Whoops. I found out on Friday that last week I accidentally uploaded a very old version of my Guess Who's a Mess demo. That's pretty embarrassing, I was actually pretty horrified but I think I'm good now. Anyway here's the latest one instead: Guess Who's a Mess (demo 2)

Okay, moving on...

Hey, who wants to hear me bitch about iMacs! I don't care, here I go:

Switching to a Mac has been great in every way except for like... the hardware. I should point out that I began this switch by buying a refurbished 27" iMac from Apple.com to save $300. I'm not made of money you guys. I've bought many things from there before and all the devices have been flawless. Except for iMacs I suppose. A rundown of the iMacs I have known:

iMac #1: Worked great! Then I went to install an additional 8gb of RAM. One of the RAM slots was so out of alignment I couldn't get one of the sticks in there. I contacted Apple Support, they offered to let me buy another one and then refund my money for the first when I returned it. Fair enough.

iMac #2: Right away I noticed the hard drive was noisy (even when idle). I had iMac #1 and iMac #2 beside each other before I returned #1 and could easily tell the difference. Turns out it was a noisy Seagate drive. Since I'm recording with this thing, that's kind of a big deal but bleh I didn't want to return it yet again. Then I noticed the left internal speaker kept making annoying intermittent crackling/static noises even when the audio wasn't in use.

I talked to Apple support and they suggested I unplug the power cord and plug it back in and see if that helps. The iMac didn't immediately make the noise when I started it back up, so the friendly Apple guy said to call back if it did.

It did later, but it took me three days call back. I was out of my 30 day return window at that point and was told I'd have to take it in for repair + be without a computer indefinitely. I told them that made me so so sad so they talked to various managers and eventually agreed to replace it, plus gave me $150 credit back for my troubles. Nice!

iMac #3: This is the one I have on my desk as I type this. The RAM slots are fine. The internal speakers make no unwanted noise. But I've noticed the fans getting loud a lot whereas I realize now I never even heard the fans on the other ones. When I'm recording for instance or watch a few Youtube videos in a row, the fan turns on and is pretty loud in this small office. After an hour of mixing just now the top of the case is too hot to leave my hand on for more than a second or two. The others were pretty warm but not at all like that.

So. Do I have the energy to complain about this one? The fan noise is annoying and maybe not tolerable. The extreme heat worries me that it'll be prone to failure over time. But I'm getting pretty tired of swapping these bastards out. Basically I want to give up on buying refurbished and go buy a brand new one, but what if they're prone to the same issues?

So: ugh.

Update: well, that resolved itself. The display on iMac #3 died last night. So now I'm on hold with Apple support. Woo hoo hoo.

Update #2: Here is what the display looks like! (The lines move!)

Update #3: Talked to four supervisors. They're taking iMac #3 back and refunding my money. I'm gonna drive to the Ottawa Apple store and buy a new iMac that hopefully isn't a piece of junk.

iMac #4: Seven hours later my Time Machine backup is restored and I'm back where I was almost 24 hours ago.

Hey, here's another messy demo: Guess Who's a Mess (demo)

It's the title track and will probably be track 6 on Guess Who's a Mess.

Scott's rolling to a stop on his solo live playing. I think that's cool, I started to weigh in with a comment on my own struggle with playing live but it got too huge so here it is:

A couple of years ago I was fed up with playing live. Some people love to perform and I'm just not that guy. I wouldn't say I'm shy but I wouldn't deny that I'm an introvert. Then I had a pretty bad string of rough, demoralizing gigs and it was messing with me. I'd travel home afterwards all bummed out and thinking my time would have been much better spent recording or writing or doing stuff on the internet. Plus it's easier and more fun to me.

I got fed up, took a break and decided to play less shows but to make them more meaningful. Promote them better, book them better, work harder at them. In 2010 that approach was pretty successful so I'm planning to play some more in 2011.

A lesson I learned, and this may only apply to me and my city, is that there's very little point to playing thankless gigs. Maybe you're getting some practice in. Maybe you enjoy it. But you're not building a fan base. You're not generating buzz. If you have a small draw, which most bands do, you're spreading it too thin over many sad shows rather than saving it up for a few good ones.

