Bought a 37" LCD TV to make my Xbox 360 feel better, it's pretty sweet. Also had my first Xbox Live Halo experience tonight and it lived up to my expectations: I got brutally destroyed by some kid yelling racist stuff at everyone. Ah, the future.

My gamertag on Xbox Live is chillbaron (it's the opposite of chillbilly) if you would like to add me to your friends thing and destroy.

I started playing Halo 3 solo but god Halo is boring. Please, no more boring cutscenes! Maybe it'll pick up once I try playing co-op as the others did.

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine last night about whether the song Phantom by Justice could be played on the electric guitar. I thought it could be (but it would sound stupid) and he wasn't sure (but thought it would sound stupid). So here it is, me playing along with Justice's song Phantom:

Justice - Phantom (Brad Sucks at Guitar mix)

Yep. Stupid.

I turned 31 yesterday. I'm old as hell! My girlfriend gave me an Xbox 360 though so I've got a lot of game-playing to do. I've got Halo 3 and I believe I shall be subscribing to Xbox Live -- anyone out there playing? What are the good online games?

It's been confirmed: Friday November 23rd I'll be doing my first solo show at the University of Waterloo. That's nearly a seven hour drive from my home and will be my first time playing outside of the Ottawa area.

It'll also be my first hardcore test of the laptop + guitar + vocals setup. I'm hoping it goes totally awesome as that would mean I could travel with this sucker when there's no budget to lug a full band around and I could start fulfilling some of those Eventful demands.

The only two huge issues I'm really worried about are:

The laptop could flake out - I'll have the backing tracks on MP3 and CD as well as the laptop which would mean only my realtime vocal effects would be killed if something terrible were to happen to the laptop.

It could be totally lame - A dude singing and playing guitar to some laptop backing tracks -- is that cool? My favorite rappers generally just have backing track -- or a DJ going through the motions if they're rich and want to be super cool. Doing an acoustic show seems like a cop-out, but maybe having backing tracks is too phony.

Of course I'm sure something unexpected will happen instead. Who knows!

Thanks to everyone who submitted vocals for Out of It. We got 54 entries and that's pretty awesome. Quite a weird sensation to hear so many people singing my song.

Now comes trying to mix the track, woo woo! While I'll only be using a handful of the vocals on the record (I think) I'll definitely put together some other mixes with more/all of the vocals.

Scott gives the lowdown on his pre-orders. Very awesome and open of him to give the numbers out. Looks like it was a pretty great success and huge congratulations to him.

I've been thinking about taking pre-orders for the next Brad Sucks album but I don't think I have the energy or time or talent to set up a sweet system like Scott's so I doubt I'll bother. It's hard enough getting the record out the door.

Facebook finally has band pages. I made a Brad Sucks one here. These days I'm really despising Facebook, it seems so anti-Internet, full of lock-in and crappiness. Also: we got photos, events and videos for bands -- but no music? What in the--

Anyway I'm sure it's great! Check it out here.

Update: thanks to Justin for showing me what I did wrong. Adblock removed the pulldown menu that included the selection for the musician pages.

Facebook tells me they can't change the page, so I've had to make a new one here. Hooray I'm dumb!

Just a reminder: you have until this Sunday November 11th to get your vocals in for Out of It. Details here.

So far there are 22 vocal recordings on ccMixter which is a decent haul. I was hoping there would be so many it would crash the Internet so here's hoping business picks up this week!

Last Halloween was our first time trying to go all out on the decorations. This year we extended it out a bunch and improved a lot of little things. Some photos:

Everything went over real good. The black light where we gave out the candy was a big hit. We wound up dragging a big mirror out so that kids could see themselves glowing and they really dug that. You can see more pictures here if you're interested.

I've been working with David Huyck on some new Brad Sucks t-shirt designs. The first one is up in my shirt store:

Here are some of the shirt variations:

The crow on the left would rather be elsewhere.

