Video from Eliaphir, shot during our recent Further Confusion concert in San Jose.

Photo by foxgrrl via Flickr

This month I played what I believe is only my third west-coast concert after leaving the Christian Music scene…  The folks at Further Confusion not only invited me to play their awesome convention, they made me one of this year’s Guests of Honor.  How cool is that?  It was a truly rad experience, despite the usual first-year-in-a-new-hotel troubles.  The people out in San Jose welcomed us with open arms, paws, wings, whatever.

If you want to hear the entire concert recording, of course, you’ll need to head to Matthew Ebel dot net and log in.  Members will be able to download the recording for a couple of months, so grab it now before it disappears into the Archive.

You see, if SOPA passes, I want to own Grooveshark.com

It’s not about fairness or liberty or innovation, really. My support for SOPA comes strictly from the fact that it wouldn’t be difficult for me to own Grooveshark once these bills pass.

If you’re not familiar with Grooveshark, here’s their business plan in a nutshell:

1. Allow users to post and distribute MP3′s of any band they like
2. Whatever the users don’t post, Grooveshark will post for them
3. Ignore DMCA takedown requests, court orders, and lawsuits
4. Don’t pay any royalties to labels or indie musicians.

Don’t ask me how a site like this gained any legitimacy, but for some reason tons of people think Grooveshark actually supports the music it’s using to sell ads and subscriptions. There’s a reason they’ve been sued by every major label and why independents like Zoë Keating have had to issue DMCA takedown notices upwards of seven times. Just like the United States Congress, Grooveshark has become a respected batch of pirates that nobody seems to sense as a threat.

How SOPA Can Help

Under the terms of the SOPA bill (yes, I’ve read it, have you?), pretty much any site on the internet becomes a site that facilitates piracy. My dad’s blog about shit he finds on the beach in Washington? Total pirate haven. Forget YouTube, Wikipedia, and of course Grooveshark, any site with a comments section falls under this bill’s definition.

All I’d have to do is issue a notice to sites associated with Grooveshark under the new law. You read that correctly, I don’t even have to inform the site I’m attacking. At that point those sites have 5 days to stop servicing Grooveshark- Paypal, Google, whomever. If Grooveshark doesn’t somehow sense they’re being targeted via some disturbance in the force, they’ll probably keep violating copyrights and ripping off musicians as though nothing had happened.

At that point, I can literally own their domain name through a simple court procedure. I wouldn’t get their bank accounts or assets, but think about all the traffic I could funnel directly to my website through their more popular name. Hell, I could just point Grooveshark.com to my Pandora Radio station since Pandora actually pays royalties to guys like me.

If Grooveshark bothered to notice and tried to defend themselves, it’d be even better. Since every site- even mine -is now a Pirate Bay, they’d be perjuring themselves the second they tried to claim otherwise. That means jail time for their directors and executives, but SOPA adds a bonus: They would immediately be responsible for my legal fees. I could hire the ten best lawyers on the planet and let Grooveshark pick up the tab.

How You Can Help

You too can help me own Grooveshark.com – it will be a simple matter. Besides, if you don’t help me, I’ll just own your domain name instead. It will be far, far easier than you can imagine and you will have no legal recourse to fight these claims.

If you doubt any of this, I suggest you educate yourself on SOPA/PIPA right now… though I wouldn’t recommend it. Congress and their friends at the MPAA/RIAA are counting on you NOT knowing what the hell is going on in order to pass these bills.

So you’re better off joining my quest to own Grooveshark. Just tell your representatives how you feel about SOPA/PIPA and together we can make this happen!

Tablets: The Ultimate Control Surface

I’m not going to get into buying advice for specific models since that advice will be irrelevant two days after I post this. Heck, the tablet I’ve got is an HP Touchpad, probably the most unlikely candidate for anyone shopping right now. I will, however, tell you why this thing has changed my life and you can decide if your potential purchase will do the same.

