Learning takes time and effort to become experience.  I know this very well and put it to my advantage by arranging new habits and learning to do them by rote through conscious repetition.  I am very much a handmade, homemade, experimentalist poking-about sort of musician.  There’s just a lot new to poke about in.  When something strikes me the right way, I run with it and a song is born.  This process is far from fixedly simple for me, though.  Again, this is part of what 2011 is to be spent on/in. 

I also now have some video stuff going on at YouTube.  I added a reasonably sufficient video card to this happy computer and got some video software of a level that is perfect for me to jump right in and start learning.  This is also much of what will be doing in 2011 (I am writing this while waiting on my first longish video to test render, even).  Why am I not blogging the videos?!?!?  Because I am mostly doing near daily weather reports for my area, from my limited aspect here in this house I almost never leave.  And cat videos.  And some casual vlogging mixed in.  If you want to get to know me better as a person, the videos are probably a good way…but I don’t wish to fill this blog with that stuff.

I will reserve this area for the stuff that really stands out for me, and mostly that means music.   I mean, if you don’t know this, I have this other page that is updated at least a couple of times a week with links to things I have absorbed lately…Links for Whelp, as above on this blog, but moved to my own website for easier updates and no reliance on WordPress to not crash a post that took weeks to write.  :/  Links for Whelp is where I will post ALL the video links I make, as Whelp will watch them in his long boring night job.     Then he will say encouraging things, as he always does.  He’s a useful friend that way, for sure.  This page is for him, not spam or anything nefarious.  See for yourself how freaking simple I keep the code.

What else?  There’s more?  Yes.  I have also been very busy with making new jewelry.  I just packed the beads up for awhile, but I have to go another couple weeks of beading sometime here before Spring kicks in for real– the weather here has been pooie for days after 2 or more teaser weeks of springtime.  Wah, huh.  I am already missing the sun.

I also reopened our Etsy store.  I only have 10 items in there so far, but there’s some crazy stuff coming soon enough.  I have a lot of different bugs vying for the right to fly up my ass each day, WHICH IS JUST HOW I LIKE IT!  Trust me, I need the distractions and the more occupied I remain, the better my mood, the easier it is to deal with my day-to-day health issues that are not going to go away.  :/  Not a pity plea, just a fact, jack.

I also also made us a Facebook page for Braplets.  I don’t use FB much, but Manda does.  I just like the easy ability to post pictures of every single piece of jewelry that I make from now on and have an archive, as they are each individually imagined and designed works of wearable art.    I think of the thousands upon thousands of bracelets that I have made and not photoed…and then am just glad that technology finally gave me the ability to capture, archive and share so easily.  Regret won’t help…but I have been doing this for ten years and barely started taking pics in any earnest last Fall….  Look to the future, live in the Now.  Huzzah.

Now I will go back up this page and add all the appropriate links.  It is 4:36 in the AM here and I have not been to bed since my nap from 8-10 in the PM.  I very much need to and the video is at 87%…woot.  Peace.  (Update: it beat me in rendering.  I hope I didn’t miss any links.  Much love.)

Several weeks ago, a glass truck dropped out of The Universe and landed in the side of our car out front of our little (TINY!) home here in Salinas, CA.  This was the second time for a car getting destroyed out there…but the first glass truck.  Both times, the driver bailed and we got screwed financially, in short.  Last time, my wife was not my wife and the car was actually mine.  I loved that car dearly and it was completely paid for.  I got a few thousand in insurance and handed it over to Manda to get another car, her having the job and all.  I did it with only half a blink and never regretted it; Baby (Ford Contour) upgraded into a Bob (Ford Taurus) and life continued.  At the time, my health was such trouble that I was plenty distracted as it was.