Now that I'm taking this new approach I'm enjoying the shows way more. I'm still not much of a performer, but I've been enjoying the crowd interaction. I like getting yelled at. I enjoy feeling like my being there and doing my thang is facilitating a good time for others.

So when people come out now, tell me they like my stuff, tell me they're looking forward to new music, it's pretty great. It's very easy on the Internet to group fans into one single entity. But when I meet people face to face who seem to genuinely connect with what I've done or what I'm doing, well that's encouraging and awesome and nice.

Last night's show was fun, thanks to everyone for coming out. These three shows I've done with the new band have been pretty encouraging. I'm not someone who actually really enjoys performing or being on a stage, but I do get a huge kick out of an energetic, happy crowd and instigating a good time.  So I'm gonna let that motivate me into more show bookings and hope it's enough.

Well, 2010 was a mixed bag Brad Sucks-wise. My live show is sounding good I think and I'm happy with that. A few encouraging shows went down. I got some demos done. But I betrayed a next-album deadline and overall I was distracted with some mid-year depressions and med change as well as other projects and jobs.

Money from the Brad Sucks stuff is nice but it's unpredictable. It's been hard to justify working on music for potential future maybe-dollars when there's guaranteed money waiting for me somewhere else.

But I need to do better. It may sound awful, but my goal for 2011 is to treat music more like a job. As opposed to a hobby that gets pushed aside as soon as I have another opportunity. I'm fortunate to have anyone wanting new music from me at all and I'm disappointed I didn't deliver more in 2010.

But that's in the past. I hope you're all doing great.

I got asked if some folks from Germany could use my music in a sport DVD. I said yes. Then they told me it was for Sporthockers (sport stools) and I said double yes. Here's what it looks like:

I love any sport where the goal is to become successfully seated.

Do you remember that I did a cover of a friend's Christmas song last year? And that it was called Fuck You, Motherfucker (It's Christmas)? Ah, good times. Back when I made songs.

Whooo the switch to the Mac has been time-consuming. Nothing like re-learning decades of software and keyboard shortcuts and... everything.

Stuff I love:

• Unix. Yay. No more DOS or batch files or Cygwin or whatever.
• The apps are generally better. Lots of creative, well-designed software out there.
• Spaces is great. Virtual desktops were always clunky in Windows, but Spaces is slick and works.
• I always hated it in Windows but iTunes is excellent on OS X. I feel happier with my music collection than I have in years.
• I feel more in control of my software and OS. I always suspected Windows was betraying me in the background, OS X feels pretty locked down.
• The audio is rock solid. I had gotten used to Windows audio crapping out if I launched two audio apps at the same time or various other factors. No more!
• Time Machine is great and has simplified my backups.

Stuff I don't love:

• I hate the magic mouse and tiny keyboard. Holy god they're awful. It took me a week of struggling to get used to them before I tossed them and figured out how to disable mouse acceleration. And I also felt ripped off getting a shitty little laptop keyboard with my big expensive desktop.
• I miss Total Commander. I feel like a dummy in Finder, clicking and dragging around like a baby. I'm adjusting, but slowly.
• I haven't found a window manager I like yet. I was using Winsplit Revolution on Windows and it was nice.
• Page Up/Page Down/Home/End. OS X hates these keys. I've remapped them but there are still a few apps that act weird when I hit page down and page up.
• Every app seems to have a different keyboard shortcut to switch between its tabs. On Windows it's always ctrl-tab. I've remapped them now (yay) but it was a dumb struggle.
• Mac software is really expensive.

These complaints are pending my switch to the replacement Mac as they might be due to this busted unit (more on that shortly):

• The internal speakers could be a lot better. It sounds like the bottom panel in the front needs some holes poked into it.
• The hard drive is a huge bottleneck. Hopefully this will improve once I throw more RAM in, but I'm routinely listening to the hard drive grind and it annoys me.

Re: the busted unit. I bought a refurbished Mac to save $300 or so and three of the four RAM slots were dead. One was physically misaligned. Apple support was good and I'm moving everything over to the replacement Mac they sent me.

Also if this Time Machine restore on the new system works as advertised, I will be so impressed.

Hey, we'll be playing in Kingston at The Mansion on January 7th:

Facebook events here and here.

