Here is a short moving showing a very simple way to accomplish “crazy idea” branch sharing.

While playing, I realized I’ve been going about learning words the hard way.

In the past, I’ve just used rote learning to try to remember words, but I find it easier to remember words when I have a visual anchor.

I couldn’t find a nice way to build random, visual flash cards quickly. I needed something simple, because I have to learn a bunch of new words each week.

To solve my little problem, I threw together this simple chrome extension called PicFlash. Here is a video of how it works:

You can download it free on the Chrome app store if this is something you are interested in.

I was lucky enough to hookup with some great guys – Scott Gamble (Drums / Vocals) and Gavin Stewart (Bass) – and we made a little EP under the name Grand King Ghidorah. These are some lessons I learned while making and (slightly) promoting the album.

(As a side note, we were playing with the mighty Jason Verkerk in a covers band called Chucks with Ducks, but that band fizzled a bit. I wanted to give a nod to Verkerk who is a far better guitar player than I am)

Recording

While playing with my first “real” band, Big Midget, the drummer Brandon and I got the recording bug. We spent all our money on recording gear. In fact, I think the only reason we had jobs was to be able to buy equipment.

Brandon had a garage that he sound proofed, and built isolation boxes for the drums and vocals. We had a 32 channel mixer, multiple random processor boxes, tons of mics, and it all went into a fourtrack recorder – and later on we replaced the fourtrack with a computer.

We were rather popular with other local bands, and we recorded a lot – sometimes others, but mostly ourselves. It was awesome. We must have made like 10 albums ourselves, and countless other random recordings.

Today, you can do almost everything with just a laptop, a keyboard and one microphone. However, it probably wont sound very good. It’s not the tools that will fail you, it’ll be your lack of experience and recording knowledge that will do you in.

Professional engineers really understand how things go together. One of the things I learned when recording with Big Midget, is that it’s hard to capture a recording well / make it sound good. It’s easy to fumble through and record something, but to really capture the performance you’ll want a pro.

Luckily studio time is very reasonable nowadays. We used Sydney based DefWolf for our recording. We did our EP in an 8 hour session (recording, mixing, and mastering) for under $600 (If given the opportunity to do it again, I would have pushed for two sessions).

To do 5 songs in 8 hours (that includes setup time for the studio), we had to know our songs very well. By design our songs were pretty simple, and all songs on the EP were done in 2 or 3 takes.

Mastering and Formats

DefWolf recording package included mix down and mastering, and they did a great job. However, I wish we would have had more time with this as well. The mastering was for CD and download distribution, but at some point I would love to get a mastering done for vinyl.

Mastering for vinyl is quite expensive. Getting vinyl made is quite expensive. If you’re going for download only, don’t pay this any mind, but know what formats you want to distribute on before you go to the studio.

You might be thinking you’ll just skip pressing CDs, and in theory I agree, but take heed: If you want old people to listen and play your music (like terrestrial radio stations), most only accept physical CDs. Sad, I know, but it’s true. The good news is you can get nice deals to do small run pressing. We used TroyHorse in Sydney to make 30 CDs for about $150.00.

Distribution

For independent, low cost digital distribution I highly recommend Bandcamp. They have an amazing service with great statistics.

In the image above you can see how many plays we’ve had since we released the EP (not many), but the coolest part is the breakdown of full plays, partial plays and skips. I can’t say enough good things about bandcamp.

If you’re into getting into the mainstream distribution channels, CD Baby is a really amazing service. With very little effort we were able to get our album on iTunes, on amazon, and they provided us with a UPC code if we wanted to sell physical CDs or vinyl.

No matter what you do though, if you want to distribute digitally, checkout bandcamp.

Exposure / Discovery

Now, here is the hard part. The current situation doesn’t seem to me to be any different than it was back in the 1960s when you’re trying to get exposure for your band. The internet is awesome for doing digital distribution, and it’s great for getting content for bands you already know about, but it isn’t super useful if you are an unknown band.

Well, let me clarify that.

Unless you really dig playing live (which I do), going on tour is a waste of money and time. You spend a lot of money to go from town to town and you play for … what … 30 people a night if you are lucky. Of those 30 – since you’re the opening band – 5 pay attention to what you are playing, and 1 actually bothers to remember who you are. These numbers are totally made up, so feel free to dispute them. I am just using them for arguments sake.

Then you have the internet – billions of people. You don’t have to go on tour, you don’t have to do anything except get them to listen to your music, and let them decide if they like it. If you look at it strictly from a numbers game, touring makes no sense since we have the internet (not including the fact that playing live is fun as. I am speaking only from a growing your fan base perspective).

However, most people on the internet are not looking for new music. They don’t want to try something new. They are trying to torrent the latest Jay-Z covers Justin Bieber album or what have you.

So I think the challenge you face, young musician, is how do you get people to find and listen to your songs so that they download them, listen to them, share them, and maybe even buy them? What the internet needs is some sort of digital radio – that kind of exists today, but it still doesn’t have the audience of terrestrial radio.