A Paler Shade of White is an interesting article about indie rock and race. Its basic premise seems to be with the rise of legitimate black mega-star musicians, white people are self-consciously limiting themselves from doing what has previously made white music good -- namely stealing from black people. Mostly he pins it on a lack of rhythm:

How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? I can imagine James Brown writing dull material. I can even imagine the Meters wearing out their fans by playing a little too long. But I can’t imagine any of these musicians retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.

It's a neat analysis and it's fun to put down boring jangly Pitchfork whiteboy rock. I liked this quote:

But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

But there are lots of counter-examples. The White Stripes for instance are still healthily stealing from black people and are doing just fine by it. My city has more blues-rock bands than you can shake a stick at. But I guess they don't get called "indie rock" as they're not white enough.

Weird, just got a call from my drummer saying "Turn on the radio! There's a song called Fake It that sounds like yours but it's some other band!" I realize I don't even have a way to listen to radio in the house so I went and looked it up online. It's Fake It by a band called Seether that I had not heard of.

Sounds pretty different to me, though now I feel like a tool maybe releasing an album in a month or so with Fake It as the first track.

Whooooo.

Looking at their album they also have a song called "Breakdown" too and my album will have "Total Breakdown". Good thing I never finished my song "FMLYHM (Fuck Me Like You Hate Me)" though or man would I feel stupid!

fieryprophet put together all the vocals submitted so far for Out of It and man is it awesome: Out of It submitted backup vocals (as of Oct. 16) [5mb mp3]

That audio fills me with so much joy. I can't wait till more people get theirs in!

I played Half Life Episode 2 and Portal over the weekend. EP2 was good, Portal was brilliant (and many props to Coulton for the awesome credits song).

Anyway I was trying to search the Steam forums and you have to prove you're human by entering a CAPTCHA. I got so many wrong I gave up. Here's a small sampling:

    

Can you guys read any of these? I had to check with friends to make sure I hadn't suddenly become colorblind or something.

Early data points to Valve's CAPTCHA algorithm sucking and my vision being fine.

I was warned my Out of It backup vocals deadline was too short and either that's true or not many people want to participate. Regardless, you've now got until November 11th instead. Read the original request and get the song MP3 here.

I've also clarified that I need a recording of your vocals alone (not mixed with the original track) in order to mix you in. Thanks!

The Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time. I think #3 is my favorite as he giggles and draws a picture of the interviewer through the entire interview:

I don't know if anyone told you -- I mean the Internet has been practically silent about it -- but Radiohead is offering Magnatune-style pay-what-you-like pricing (including free) on the digital download of their new album In Rainbows (site is currently dead slow), to be released in ten days. Or you can buy their $80 box of vinyl and extra songs and stuff.

I don't have much to say about the move. Radiohead is in a unique position that's about as far away from most musicians as can be imagined and I'm thinking it'll work great for them.

What's interesting to me though, especially as I try to decide on one myself for the next record, is all the different sales models out there that musicians are using. It's a little overwhelming:

There's giving it away for free and asking for donations, variable pricing, lower-than-retail pricing, higher-than-retail pricing, tiered clubs with rewards, pre-ordering incentives, club memberships, merch bundles, box sets, etc, etc, etc.

How do you choose which one's best?

Here's a remix I did for c.layne off his new album SHARK WEEK. (All his vocals for the album are available here.)

short fuses burn long bridges (brad sucks remix) [5 MB]

This was fun to do. After grinding away on shitty boring album stuff I was looking for a remix project to go kinda crazy on. I need to remember to do remixes more often, it's relaxing.

 

We had a good showing last year but we're gearing up for Halloween 2007. First step is putting up some advertising like this countdown sign that's now on our front porch. Here it is with the camera flash:

They're laminated fluorescent posterboard letters with a black light shining on them. The numbers are attached to the board with velcro. The crappy pictures don't really do it justice, it looks awesome in person. (We stole this whole idea from here, but are proud of how it turned out.)

32 days left!