Monthly Archives: January 2018

Writing Lyrics, But Do I Have Anything To Say?

I’m working on a new musical solo project, pretty unlike Bloodless Mushroom (my long-running experimental instrumental electronic music project that you probably know about by now).

The whole point of this is to have something to perform live at open mic nights. I love playing, but I also love going to them to see the other performers. This will give me an excuse to do both. There’s also something on my bucket list — play in two different bands in the same show (and a solo act counts). And hey, Emergency Brunch definitely plays open mic shows.

There’s a problem. Not that I can’t sing – that can be cured with practice and lessons and effort. If that doesn’t work I can do spoken word, chanting, yodeling, or farm noises.

No, the problem is that I don’t really know whether I have anything worth saying. Sure, I have plenty of opinions and things I care deeply about, but does the world need to hear about them? Or should I just leave them inside my head? Does anyone actually want to hear about Spanish cheese and punching fascists and how much Google sucks?

The last time I even wrote a song with lyrics was about 23 years ago, and that was some not-very-good comedy-punk that I never recorded (the band name was Dead Cement). Or 17 years ago if you count drunken NWO jam session improv.

The name Bloodless Mushroom originated with the word “bloodless”, and I chose that as a word that reflected my watery spine toward the idea of writing and performing music with words (before that I played grunge-punk as “Navy Blue Fred”, based on a Flintstones t-shirt I used to own).

I had a good reason for dodging words altogether. Most of the songs I grew up listening to were dreadfully stupid, with the most common words being “ooh” and “baby”. The last thing the world needed was another dumb rock bombast-bro talking about his dick.

So here’s where I try the thing. I’m new. And a bit scared. And may fail. And don’t know what will come of it. But it’s time.

I know I’ll be my harshest critic, and don’t know if anything will make it past my “this sucks” filter, but I hope it does. And one of the nice things about open mic shows is that they’re a good place to try and refine new things, discarding the ones that don’t work. Even when they’re strangers, it’s normally a friendly and supportive audience, and that helps.

If you see a new Bloodless Mushroom album it doesn’t mean I’ve given up. There are three finished albums in the publishing pipeline right now, with one releasing Thursday.

Dr. Kilpatient – The Prototype IV Soundtrack

My old band Dr. Kilpatient re-released an album we recorded in 2000, the Prototype IV Soundtrack.

It’s the soundtrack to an imaginary science fiction film and was the combined songwriting effort of myself and Tomasz Kordowski (The Doctor Himself). Marc Haney also played guitar on a few of the songs. It was a blast to create, and I’m glad it’s out in the world again.

It’s an instrumental fractal surrealist circus rock album.

It’s available for streaming online:

Spotify

Deezer

YouTube

Tidal

Zeta Centauri Windows App Revenue Postmortem

Now that I’m no longer selling the Zeta Centauri apps, I decided to add up sales of Windows desktop apps over the years and see how much it was.

2010: $261.25
2011: $160.44
2012: $69.24
2013: $0*
2014: $109.26
2015: $50.08
2016: $95.58
2017: $36.42

Total: $781.27

Overall I’d estimate that I’ve spent about 3500 hours developing apps for Zeta Centauri. This works out to about 22 cents per hour.

This does leave out 2008 and 2009 that I don’t have records for, but I think it was about $35 total each year.

This also leaves out my brief experimentation with installer-based advertising (that spamware/crapware stuff that tries to trick you into installing a useless toolbar). That made about $50, and I feel bad about even trying it.

This also leaves out selling Ubuntu versions of some of these apps, which was about $35 total.

In any case, it’s less than $1000 total.

During the 6 months or so I was building webOS apps (before the platform was murdered), I brought in about $700. That was a much better return on my time. I managed to port one of those apps to Android and made about $7 with it. I really hated working on Android and using the Eclipse tools, so after that one I was done. Never tried iOS (always had a mild dislike of Apple).

It was an interesting experiment, and I tried nearly everything I could think of to make it work. If I’m going to make it in this world, it won’t be with desktop audio software.

The only thing that I didn’t try was adding VST support, and that would have made a significant difference. I’m guessing 4x sales. I mean, I did try adding VST support, but didn’t succeed in implementing it. I could never get it quite right.


* Technically sales happened this year, but not enough to hit the $25 payout threshold, so they’re counted in 2014.

DrumPads Now Open Source

Of all the audio apps I wrote for Zeta Centauri, DrumPads was by far the most popular, with more than 300,000 lifetime downloads.

It’s a pretty simple app. It’s a set of 12 virtual drum pads, each of which plays a sample when you tap or click it, or hit the corresponding keyboard key. It also had MIDI support and included a bunch of samples from freewavesamples.com. It let you use arrow icons scroll through to samples to change the kit, which could be a fairly long process. It was notable for me in that it was the first app I had ever written as a with a touch-only interface.

It started as an app for webOS tablets back in 2011. Soon after, webOS was discontinued, abandoned, and set aflame by Leo Apotheker, one of the most incompetent CEOs in modern history. I ported it to Linux and it was in the Ubuntu app store. Then I ported it to Windows and posted it online. And I almost got it ported to OSX. It built, but it never came together well enough to make it past the App Store goons. There was a pretty capable free version and a paid version. The free version was very popular, but the paid version only sold a few dozen copies.

Now that Zeta Centauri is no longer a business, there’s no reason not to release the full version for free.

The source code to DrumPads is now available on GitHub, along with a full version Windows download. Enjoy. 🙂

 

MusicSrch Reboot

Early in 2016 I bought the source code for a music search site from a fella in Slovenia and put it under the umbrella of the WbSrch search engine.

When WbSrch shut down later in 2016, it was left in limbo. It was still running through 2017, but ignored. And sometimes the service crashed and wouldn’t be started back up for a while. Like, sometimes even months.

When I started curating for RCRDList, it became something that I wanted to use again. But it was pretty broken, and I never really got around to learning Ruby. So I spent a long weekend and a few evenings rewriting it in Python and JavaScript.

It doesn’t search all of the same services that it used to, but it searches more of them now, especially more of the mainstream services. There are a few more things I’d like to add, but it already does more than the original version did. I also don’t have to worry about the service crashing because it’s a Python app, and I know how to keep those running consistently.

Try it out at:

https://musicsrch.com

 

RCRDList

My friend Zoe, founder of the RCRDList music discovery email list, is currently in grad school. She’s handed off curation of the list to me while she’s busy with classes. I’ve been finding a lot of great music you should know about, so you should sign up.

It’s here:

http://list.rcrdbox.com/

SampliTron Now Open Source

SampliTron is one of the most popular Windows apps I’ve written. Although it’s fairly simple, it’s pretty powerful. It’s a virtual sampler that lets you load a .wav file and scale it across the entire keyboard, with that keyboard playable via either the computer keyboard or an external MIDI controller.

Before today it was a commercial app with a demo version, and the full version was $15. Over its lifetime it’s been downloaded more than 40,000 times and has sold a few dozen copies.

As of now, the full version is free, on the zetacentauri website, and the source code is available under the MIT license on GitHub.

New Bloodless Mushroom Album: Cymatella

I’ve released a new album called Cymatella.

It’s a mix of nearly-industrial guitar-synth-and-drums tracks and ambient/soundtrack electronic music.

Nothing I’ve done musically has required more time and effort than this album. Technically I’ve spent more than 12 years working on it, with the first drum tracks being created in 2005. Turning those tracks into real songs started in 2015 after the release of Marasmius and most of the work for it was done in 2016 with the rest finishing in 2017.

It’s available on all the major streaming services. For more info click here.

Cover art by Suzanne Champion.