Adam had been struck and killed by a school bus on Thursday. I didn't believe it at first because Adam's most recent post on TV Squad was this morning (and made me laugh). But I knew it was possible the posts were pre-written and queued. I held out hope it was a sick joke, but Google News backed it up (1, 2). Awful.

As is common these days, I had never met Adam. We spoke on the phone once or twice and got along great. He interviewed me for Flak magazine and it was like talking to an old friend. In email we tossed bits and pieces back and forth, checking in for life/career/project updates whenever we had gone too long without contact. I always asked him what he was working on. I knew that he'd go on to be an extremely successful writer. It was only a matter of time.

There are huge gaps in my knowledge of Adam. I really didn't know him the way his family and friends did and it would be disingenuous to even put my sense of loss on the same level of what they must be feeling. But I do know Adam was thoughtful, funny, caring, talented and unique. I'll miss him and I'm very sad he's gone.

The GT-8 + Power Engine combo got a tryout in rehearsal last night. Verdict: thumbs up. It was sorta touch and go with levels and patches for a first try, so I don't think I'll be using it at tomorrow night's show, but with some tweaking I think it'll be a big improvement.

The 60 watt Power Engine puts out more than enough juice to keep up. At only half gain it's as loud or maybe louder than I ever got my Delta Blues 210 up to (my loudness demands are not very high).

The biggest difference is the amount of tone control available. It's wonderful and horrifying at the same time -- so many choices! Also there's a fair amount of difference between what the tones sound like at whatever level I can manage in my house and band levels. That'll take some adjustment -- as well as probably me sitting in the garage diddling with settings and being eaten by mosquitos.

New version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store, most of these changes are thanks to Scott Andrew who's using the DDS on his new store. Changes:

+ variable pricing
+ default price (list in order)
+ can now add physical items
= fixed: spaces now allowed in filenames
= fixed: specifies product ids must be number in items.ini
= fixed: noted PAYPAL_EMAIL must be your sandbox business email

Very handy additions. You can grab it here.

Some people are reporting installation troubles with previous versions here in the forums. Still trying to figure out what's going on there.

Wow, linked to by William "father of cyberpunk" Gibson:

People sometimes ask what I was listening to during the writing of a given book. For Spook Country, I've usually cited the complete ouvre of Drive By Truckers (whom I happened to discover for the first time just as the book was really getting started), and, toward the end, Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. But I've been forgetting Brad Sucks, who I discovered when I was somewhere in the middle. Anesthetic's remix of "Dirtbag", in fact, came to have much to do with the tonality of my character Milgrim. I'd drive around and listen to that if I felt I was losing the peculiarly floaty grip that Milgrim required.

I don't know if I will ever feel any nerd-cooler than this moment.

The Anesthetic remix of Dirtbag is here by the way and it's by my fellow Magnatune artist c.Layne.

Previously beside my desk I had a keyboard stand and my Edirol PCR-50. The Edirol would invariably become covered in papers and garbage which really hampered my workflow. I also bought a second smaller keyboard that I wanted access to as well.

After complaining about it here and multiple trips through IKEA looking for something that would work or be adaptable, I realized I had a much larger table in my basement that I could cut down to my purposes and install a keyboard shelf into.

So after a lot of planning and some nervous work with a table-saw, here's my new side-table with the keyboard tray retracted:

Here it is with the keyboard tray extended:

The keyboard tray slides were around $36 and the pine board was $10. It works pretty well though I slightly brutalized the board cutting it to fit. I may sand and stain it later but I'm too lazy now.

The keyboard tray works well but I'm sure a better craftsman could have made it less wobbly when pushing it in.

But it does what I want. The large keyboard stays out of sight most of the time and I can't cover it with junk. The small keyboard is accessible up top and there's plenty of room on the left side for papers and garbage. Hooray papers and garbage!

As chronicled in my amp search, I went with a Tech 21 Power Engine 60 extension cabinet. Today I had a chance to play with it for an hour and I'm really, really happy with it.

The big drawback of using a regular guitar amplifier with an amp simulator is that regular amps are specifically made to "color" the sound coming out of your guitar. That's what makes guitars sound awesome. But layering the amp sound on top of your amp simulator results in random muddy crap. You have to constantly be compensating for the sound of your amp when designing your patches on the amp simulator.