Happy 25th birthday, Windows. I just had a birthday too, I'm 34 now. DOS & Windows have been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. We've had a good run, but I'm moving on. I just sprung for a quad core 27" iMac and I'm as excited about getting it as can be.

When I was younger I really loved getting my hands dirty, building my own systems, getting under the hood of the OS, tweaking it, customizing it, learning its quirks and weaknesses and how to make it run smoothly. The flexibility of Windows and the control it allowed me was a huge part of its draw. Along with it being the most popular platform - where the action was happening.

But things have changed. The most popular platform is the web and the OS matters less now. And I've personally changed. My number one issue in my life these days is that I don't have enough time to do the things I want. And every time Windows wastes my time, or is unhelpful or counter-intuitive, I resent it and that resentment has finally boiled over. While I have issues with their lack of openness, my iPad and iPhone nearly always feel like they're on my side - they want to help me do what I want.

Here are some things I'm looking forward to:

• Being on Unix. Basically every other machine I interact with on a regular basis is running some flavor of Unix. Going back to DOS and not having all the usual tools available has become intolerable. Write a batch file? Ugh, go die.
• Worrying less about security. As on the ball and cautious as I generally am, even with better browser and OS security and multiple scanning apps, it's still impossible to avoid getting spyware. That of course sucks for performance and security issues but it's also just a huge waste of time.
• Easier backups. I'm excited about Time Machine. My backup situation right now works but is crazy and scattered.
• Higher quality applications. In my research looking around to see if there was any software I'd truly miss from Windows, nearly everything appeared to have a superior OSX counterpart. 
• All my iStuff working better. iTunes on Windows is a slow piece of shit. MediaMonkey is nice (but ugly) and syncing breaks regularly. My iPad and iPhone would rather deal with OSX, I'm sure.

We'll see though - after so long with DOS and Windows the transition will certainly be weird, but I'm looking forward to it.

Getting the laptop into the live show has been a long dumb technical process. It's been working solid now for a long time so the last step was to get it all into a nice portable form factor that was quick and easy to set up and tear down.  I think I'm just about there:

I bought this Gator Studio-2-Go case - which is a 2U rack case (front and back) as well as a laptop compartment on top (and most importantly a hole between the rack and laptop compartments for cable runs). Getting it was a stupid ordeal. I actually couldn't find it anywhere in Canada (everyone said it was discontinued) so I had to order it from Sweetwater, get it delivered in the US and drive across the border to get it.  Sine then it's been a gradual process figuring out everything I need in it.

In the front (sorry for the crappy photos) I've got a Furman M-8X (rack-mounted power strip), a MOTU Ultralite mk3 (sound card) and a Shure PSM200 wireless transmitter (for feeding the click to the drummer). The power strip means I only have one power cord for the whole box, which is great.

In the back:

The sound card's outputs go into a Behringer ULTRA-DI PRO DI800, giving the sound dude three channels of DI'd output.  I had to learn how to build some short angle patch cables since non-angled ones wouldn't fit with the back cover on.

Remaining issues:

• I need an 8-channel XLR s-s-snake for the DI outputs (this has been ordered.)
• The power supply for the PSM200 is one of those dudes with the AC adapter block separated from the plug. Meaning the block is floating around in the case, threatening to knock all my other connections out. I'm not sure how to secure it down or if I should try and replace it with a different adapter.
• The Firewire adapter in the laptop sticks out of the side of the laptop a great deal and makes the side-foam the case comes with not fit properly. I guess I'll cut a hole in it.
• I wish it was easier to get the DI in and out in case I need to adjust something.  Right now I can squeeze my arms in but I'm only getting fatter so that's not a permanent option. I don't know much about racks - is there a. thing for that? A rack drawer maybe?

So instead of bringing in a pile of devices and having to set up all my cables each time, I'm down to one AC adapter and a handful of XLR outs and I don't need any DIs from the house.

That was a lot of work.

The original Rebirth RB-338 was great. Released in 1996, I remember it being one of the first software synthesizers on the PC that seemed serious and sounded cool. An iPhone version has been around for a while but the iPad version was just released for $14.99 and I couldn't resist trying it out.