I Can VNC Clearly Now…

Probably the most significant impact on my studio workflow has been a tablet with VNC. For those that don’t know, VNC is what lets you control another computer’s screen- like Apple’s “Screen Sharing” feature. When recording previous albums I often found myself dancing back and forth between the microphone and the computer to set up new vocal tracks, save my progress, mess with effects, and so on. Talk about killing the creative process!

Hardware makers have sold “control surfaces” for years- little devices that look like mixing boards that interface with your recording software. Hell, I own one… but few if any of these will let you create a new track, save your work, undo bad takes, etc. Some of them can run hundreds of dollars and most of them still have to be plugged in via USB cables. My tablet lets me control everything my computer can do and has no moving parts so I can keep it in the mic booth with me.

It’s like recording in Star Trek.

The Digital Stage Hand

If you’ve ever seen one of my shows, you know I’m technologically oriented even when I’m on stage. Most of my shows are streamed live to my own website with a chat room for people to interact. Since my laptop is already working at 100% to keep up with all the effects, plugins, and software instruments I’m asking it to process, I really don’t want to ask it to handle chat rooms as well. Now I keep the chat room sitting right on top of the piano via the tablet. Not only can I interact with the folks in the front rows, I can respond to people halfway across the globe.

If I played covers or wanted to debut a tune I wasn’t too familiar with yet (Lord knows I never forget my own lyrics), the tablet would make a perfect sheet music and lyric reader. Hell, if the venue had internet access (or my tablet wasn’t wifi-only), I could take requests and go search for the sheet music and lyrics online without having to tax the laptop any more. Even in a dark club the backlit display would be easy to read.

Paper Or Plastic?

Thanks to companies like Square and Intuit, credit card swipers are now available for guys like me. While they started life on smart phones, these digital readers now work with Android and iOS tablets. I haven’t had a chance to play with Square on my tablet yet (the last show I played was before I put Android on the Touchpad), but the point-of-sale software I’ve seen really makes use of the screen size.

New fans are a lot more comfortable saying “I’ll take one of everything” when they can put it on plastic, and I’m a lot more comfortable taking their plastic knowing that it’ll be approved or declined on the spot.

Merch Table Magnet

Finally I get to the flashiest part of the tablet- its, um, flashiness. If you’re playing a convention or festival with a bunch of indie band merch tables lined up by the stage, how do you stand out? VIDEO. I can cue up a YouTube playlist of my best concert videos and leave it on permanent loop to catch people’s eye. Hell, the Touchpad case that I bought even props it up like a digital picture frame so all I have to bring is the tablet itself.

If not videos, maybe just a slideshow of photos and promos would do. A QR code as part of the mix could draw in that extra 10% geek crowd, who knows?

If I had another tablet to spare, I would probably set one up as my email signup kiosk. You’d be surprised what some idiots consider “legible” when dealing with a pen and clipboard, but it’s hard to screw up typed letters. If they can’t even type properly, well… that’s their problem, not mine. Either way, it’d save me the trouble of having to manually enter all those names in later. Then again, what will I do in the airport when I’m bored waiting for my flight home?

The Final Word

I know that a tablet is not exactly a stocking-stuffer. (If you consider a $200-$500 device as such, then you REALLY need to grab a Robot Army subscription before you do anything else.) If you’re looking for something that could truly change a musician’s lifestyle, though, a good tablet can streamline any number of processes for the working songsmith.

I’m sure I’ve left out some benefits and I know I haven’t discovered all of them for myself yet. If you’ve got other ideas, please share them in the comments- I’m always looking for ways I can experiment with my system!

If you’d like to grab a tablet as a gift, I encourage you to use one of the links I’ve shared in this article or just visit http://amzn.to/v8qhRU – I will get a miniscule chunk of change from Amazon if you use these links to buy anything. Anyhoo, back into the mic booth I go!

An 'American Tradition' is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice.

It’s funny. It’s true. It’s also a pretty potent statement about damn near everything that’s right and wrong with this country. I would’ve just chuckled and left this on my morning feed, but the mouseover punchline (printed as the caption for those of us on tablets) transformed this piece from funny comic to political food for thought.