The Tech 21 PW60 Power Engine however is more faithful -- it puts out what goes into it with minimal coloration. When I switch between headphones and the PW60, the patch sounds are nearly identical (the PW60 has more "air" which seems unavoidable due to physics.)

It'll be a week before I can try it at rehearsal -- which is good because I've got some patch programming to do -- but I can easily get the PW60 up to volumes I'm sure my neighbors can hear without even putting the gain at 50%.

It's slim on features, which I like as opposed to Behringer's habit of throwing shitty digital effects processors in anywhere they can. Three EQ tone controls, gain control, handy XLR in and out and of course 1/4" in. Mine didn't come with an AC power cable but I'm not sure if that's Tech 21's fault or the music store. I have lots around so it was no big deal.

It's lightweight (33 pounds) and nice looking. It's smaller than my Delta Blues 210 so I guess I'm less of a man now.

All in all, I'm very happy with it, five thumbs up.

I've wanted to ditch my Peavey Delta Blues 210 for a while but what to replace it with has been an issue. The 210 is a great amp but running my digital amp sim into its tubey goodness is basically dumb (and a huge hassle in patch-tuning).

Ideally I'd like to not lug an amp around with me and go straight to the PA but the few sound guys I asked about this seemed terrified by the idea. They said they'd probably run my amp sim into a monitor and mic that just to be safe. So I guess I should still have an amp that I can control.

Looking around the bossgtcentral.com forums lead me in the direction of keyboard amplifiers like the Roland KC-350 and Behringer K3000FX. Keyboard amps of any decent power and quality are expensive (the KC-350 is $600+ here) and they get quite heavy.

Somewhere I stumbled across the Tech 21 Power Engine PW60 extension cab: 

The Tech 21 Power Engine 60 is an open-backed 1x12, 60W powered extension cab designed to be used with the Trademark 60. It is not a standalone piece; however, it can be combined with any discrete bass preamp. You don't have to tweak your usual settings or presets. Just plug into the Power Engine and go. It has a level control, 3-band active tone control, 1/4" input, and balanced XLR input and output. You can daisy-chain any number of Power Engine 60s together for the really big gigs.

Regardless of what it's intended for, it's been embraced by amp sim users. The Harmony Central reviews are glowing. "Clear", "clean", "flat", "loud", all very promising. Also it only costs $380 Canadian, weighs in at a svelte 33 pounds and if I decide to go for stereo I could grab another one without too much hassle.

I've ordered one and it should be here tonight, I'm hoping I should be able to make that cash back selling the Peavey if it's all good.

I broke down and bought a Boss GT-8. I had run up against tweaking limitations with the GT-6 and finally decided to go for it. Immediate knee-jerk review is that it sounds great, a substantial improvement over the GT-6. Other things:

• The GT-8 does two amp models at a time, giving you a nice big stereo sound.
• The patches sound more full and natural.
• The synth patches (wave, sitar, etc) are actually responsive and playable. (On the GT-6 you could make noise with them but they frequently missed notes if you played at anything above a really slow speed.)
• It's black and looks sexier.
• The effects chaining makes more sense, particularly that it has a standalone compressor/limiter outside of the effects chains. It always pissed me off on the GT-6 that in order to use the compressor or limiter you had to give up an effect slot.

The bad:

• The acoustic guitar sim presets still sound like tinny crap. Maybe I'll be able to tweak it into usability but I'm not optimistic.
• The Output defaulted to JC-120 instead of Line/Headphones so I had a little "uhh why does this sound like total garbage?" moment, which I assume would be way worse for someone new to amp sims.

I'm very happy with it though I'll need some real time programming it to know the full score.

My pal Scott Andrew's taking pre-orders for his new record. His album site is super awesome and fills me with seething jealousy... of friendship. Go check it out!

Hey awesome, CD Baby has redesigned and is now offering direct MP3 downloads for albums. The design is a little sparse to the max but it's cool I guess. I'm glad they're offering MP3 downloads now.

I'm back from Maine. Turns out there was no beard shortage at the American Folk Festival after all.

I'm at the American Folk Festival in Bangor, Maine right now. I'm not performing (as I am all rock dude), merely sweating my balls off in the searing humidity. Anyway they confiscated our apples at the American border, so you can all sleep safe (for now).

Not sure even Jimi Hendrix would have looked cool in these things. Maybe Devo could have pulled it off fashionably. (via Music Thing)