I just uploaded v0.20 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Some small changes and one big one. It now supports Amazon's Flexible Payments Service:

Of course I can't actually offer it on my website as Amazon doesn't offer the service in Canada. So that's pretty weak. But for all you Americans: go nuts.

Update: I've pushed out v0.22 of the BSDDS, fixing a batch of bugs.

I loved this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about creative genius:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

It's very inspiring and I really admire how she's reconciled her creative expectations.

A point I think is also missing from most discussions about creative genius is context. The time and culture a work is released in have a lot more to do with being considered genius than the work itself.

If I had a time machine I would travel to the past and play some electronica on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Minor update to Gimme Some Money, the object donation script. Just a formatting issue with the Javascript widget that should make installation less annoying.

For the past year I've been thinking a lot about solo guitar interfaces. One of the challenges with being a guitarist and playing solo is that both hands are almost constantly busy with the guitar and your feet are usually busy with pedals. Doesn't leave a lot of other options.

I've thought up a lot of ways the guitar as an interface could be improved or augmented and the simplest idea seems like it would be to put a bunch of easily accessible buttons in the guitar and have those buttons simulate keystrokes on my laptop. How hard could that be? Let's see.

Step one:

I ordered some Seimitsu PS-14 arcade buttons. A lot of the buttons I found were wayyyy too deep (such as these) but these ones looked like they might not go all the way through my guitar and halfway into my torso while playing.

I also impulse bought an Arduino. The Arduino is awesome but turning button presses into keyboard strokes isn't really its main deal. So I ordered an I-PAC VE which is dedicated entirely to simulating keyboard controls.

 

Step two:

Months later when the I-PAC finally arrived, I wired up the buttons and the board and it all worked on the first try. I made a little cardboard stand for testing:

But it doesn't look like there's much testing to do, it's pretty brain dead easy. I had it entering keystrokes on the computer and triggering clips in Ableton Live within minutes. Windows XP even recognized the I-PAC without any additional drivers, very nice.

Step three:

Where should the buttons go on the guitar? I put some cut-out circles on it to see where they'd fit and be most useful:

This is the layout I'm thinking of right now. There's a lot to take into consideration, such as:

1. Ease of access while playing (the upper right ones seem close enough I'd be able to hit them with only a brief pause in playing)
2. Staying away from locations where accidental hits are likely (the right side is where my arm is while playing)
3. Making sure I don't interfere with any of the guitar's guts
4. Keeping them far enough away from the edge that I don't weaken and collapse it

Right now I'm wondering if I should try to house the circuit board inside the guitar and run a USB cable from the guitar to my laptop or should I run the wires from the buttons to the external I-PAC which would be by the laptop? I do not know.

Had to do this to get it out of my head. Now I can move on.

I try to stay away from idioms and other bits of faux-wisdom but one that actually stuck with me from recording/songwriting circles is “you can't polish a turd”. 

Which I always took to mean “if your song isn't any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it good”.

So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.

Graphs of Billboard's 2008 Hot 100 and Pitchfork's Best 100 Tracks of 2008. 

I like the disparate song lengths. Maximum song length on Billboard: 5:21. Pitchfork: 17:03.

Also are we not ready, as a people, to combine the post-grunge and hard rock genres? [via waxy]

Radio Aporee is geo-located field recordings. I have no idea what use this is, but I like it.

Trying to do a song demo a month in 2009, here's the first of the theoretical twelve:

Certain Types of People (demo)

Update: BFF GrowYoYoRhino has put together a guitar lesson for this song:

He's got it pretty much perfect.

I've been tagged twice now in this Seven Things meme, first by Rob Campbell and second by Dan James. I resist this stuff because I'm boring but I've found reading other people's lists fascinating, so here we go:

The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they've been tagged. (you'll just have to trust me)

My seven things:

• Jobs I have wanted in chronological order: Dickie Dee man, baseball player, Sierra On-Line adventure game designer, computer programmer, writer and musician.
• People I have written fan mail to: Mr. T and Michael Jackson. Neither replied. In my letter to Michael I lied and told him I lost my copy of Thriller and could he send me another one (signed please).
• When I was 17 and a desperate aspiring writer, I emailed Terry Pratchett to see if he'd answer my questions about writing. He graciously said "Sure, as long as they're not too dopey". I then asked him what he kept his margins set at in his word processing program. I still regularly think about how stupid that question was.
• The first concert I went to was Corey Hart (opened by Katrina and the Waves) during his Boy in the Box tour. I had backstage passes but Corey had already left when we tried to go up. (I lied and told all my friends I met him anyway.)
• A few years ago I was diagnosed with vitiligo, which is the disease that allegedly turned Michael Jackson white. I'm a pale guy so other than it turning a lot of my hair white it's not very visible unless I tan.
• When I was four or five I had a habit of peeing on my neighbor's steps. I can still remember my dad hosing them off.
• Me: “I need a seventh fact about me.”
  Her: "Why don't you say that you try to get angry at animals when they run out in front of the car so that you don't feel as bad if you kill them?"
  Me: ”Did I say that?”
  Her: ”That's what you told me to do.”