Here is what I did and the results I got. One problem with what I am about to show you is that music is subjective. I like my band’s EP, and there are a few others that do as well, but it is by no means mainstream music. What I was after here was trying to get anyone to listen to our songs. If they liked them, right on. If not, that’s cool too. I would do all this again if we made another album, but your mileage may vary.

We got the best results from doing a Grooveshark campaign. You upload your tracks to grooveshark, pick bands that are similar to yours, and they randomly play your tracks when people listen to that grooveshark channel (rock, punk, etc).

As you can see in the image above, at the peak 451 people listened to (at least part of) our track. They were also likely to like us since we were played around some of the bands we’re similar to. I don’t know how many venues we would have to play to get 451 people to listen to us.

Grooveshark also let us do a banner ad one day, and it resulted in 45 people hitting our website (up from like 3).

We had a little bit of luck with Reddit Radio. Reddit Radio a community based digital radio station (for nerds mostly).

As you can see the volume of listeners isn’t quite as high as Grooveshark, but it is getting played (though not many people seem to like us).

Currently, the only way to get a lot of people to listen to your band seems to be terrestrial radio. Sadly, they often wont play things by unknown people, they wont likely play anything that their advertisers wont like, and they are a bit of a gatekeeper when it comes to taste. If the musical director doesn’t like your album / song / band, you probably wont get played. We sent our songs to TripleJ and to FBi Radio, neither of which were interested. (OTOH We definitely didn’t write any radio friendly songs (purposefully))

Following / Fans

Ok – and now I’ve had 2 glasses of wine – you’ll need to setup a facebook and a twitter account. It’s a good idea to setup metadata for your album in Gracenote, and keep an eye on last.fm and update your last.fm page.

Oh, and a generic landing page is a good idea. It’s nice to have a single spot to send people to when you’re filling out all those forms for the above services.

Fin

Recording Grand King Ghidorah was the most fun I’ve had in years. Creating music is almost as fun as creating software… or maybe creating software is almost as fun as creating music; tough call. I hope to do it again.

The reputation Aussies have for hospitality and kindness is well deserved, and runs deep throughout their culture. “Mate” … it actually means something.

There were too many cool people, and too many amazing experiences to catalog. I wont belittle them by cramming a few into a blog post on my random corner of the internet. I will only say that I miss my friends, and I will see you again some day.

While it’s expensive at the moment, if you get a chance, take a getaway to Australia (and New Zealand too :-D)

Living in a country other than the U.S. has had some unexpected and random affects on me – mostly on my view of the world (big and little). I fear I will lose this over time, so I decided to write out some of the items to help me remember:

• Live in the present, and don’t obsess about things that haven’t happened. It’s not useful.

• Read the news, but don’t read it all day. It rarely contains new information, and it’ll just spin you up which often leads to bad decision making.

• Most things in the U.S. are huge. From parking spots to stores to shelves, it seems wasteful and inefficient to me now. Don’t lose the perception of normal sized things.

• Eat vegetables and fruit.

• The vast majority of people are kind, and just want a pleasant, hassle free life.

• Try to get people to stop yelling, and stop making TV shows about judging people. Neither are helpful in the slightest.

• People before profit. I now think a lot of Americans are too individualistic. While that use to be a useful trait in the past, I don’t think it will be as helpful in the future. I think we need more team work and community – if your mate is suffering, you are suffering. Volunteer. How is one person winning at the expense of all others losing a sustainable model?

• Smile at everyone and say hello.

• The internet is really fast in the U.S.; it is not like that everywhere.

• The U.S. is an important country in the world. It can effect the world very deeply and in many ways. However, it is not the only wonderful spot on this planet. Be humbled with our place and responsibility in the world – while it lasts.

• HTFU

• The peace enjoyed by parts of the world is, in a large part, due to the U.S.; however, most of that is because of past actions, and I think we need to stop clinging to the past. We have so much potential to make the world a better place, and a lot of people look to us to do that.

• I think it should be mandatory for everyone to live and work in another country for at least two years as part of university study. Try to get this to happen somehow.

• Despite the U.S.’s problems, there is an amazing amount of opportunity here. You can do so many things here that you can’t do in other places. Question is, why aren’t you doing them?

• Act like an immigrant with new found freedom not like a whinging prima donna.

• You think your life is hard and you pay too much in taxes? Compare your life to those living in Burma.

• Like the fire department and police, basic health care should be given to all citizens. I think this would help spur the entrepreneurial spirit.

• Help spur the entrepreneurial spirit.

• Being an immigrant is one of the scariest things a person can do. Try to help people who have no frame of reference, and be welcoming to all those that are coming to your country (permanently or only just for work).

• I think the U.S.’s biggest problem – the root – is perception. Change your thoughts on your current situation, and you’ll change the world. It sounds hokey, but it’s true.