Anyway, this time it was Manda’s turn to deal with the circus we call Insurance and all of that.  She got a new loan and another car (Kia Rio) that she loves even more than Bob (seriously, the USB port connected to the sound system is an awesome idea and we had no idea when we picked the car) long before the meager (OUCH!  Hey! Stop that!) insurance arrived.  Some few weeks before a check was cut TO us, Manda said she wanted to hand me the insurance this time.  She told me to upgrade my studio and my life with it.  Though my focus is rarely very material beyond a few XBOX 360 games and occasional new CDs from well-loved artists that I have followed for years (c’MON, Orbital!  Give us some already!), I saw the beauty in this idea instantly.

I had a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with a couple gigs of ‘fast’ RAM.  I got it in 2003.  Early 2003.  The biggest hard drive was 300GB and I had managed to retain some space on that.  The best part of that computer was Ableton Live 6.  I bought the download version of it some years ago…they are on Live 8 now and have been for awhile, anyway.    Oh, and the kickin’ monitor Manda bought me a couple of years ago.    While I love this old machine and have done SO MANY things with it that have enriched my life, every time I hit ‘the technology wall’ in writing, I wanted to dropkick it; that computer would always let me know when I was out of processing power.    Sometimes most painfully, creativity-wise.

NO MORE.    Shit happened, we rolled with it and came up firing.

I now have a new computer and I built it myself.  It is a very satisfying feeling I have here right now about that part, too.    It was the first time I built one from the ground up and slow insurance processing allowed me to truly labor over each and every decision, detail after detail.  The build went through at least one new iteration every single day for almost 3 weeks.  I am so Virgo, it’s funny to some, self included.  I studied forum after forum, review after review, product after…obsessed is a useful word here.  Where I landed was a far sight from where I took-off, too.  This is what I rock now:

• AMD Phenom II x6 1090T Thuban 3.2GHz hex core goodness (WOW.  Really.)
• Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H motherboard (on-board video, this machine is not about games but can play them a bit anyway)
• 8 GB of A-DATA 1600G RAM (I wanted G.SKILL, but was surer these would work…it’s all good)
• G.SKILL Phoenix Pro Series 60GB solid-state drive (SSD for system and smaller programs only…it quietly screams)
• Two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB fast SATA drives (one mirroring the other, another such pair planned in the future)
• Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (I am now truly a convert from XP in less than one week.  Thumbs up, Microsoft.)
• Ableton Live Suite 8 (now if only they would make it 64-bit and allow me to use all 8GB of RAM…)
• badass Patriot 8GB USB drive (had to mention it cuz it truly rocks…and will rock the car, too, heh)

All of this in a budget case, little dressing beyond the internal organs above.  Tomorrow marks a week since I first assembled it all and I just got the Ableton package 2 days ago, but I can already tell you wholeheartedly that I am in love with an object…with this tool that I have born from loving research and effort.  It will enrich my life daily and I plan to use it to further enrich the lives of others.  The limit for my music has become my imagination, in many ways now…the rest is up to me and my capabilities.    Never have I see such a beautiful, blank piece of paper waiting for ink.  It is very exciting and words fail beyond that. 

The new machine is simply dubbed ‘Bob Junior’.  It has two wheels more than its daddy. 

I will add some pictures here later; I am still migrating from old system to new and don’t have stuff handy to share.  I will leave you with this wonderful photo, though:

The Zalman sits in its box, after I read that using it would void the AMD warranty. WTF, AMD? When I am sure enough to try it, I will add a glowing blue heart to the machine by installing the Zalman.

And yes, that is Civilization V there. While it’s not about gaming, I did include something I had looked forward to until I realized my old computer did NOT meet Minimum System Requirements.

More to come, oh yeppers. Peace out.

UPDATE!  11/4/10 – I have not been able to get pics off the old computer, as my wife needed the little monitor I had on it.  I will leave you with this one that did make it over in the migration. 

Brap Allgood - Fractal Nature

Brap Allgood
Fractal Nature

(featuring Maxwell Igan…again, heh)

Download 320kpbs mp3

Firstly, I don’t see the point in having more than a high quality mp3 up here, so just the good stuff now. If someone has a need for a ‘perfect’ lesser version, you can ask and I will post that, too.