Now go grab some gifts for your friends at the XKCD Store. Merry Christmas.

I powwow with artists sometime and during one discussion the subject of people’s characters came up. I’m altering the specifics just in case someone is afraid I’m singling them out, but basically it came down to someone loudly insisting their character was unique because they had different colored markings. Their cheetah had blue and purple spots while someone else’s cheetah had purple and blue spots.

I can almost discern the age and creation timeline of someone’s character by their appearance these days. A lot of the old guard represent themselves with fairly common characters that resemble their creators. As time went on people started picking more exotic creatures, then we ended up with characters that had wings, multiple tails, horns, then hybrid animals, then exotic colors and more horns and wings and tails and elaborate tattoos and jewelry, and they were no longer known by their creator names. Joe Fox became Steeltalon Dragonwolfen (And if there is a Steeltalon Dragonwolfen, I apologize for taking your name in vain).

All this is well and good, but one of the problems is that people are creating characters for the sole purpose of them being different with no thought to design. They just want MORE wings, MORE bright colors, MORE words in the name, MORE hybrid.

One thing I find in common with the really detailed and strange creations is that the creator always has the same complaint about their commissions, “Nobody ever gets my character right!” It’s amazing how few people consider that they just have a crazy design that needs to be simplified or changed instead of simply blaming the artist.

During a livestream I pulled my blotter sheet under the camera view so people could see the mad swatches of color that covered it from me testing the hundreds of colors I use as I work. Then I got a black marker and drew a simple black rectangle next to it. I asked the audience which was more memorable and the answer was the black marking.

Look at iconic characters from comics and consider how many have very simple color schemes. Their uniforms are 1-3 colors. Some have weird physical characteristics but not all of them. The thing that makes the character unique is what it does and how it acts.

People are losing sight of what makes a character unique and turning them into impressionist paintings rather than characters. Having spots that are six different colors isn’t the thing that will make you stand out, and in the long run it might, in fact, make you more of a complicated mess that nobody really finds that memorable as it gets lost in a sea of sparkledogs.

Weird colors are fine, wings and horns and other things are fine as well, but remember that more isn’t always better, or as memorable.

When you add a link to your Google+ posts, Google pulls that page’s Meta Description and adds it to the link. The problem is that, by default, WordPress uses your blog’s main description for its Meta Description on every single page. So this is what I get:

No Meta Description? Bad Birdie.

Telling The Short Story

So how do you get a concise excerpt to show up in G+ posts? Change that Meta Description tag to look like this:

<meta name='description' content='<?php
if ( is_single() ) {
the_excerpt_rss();
} else { ?>
THIS IS WHERE YOU'D TYPE IN WHAT YOU WANT TO DISPLAY OTHERWISE.
<?php } ?>'>

But here’s the kicker: The tag has to be moved inside the WordPress Loop. It’ll still work even if it’s not in the Header, so don’t worry about that. If you’re using a multi-loop theme, plant this code inside the loop that you use for your blog posts and page content. Once that’s in place, you’ll get this:

Clear, Concise, BETTER.

Telling The Short Story With Branding

If you’d like to add a sentence that precedes every description and will stand alone if necessary, Chris Penn suggested this as an alternative:

<meta name='description' content='THIS IS WHERE YOU'D TYPE IN WHAT YOU WANT TO DISPLAY OTHERWISE.<?php
if ( is_single() ) {
echo ' - ';
the_excerpt_rss();
} ?>'>

Controlling the Excerpt

WordPress, of course, gives you total control over what goes in this spot too. If you don’t type in a specific excerpt when writing a blog post, WordPress grabs the first few lines of the post instead. If you’d rather type your own excerpt, bear in mind that this could show up in an RSS feed, next to an image in a Facebook or Google+ post, or anywhere else.

Many SEO plugins will alter the excerpt further, but you’re probably using one of these plugins because they do this. For more information on the WordPress the_excerpt_rss() tag, read their documentation here.

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