Oi oi oi!

♨

In short, this site is hosted on amazon ec2, and they have been having – I think – physical hardware problems over the past few months.  The problems have been highlighted in the news over the past few days so you might have read about it.

I’ve actually been having really bad problems for a number of weeks with my EBS instances (along with many sites like reddit).  It’s been frustrating, but I am hopeful that this big crash has sused out the underlying problem and the stability I have grown to love with ec2 will return.

I have been recommending ec2 to everyone for a few years now (has it been that long), and I will continue to do so.   Amazon has been at the forefront of cloud hosting since the begining, and aside from the recent problems, they have been amazing.

To keep this from happening, I am probably going to move most of the open source code from the site to github, and I might move this site to s3 (as read only).  I don’t blog very much anymore, and I don’t think I’ll do much more, but there are some interesting / funny posts that still seem to get some hits.

Hopefully, I’ll have everything worked out in the next few weeks, and hopefully you can read this :)

Thanks for reading and downloading my wacky ideas.

You put a manifest file (manifest.json) into a directory, write the usual HTML, CSS, and JS, zip up the directory and you’re done.

Here is a movie showing the simple widget in action (“Regex Widget” if you want to search the Chrome App Store):

Chrome App – Regex Widget

You can read more about how to make them, and get some examples, on the Chrome developer page. If you want to have a play with the RegexWidget source code you can get it on GitHub

I’ve found quite a few basic utilities that are useful for doing a number of different tasks – here is a movie showing off my favourite ones for music – composing, practicing, recording and note taking.

Ramble mode activated.

It feels a bit like the end of the 90s in the US. Back then there were so many cool bands doing so many interesting things that it was difficult to go to all the shows. I find myself in the same situation here … it’s a good problem to have.

NOFX… Primus… Kyuss… the Melvins… Slayer… Tool… Queens of the Stone Age… those are just a fraction the big name US acts coming this way. They are mostly coming by way of incredible festivals like Big Day Out, No Sleep Til.., Soundwave, and Southbound. Who’s line ups are stock full of big names along with quite a few interesting, lesser known, up and coming bands.

The festivals result in tons of amazing side shows as well.

If you like music, you might think about taking a trip out to Australia.

On a more local front, I recently went to a show to see a New Zealand punk band Die die die at the Oxford Art Factory – they were legend.

Image courtesy: Cat Rose Photos

While they were an older, more popular band, the opening act Chicks who love guns renewed a bit of my faith in new music. Both Die die die and Chicks who love guns were energetic, they knew how to play, and appeared to have a love of the music. If you listen to one Chicks who love guns‘ song find Alopecia Catfish on Vomit on the Dance Floor album (the title track on that album is ok, but Alopecia Catfish is much more interesting).

Quite a while ago I saw a band called the Tom O’Halloran Trio. They are a 3 piece jazz band – piano, upright bass, and drums. They were all amazing musicians, but the drummer was absolutely mind blowing. If you can grab some of their music somewhere I recommend you check them out. It would be best to see them live, but listen to get me to the village or javert on the green hills and white clouds album for a good sample (if you are into that sort of thing).

My last outing was to see a band called Amy Meredith (they are a group of guys if you didn’t know). They are a very popular Australian band. They kind of sound a bit like the Cure, but sans emo. Amy Meredith is not really my style of music, but I have to say they put on a great show. They had the crowd jumping up and down, and just had a great energy and vibe. Even though it wasn’t my bag, it was nice to see a huge room full of people totally digging music – I haven’t see much of that in the past few years.

I haven’t been doing much social media type things because I’ve been too busy. While I don’t see the too busy part changing, I am going to make an effort to do a bit more writing.

I’ve had quite a few changes since my last post. I’ve started working at a new Sydney startup Posse.com, started using a new programming language (Groovy + Grails), I’ve gotten back into playing guitar (after a 15+ year break), and I started tinkering with electronics and recording music (again)… as if I didn’t have enough hobbies – 太好了！

Posse, by the way, is a site to empower fans to help promote bands they love. It’s a great idea, with some very cool people running the show. Lots more to come. You’ll probably get tired of me talking about how cool it is – just warning you. Oh, if you want to buy some tickets to no sleep til… you can get them here ^_^

I’ve added a new category – music – to the blog and I am going to try to post about shows I go to, and my rekindled music fanaticism. I’ve also recreated / reactivated some of my social media accounts (mostly to test Posse code, but I also make an ass out of myself on there from time to time). If you are into that kind of thing you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Posse and probably anywhere else – for extra points and added humor you can follow my super popular rock band Chuck with Ducks :-D

Like any architect, seeing people use the system and what they put out on it is where the pleasure of building comes from. I was debugging some bits the other day and happened upon this movie made by the College of Fine Arts (COFA Digital Media student John Turello). It’s a wonderful movie I can – and I am sure you can - relate to:

You can also watch Monkey Spoon on UNSWTV or on YouTube.