That said, here is another labour of love revolving around the voice (and words…) of Maxwell Igan. This is directly a sequel to “The Solution“, in fact beginning where that one ends. Such is fun for me.

I spent a ridiculous number of hours on this track, all told. It took a good two weeks just to arrange the vocals…but that has become about the norm for most of my recent tracks. It is what followed that took forever and two days. I would still work at it yet, but my computer has informed me repeatedly that it finds the track to be finished. I look forward to the day of a new computer, lemmetellya. :/ For now, I do what I can with what I have. (And thank Bejeebus for free VST’s!)  I really like this and I hope you do, too.  That is what matters. 

This literally clears a table in front of me that has been messy for a long time.  Not sure what I want to do next musically, but I expect it will be a bit different for awhile…I feel noisier than usual lately.    Anyway, thanks for listening and more to follow….

Oh…and this is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license and more such music can be found here.

Brap Allgood
Hear Hear

(Right-click and save as or grab them all at once now, including liner notes and artwork.)
1. Born to Shop
2. To Serve and to Protect
3. ItsAConspiracy
4. Feeding Frenzy
5. The Solution
6. Blue Lake
(All are 320kbps mp3′s.)

Liner notes:

1. Born to Shop – video
_ featuring Charlie Veitch
_ http://charlieveitch.org
_Arranged in the early Summer of 2009. I saw a link to a video by Charlie at http://davidicke.com and was thrilled with his antics, as well as those of his former partner (let’s call him The Mystery Man), who is also featured in these samples at bits. LITTLE DID I KNOW how far this ‘kid’ would go with this Love Police thingermajigger…literally around the world. I was *very* inspired by what I saw (and felt) even back then, though, when viewing his videos and this is the result. It’s a little weird in structure, but 5 listens should cure that, I’d think. Everything is where it is for a reason and the sounds were literally built around the vocals, which came together on their own; I simply allowed it to happen naturally. I really love what resulted and share it in the spirit it was born. Samples used by Charlie’s permission, thank you very much sir. Much love. I’d SO hug your ass…and you would remember it for years to come.

2. To Serve and to Protect – video
_ featuring Alex Jones
_ http://infowars.com
_ I was listening to Alex Jones one day, more than 2 years ago. He went off on this rant that literally disturbed me. I was shaken. So, enjoying some skills that I have learned in life, I turned my creative side on the situation and TSatP is the result. I was trying to ‘exercise Alex’s demons’ with this effort…though it also seemed to exorcise them, too. Heh. Whatever, once started, it was obvious this needed to be pursued and shared…we giggled to tears, here. And what *better* thing to do with what started out by bothering you? I tried to contact Alex and get express permission for these samples, but he’s just too busy. In two years, though, it has not seemed to bother him and so here’s a nice new mixdown of it. I was very new to mastering when I shared it originally. Thanks, Alex, should you see this. This song has taken on a life of its own in ways that cannot be bad. (UPDATE! _ Also, tee hee hee…I discovered since writing this that I last re-mastered and re-released versions of To Serve and to Protect on this exact day two years ago.  Check it!  That’s funny and cool, I think.  No plan about it…that I am aware of!)

3. ItsAConspiracy – video
_ featuring MC Paranoyd (aka Sonia)
_ http://youtube.com/user/thetruthergirls
_ My homegirl Sonia left me unable to NOT sample her after seeing a couple of her videos along these lines. She is SO creative. You are SO creative, Sonia. Some of your characters scare me, but MC Paranoyd was an awesome giggle…so much so, I just had to break out the sampler. Thankfully, she agreed to allow me my fun. It was created very spontaneously, with love.