I am tagging Aaron Walker, Courtney Summers, Jesse Dangerously, David Weinberger, William Gibson, Hannah Aviva and Justin Dykhouse.

Over the holidays I had a look at all the entries for the Fake It cliche video. They're sweet, but I think we still need some more, so I'm going to extend the deadline out indefinitely.

A few people suggested I put together a Youtube video begging for more submissions, so my crappy beard and I have done that here:

Beard out!

Crayon Physics Deluxe is out. Not only is it an amazing game, it has a remix of one of my songs in it:

I tried doing a podcast a few years ago and failed. I just wanted to share some music I was into but compiling the podcasts was time-consuming enough that it got pushed aside almost immediately. So I've started another podcast on Sellout Central which I'm planning to put out every Monday.

This time though I've spent some of my vacation time figuring out how to automate most of the process.

The nerdy details:

Using sox, flite, lame and a bash script, all I have to do is export a playlist from Foobar2000 and run a script. Sox crossfades the songs and compiles them into one big WAV file, flite generates the speech synthesis for the intros and outros and then lame compresses them into an MP3 with appropriate ID3 tags. So basically, I export the WAVs and then run:

./podcastit.sh [episode #] [# of songs]

And get back a shiny podcastable MP3. Whether anyone will like the songs I like is a whole different matter.

If you want the script, let me know and I can package it up.

Update: and here is the script all packaged up.

I just break all my resolutions but here are general goals I'm thinking about for this year:

• Release at least one new demo song a month
• Fix up this website so it makes me feel awesome
• Get a new live show together
• Climb back on the exercise wagon
• Release a podcast a week

What are you folks up to?

My pal Future Boy sends word of a complete remix album he did of Out of It:

This is my take on the album Out Of It by Brad Sucks. These aren't so much remixes as they are what might have happened if Brad had approached me with his songs and asked me to produce his album. The vocal tracks are mostly intact and the song structures have not been messed with all that much. Nevertheless, these mixes are wildly different in character from the original tracks. The album was mastered by Ben Phenix.

So far I'm really enjoying it, the production is more experimental and makes the songs interesting to me again.

I'm not doing much of anything this holiday other than hanging with family plus getting nearly barfed on by the new puppy (who is still cute and still unnamed).

It's weird, I sort of have no idea what the new year will bring. I have no real live show right now, lots of music sitting around needing to be finished and a lot of fairly decent work to do. I guess I'll let the universe pull me wherever.

I'm happy with how my new record did in 2008 and all the cool people I got to meet. Thanks to everyone, hope you're all having a great end of the year.

Adopted this Catahoula/Beagle mix today:

She is super cute. Not traumatized too bad by us so far. Some quick introductory photos here.

Got any name suggestions?

Brad Sucks - Out Of It from FRAIM online.

I'm working on getting someone to redesign this website. It needs to be wider, more attractive, blah blah. I'm pretty happy with the general layout and usability, but it could use a little lipstick and an eyebrow wax at least. I spent some time going through all sorts of famous musician websites today. It's pretty amazing how most of them are super cluttered and do not have music sections.

I mean I get that not everyone wants to give all their music away, but jesus, throw a dog a bone. If I get more music going to your MySpace page than I do your official website, something's wrong.

Anyway, the most startling thing is that out of all the websites I visited, one of the best was Britney Spears':

What it's got going for it:

• Simple design
• It's not Flash
• Straightforward navigation (home/blog/videos/music/photos/tour)
• RSS feed
• Hey, there's a music section! (though it's just music blog posts – cop-out)
• Some actual content (from a team of Britney bloggers)
• Britney's Twitter status up top

I can't say it's the greatest but compared to most musician websites it's amazingly restrained, simple and informative. Also it has inspired me to create a Brad Sucks fragrance.

What other musician websites are decent? Who should I steal from?

Over the weekend I broke up with my band. It wasn't them, it was me. Thanks to Bruce and Matt for the awesome support and good times. I'm trying to figure out what's next and I'll probably be looking for ideas on here.

How does a “one man band” do a rocking live show that isn't boring as all hell?