The multi-touch is what makes the difference of course. While the screen is a tiny bit smaller than would be optimal - it's hard to select drums without accidentally engaging a button or knob - being able to manipulate multiple controls at once without using a mouse is undeniably fun. You can actually feel like you're jamming to a certain extent.

Ultimately though I feel disappointed and am not sure it was worth the $15. We'll see if I go back to it. Without any sort of MIDI support (sending or sync or export) this is just another bleep-toy that won't really integrate with my existing audio tools.

The 303 sounds are also pretty dated sounding to me (or at least not as fat as modern soft-synths), but the drums are still thick and fun. There's also some ugly digital clipping if you start driving it too hard which is less present in modern plugins.

So, much like the original Rebirth, I'm still waiting for an iPad music app that seems serious and sounds cool.

Hey guess who's back, it's totally me. Since I last wrote I switched my brain drugs to Cymbalta. It was a rough transition and it's expensive, but everything's going pretty nice upstairs now. A good decision overall, I wish I had switched a while ago. Also I've been busy working on some non-music things re: paying the bills, putting food on the table, bringing home the bacon, etc. What else happened? I can't remember. Let's look through my phone's photos:

Oh right, we made some acoustic panels for Justin the drummer's practice room. We have not practiced since. I wonder if they worked.

James Brummel painted portraits of Ottawa musicians onto drum heads for a gallery showing and compilation. I was one of them.

I haven't seen the finished one yet. The left side of my face came out a little fat I think.

This is a Bhut jolokia pepper. A chef friend tried it but I did not have the mouth-balls. He said he expected worse so we think we got a dud. He definitely did better than this guy.

My dad didn't want to store this heavy-ass arcade cabinet anymore since I have no time to work on it and he proposed we burn it on Canadian Thanksgiving. Which we did:

Kiiind of a waste but it was also awesome, so maybe it evens out?

This is my favorite new wine. They no longer sell it here so I'm favorite-wine-starved. :(

My lady's practicing doing Halloween make-up so I am a cut and bruise canvas.

Next up: maybe a Fallout: New Vegas gamecation followed by getting back to working on the record. Yes!

Seriously gotta get moving on these album demos. Here’s one:

The First Thing About Me (demo)

The mix is a disaster, but I MOVE ON. It’ll be the last track on Guess Who’s a Mess.

My friend Ken Flagg (aka Vic-20, touring keyboardist for MC Frontalot) is using Kickstarter to fund a really cool looking animated music video for his song Pieces. He’s over halfway to his goal and needs a final push in the last few weeks. Here’s the project:

You can check out the album the song is from here. Good luck, Ken!

As a follow-up to my last post re: brain chemicals. I’m switching from Celexa, which I’ve been on for many years now to Cymbalta. I’ve been feeling a general decline in energy and optimism for a while and Ian’s post a few weeks ago really made me think about it and decide to make a change. My reaction to simple life challenges should not be to say “fuck you” and give up.

So we’ll see – this weekend I’m winding down my Celexa and will be kicking off next week with the Cymbalta. Here’s hoping I get to avoid finding out what brain zaps feel like. Brains are lame.

I'm shopping around for some new brain chemicals. What are you folks on?

Update: oh man, I meant anti-depressants.

Anyone using the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store (BSDDS) should probably upgrade to the new 0.50 release. I haven't been working on it at all but thanks to the power of open source I've been receiving some contributions. These ones are thanks to Geoff Kassel (geoff at kassel dot id dot au):

• made the store easier to customize - including currency settings, messages, and available payment methods
• the store is now in standards-compliant HTML 4.01
• added support for new file formats so that the store can sell e-books
• preliminary support for per-product shipping pricing
• debug code can now be toggled
• logging output can now be customized and toggled
• the admin login page now redirects automatically to the main admin page on a successful login
• the button and logo for a payment method is displayed only if that method is enabled
• improved security
• improved code documentation
• consistently formatted code

Thanks again Geoff.

Hey, the Toronto show was nice, thanks to everyone. And so ends the first few shows with the new band. They've been fun, I'm pretty happy with how everything sounds and I don't feel totally ashamed which is new.

Anyway, gonna take some time out and work on the next record and think about what's next. There are a bunch of things that'll need some adjusting as I go forward with the live show - like not losing money for instance. That would be awesome to not lose money.