4. Feeding Frenzy – video
_ featuring Jordan Maxwell
_ http://jordanmaxwell.com
_ I heard Jordan on the Alex Jones show and was very impressed by some of his words. This is the fruit of that inspiration. It took weeks and weeks to get JUST the vocals down, but if you can’t hear the love in this, I don’t know what to tell you. Again, newer, brighter mix here. It was long overdue for this track, which is one of my favorite ever crafted in more than 2 decades. I try to write things that I want to hear and just assume somebody else will, too. Certainly true on this song, for which I thank Jordan Maxwell for permission to sample. Thanks for linking the video, too, as it has had 1,000s of views for it. That’s cool.

5. The Solution – video – sequel here
_ featuring Maxwell Igan
_ http://thecrowhouse.com
_ Thanks to Max Igan for allowing me my madness in this production. It was a labor of weeks, though it may sound simple enough at first. Everything is in its place for a reason, as I am wont to do when capable. I have a ‘sequel’ of sorts to it in the works, but getting music to stick to the wonderful vocals has so far eluded me. For this reason, I present this here, now, for what it is already: a real thinker, both for minds and ears. Use that as much as you like. I do.

6. Blue Lake – video
_ This is a few years old at least now, but I propped it up and gave it a nice shine for your enjoyment. It is a favorite of friends and family both, so maybe you will enjoy it, too. It was created in a morning…maybe 3 hours. Then I spent weeks trying to mix it. It was during my ‘learn mixing better’ phase. I think it still holds up wonderfully, sounds better than ever, and closes this release succinctly. The samples are of reasonably unknown origin to me, found at http://sampleswap.org as I find a lot of the sounds I use there. Check it out, if you use samples. Speaking of samples…this one was composed around a clickety sound that is, honest to goodness, the sound of a drawer in a porn store. LONG story, but it is a good example of how I can hear music in almost anything…

As always, thanks for listening.

Released early August of 2010, under a Creative Commons license, found below. Tracks 2, 4 and 6 remastered from previous releases/versions you may have heard. It makes me happy and I hope you enjoy it, too. It is presented in the purest of spirits, with the best of intentions, slathered in love. Also, the artwork is left unattributed ONLY because I don’t know who created that wonderful little image, which was too perfect for my intentions here to let pass by. Like these tracks, I assume it was created to be used wisely and I hope that I have done so here. It’s all good, right?

http://brapallgood.com
http://brapallgood.com/freebraps.html
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

This will be my first interview in more than 20 years.  The last time I was interviewed on the radio, it was to introduce people to me as I took the show over from a friend.    I did a public radio show called ‘The Industrial Revolution’ in the late 80′s.  It was a fun experience for several months to a year….

…Until I got into it with the station manager, who seemed to think that because HE was paid, the rest of us unpaid workers had to treat him like a Radio God.  He ordered me to go on two hours early one night just because I showed up 2 hours early (with food, fresh from work a block away) and he was covering for another DJ who was sick.  I told him I was early because I needed to prepare the show.  He said nobody is listening anyway and if I didn’t go on, he would just shut the station down for the night and lock up.  I said he could stuff it (SORT OF, heh), grabbed my crates of vinyl  and walked out.  ANYWAY….

Come listen or wait for me to post a link to the archived show.  Or don’t.  I’m easy like that. 

UPDATE! – That was fun.    Nice guys.  You can catch the archived show at the link up top of this post.

‘Disclosures’ is just a space for me to ruminate and respond in long form to the internets, whether it be anti-troll in nature, a measured response to someone, or just for the fun of sharing and such.  I would say it is adult in nature, but I am trying to avoid my usual vernacular a la sailor, you know?    Adult, nonetheless.  I will be 42 in a couple of months and have no children (and no plans for any at all), so I leave them for others to deal with.

There’s also a new section for ‘Books’, which will grow slowly but surely.  I spend far more time in the bathroom than most, probably, and a book is always underway (brave the disclosure on ‘health’ if you need to know why).  Reading almost exclusively in that venue, I still manage a book a month or so…maybe 2 every 3.  Sometimes something grabs me enough that I plunk down in a more comfortable venue and plow through it.  Point is, reading is an ongoing exercise in my life and has been since I was about 4…so why not share some book reviews?  Why not indeed.  This section is still pretty sparse at time of writing, but it’ll grow.

‘Links for Whelp’.  When I started BrapBlog (the public version…at BlogSpot…I had two others that were private in years past), it was basically just a way to share links with my bestest buddy and spiritual brother Whelp.  He had a job that kept him working late into the night at a terminal, waiting for service calls to deal with.  T1 and long hours needs some links, ya know?  I would share things with him as posts and these added up into the old blog.  When that blog got tired, I started this one and imported the whole thing.

Two things here on this subject: 1) I will be going through (with no rush) and deleting many of the imported posts here, as they exist at the old blog just the same and I would rather focus this one better, as there are a lot more eyes than just Whelp reading it now, it seems.  2) all that old stuff you could find me posting (the non-made-by-me stuff, ya know?) is now found in the Links for Whelp section, which is the most updated portion of this blog and will likely remain so.  There’s more to say about it, but it’s said at the top of the section page.    Both Whelp and I think it is a much better way to go about it and I can share a lot more things than I wanted to actually make a blog post about. 

What else?  Music.  I actually entered ‘jewelry season’ and had to put the music aside for a time, in a way.  I have a couple of projects underway and am going about them very carefully.  I make no promises regarding what or when…but it’s on the burner set LOW, ya know?    I will say that one of those is the sequel to ‘The Solution’, for which I have the vocals completely laid out.  That alone took a few weeks of concentrated effort and now I am just playing around with different ideas to ‘score’ what I have created.  I am so home-made.    Bear with me…but don’t hold any breath or you WILL hurt yourself on this one. 

That’s about it!  Where beads and words have been occupying much of my creative self lately, Red Dead Redemption has occupied the rest.  HELLUVA game.  Having been playing them since I was a wee pup, I can say this is in my top 3, hands down, solidly struggling with the Fallout series for supreme position.    HELLUVA GAME, I repeat, FOR THE GAME LOVERS.  The rest of you can go watch teevee or whatever it is you do for fun and that is okay with me.

I am not so sure about doing this, but if you wanna cowboy up with me (and possibly even Whelp alongside me), my gamertag is BrapAllgood.  Send me a friend request and why I should add you (such as, “Truth prevails, brother!”) and I likely will, as I have only recently ventured into the online portion of XBOX and could use a bigger posse…at least until Fallout: New Vegas comes out. 

Peace, peoples.

Brap Allgood - The Solution - featuring Maxwell Igan

Here is a moody piece for y’all.    This took many weeks of effort, followed by a huge pause when my SATA controller card decided to give up its Magic Smoke and die (Whelp gets it, anyway).  All of my audio files were on my SATA drive, including Ableton Live itself.    It took some time and effort, but I finally got access to the drive back.  Whew.

SO, here I present one of my favorite voices of this Now, Maxwell Igan.  He kindly granted me permission to use his voice in my music (before I really even started), so long as I remain respectful about it and maintain the integrity of his words.  I would like to hope I did that, at least. 

Granted, this piece isn’t for everyone– and you won’t much be able to dance to it– but it came straight from my heart, charged with purposeful intent.    As the experiment has been going in recent years, I started with just the voice samples and arranged them first.  All else that you hear was built-up around the vocals, bit by bit, as it occurred to me.  Many layers– heck, I even hit the limits of my computer and software several times, having to bounce things down and around to make room for more.    However, every sound you hear has purposeful meaning, and every nuance is intentional.  It’s a lot deeper than I can possibly relate here…but maybe you’ll find the depth on your own.  Always a nice goal. 

This ambient track will be followed by another as a sort of sequel.  It will have a beat.  I even know what it is called and where the samples (also Max) will come from, but that is as far as I have gotten.  It’s jewelry season here in Trash Palace (we rent a home that is made from other, older, salvaged homes…Max would appreciate this, likely, so I explain) and I have much, much to do.  Music will come and go as I am moved in that direction; I make no promises on when I will complete this next track, but the link will replace this text when I do.

Many, many thanks to Max Igan for being game in this.  His weekly show is the best thing going on the inter-waves and I heartily recommend all to check it out.  I could sample him alone for the rest of my life and never get bored…maybe.  As my wife says…something like “He sounds like a hug.”    I agree enough to repeat it here….  We love you, Max.  I also like you because you think a helluva lot like I do.

Click to listen or right-click to download…
Brap Allgood – The Solution – 320kbps mp3 (10,160 bytes)
Brap Allgood – The Solution – 256kbps mp3 (8,128 bytes)
Brap Allgood – The Solution – 128kbps mp3 (4,064 bytes)

This song is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.  Play at your own risk.    Other free music can be downloaded here.  Peace.

Direct link to the video.

I will expand upon the 528 thing in the future. 

So, why the move to WordPress?  Because Google pissed me off, that’s why.  You may have noticed in the past that I had some Google AdSense ads on my old blog and website.  I joined the AdSense (<–gets funnier every time I type it…) program in the hopes that it would offset the $10 or so a month that our server space costs us for brapallgood.com and goodallgood.com, et al.  That was more than 2 years ago.  In that time, I had amassed the whopping sum of $90.53 (or so) from the occasional clicks I received from whoever, wherever.  All I know is that it was not me or anyone I know doing the clicking.  Fair, right?

Then The GoogMonster sends me this:

Hello,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our
advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance
for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve taken,
please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by
visiting https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Yep.  Emphasis added by me, but otherwise just like it looked for me…and about a bazillion other poor schmucks that Google has now ripped-off, hands down, with no actual reason given for the disabling.  Yep.  Just search the first paragraph of the above Friendly Note and you will find lots and lots of stories similar to mine.  In fact, it seems I got off easy– $90 was nothing compared to some of the sob stories I read about online.  Never mind that it took years to get there…but it is hard to ignore that lately the hits had begun to pick up and Google was supposed to finally pay out at $100.

It’s also hard to ignore that I had done nothing new at my site or my blog for weeks.  Why the sudden change?  Why, all in a moment, did they decide I did something wrong (and refused to actually tell me what it was)?  Why is Google allowed to get away with business practices such as these?  Oh…that’s right…EULA.  A contract with no wet signatures, wherein you accept that Google can do whatever they want, whenever they want, nyah,  nyah, pbtpbtpbtpbtpbtpb.  Right.

The funniest part?  I was going to remove the AdSense once we got that hard-earned $100 check (the lowest amount they will send you a check on…).  I don’t see the need for the ads except that it costs us $10 a month for server space to bring you things for free.  After years of watching it slowly accrue, I realized that it didn’t make enough of a difference to offset the cost by much, so why not just present things in a pure way?  Why not, indeed.

SO, in my path to shed myself of all things Google, here I am at WordPress.  I’ll leave the old blog up, but new posts will be here for the foreseeable future.  I really liked how I had the old one set-up and will miss the design, but I’ll adapt and just hope that you will, too. 

And seriously: Guck Foogle.

If you are considering going with AdSense, just be aware that there’s a good chance you will never see the money.  After reading all of the accounts that I read, it seems pretty clear to me that if you rub against the grain of society in any way, you are likely to be cheated by Google.  Defend Palestinian liberation?  CHOP! Question the efficacy and safety of pharmaceuticals (especially SSRI-inhibitors)?  HACK! Question Scientology?  CRASH! Warn about the coming (orchestrated) financial collapse?  POW. You just became a headache that was solved via guillotine (and no, you can’t have the head back, we keep it and donate it to “charity”).  Thanks, Google!  You rock!  MWAH!  Love you!

P.S.  StartPage.com has been working fine for me.