Wishes Coming True

My new Album – Monkey Paw Cowboy – is now out on your favourite streaming service under the band name The Incredible Jukebox.

This is part of an AI project that I’ve been undertaking in the last week.

I’ve written a ton of (questionable) songs, as lyricist to an AI music generator – Udio.com. It’s driven me mad.

But October – the sequel to September is a banger:

And that’s not even on the album.

The album contains some very silly tracks, of which the anti-dote to Shania Twain’s That Don’t Impress Me Much is the first proper song:

Though using AI is of questionable merit, I’ve poured a lot of creative energy into my side of the process.

More to follow.

Shenanigans and Japes

Well, I had a soft new year’s resolution to release an album of music. I did not expect it to turn out this way.

In the next few days, Monkey Paw Cowboy will hit the music streaming services and digital music stores.

This is not the album I was expecting to make.

A New Toy and Unburning Out

Anyone who knows me might be startled to think I’m publishing a campaign video for Donald J Trump. They would not be as startled as the dozens (no, it’s not exactly a viral video) of Trump supporters who found this song not to be entirely to their taste.

This is an AI generated song. I wrote the lyrics myself and used Udio.com to generate the music. I put the video together using stock footage. This is not a zero effort way of making music, but it happened way quicker than sitting down and writing and recording the music myself.

It’s a form of creativity I’m exploring at the moment as an addition to my plans for the year to make more music and write more new material. I don’t see it intersecting with my on stage work, nor with my plans to release original recorded songs, but I guess we’ll see. I will write more about my AI music project in the coming days, but for now, let’s look just at this song.

I love what the AI did. It’s similar to what I might have done, but it was created by a musical idiot that just knows how to ape styles. I curated the various options produced by the AI, and tailored the lyrics to fit the vibe of the song as it was built incrementally.

What’s lovely is the way the model degenerates and introduces a new singer at a critical moment in the song, which I wouldn’t have thought to script, but which lifts things near a punchline.

It’s really good fun.

Unless you’re a Trump supporter.

They weren’t happy. They couldn’t understand the sarcasm and the mirror it raises up to the behaviour typical of Trump supporters, though I also threw in some moderately unreasonable ad hominem attacks and accusations into the mix… because why not, eh?

As one commenter put it:

Indeed, it attracted the very behaviour it’s joking about.

Initial YouTube recommendation algorithm interest has subsided, and I’m sure the song will take its place in the long list of forgotten bits of superficial satire hanging around the internet.

But my feelings of creative burnout have been replaced by something new. I’ve created so much stuff in the last few days that my brain is reeling. More on that soon…

Burned Out Already?

I start the week in a state of burnout. At least things can only get better from here, eh?

It makes sense that I’m playing catch up.

A week ago, I had had a terrible night’s sleep owing to being very very sick after a big lunch in Oxford with the family to celebrate my 50th birthday. Being sick all night, which happened to both myself and my wife, wasn’t a consequence of the food, though somewhat wasted the benefit of eating at a nice restaurant. We had a bug.

The Monday was a day of working through the after effects of being ill, getting ready to spend the Tuesday in hospital.

I barely ate on Monday, was nil by mouth from reaching my hotel on Monday night, and then went into hospital Tuesday morning as a day case to have a procedure. It was a liver biopsy. It hurt, but only a bit, and hasn’t really bothered me since.

Wednesday, still quite weary from the day in hospital, I did another day’s work, had a buddy come over to pick up my equipment and then run my comedy night for me.

It’s a weird out of body experience seeing someone else run your comedy night for you. I helped. I was on sound. But I wasn’t MCing, and I deliberately didn’t do the heavy lifting as I was under doctor’s orders not to. Similarly, I was quite tired.

It’s odd seeing how the audience don’t treat you when you’re not the MC. I’m used to various post-gig chats with the crowd, since I’m usually the MC and the organiser. I noticed some of those chats being had with Alex, the replacement MC, and it further cemented my feeling of being there more as a ghost haunting my gig, than as a proper attendee/participant.

I’ve tried to step up my editing, so I’m also working on that as well as the day job, so last week just kept on going.

However, I think one of the major major causes of my feeling of being burned out is that I did a gig on Saturday night, which used up the remainder of my energy. Following that up with doing some chores on Sunday, without catching up on sleep, is the thing that’s cemented my sense of burnout. The more interesting part of the story, though, is what happened on Saturday.

On the up side, I got to try my new car out on a gig drive. I’m still trying to work out the best way to use this Petrol Plug-in Hybrid. I think the trick for long drives is to use the battery to augment the petrol and thus improve MPG. I think that’s it, and it definitely worked. I got to Barnsley with about 40 miles of petrol remaining, a good 40 miles greater than the original estimate of range when I left home.

There were some dilemmas at the gig. I think I knew from the pre-gig chat that this was going to be a line-up with quite a lot of newer acts in it. And by a lot, I mean a lot. 10 of us performed in the end, including the MC. It was a charity gig which I’d offered myself up for. It was for Andy’s Man Club.

Quick aside.

I’d been in a pub in Leeds a few weeks back and the room we were in was about to be taken over by Leeds Dads’ Club. We said we’d leave when they started their meeting, and we were invited to join in. I said that I’m a Dad, but I don’t live in Leeds. That didn’t seem to deter them. I pointed out that it was a really long commute, so I couldn’t, so they encouraged me to join in with Andy’s Man Club. All of these things sounded a bit “fathers for justice” to me. Day one, you’re at a meeting in a pub, day 3, on a bridge dressed as Batman.

However, I was assured it wasn’t like that, and I said I’d look into Andy’s Man Club. Which I didn’t.

So when a gig came up to support AMC, I thought I’d better fulfil my promise.

The thing is… I’ve not gigged on line ups made almost exclusively of newer acts in years. I’ve forgotten much of how it feels to be an open mic act.

I’ve gigged with newer acts. Indeed, we had two of them on on Wednesday, of varying degrees of competence. Newer acts haven’t lost their illusions yet. They have much to learn. They can be enormously fresh and talented, and they can be way off the mark. Who’s to say?

There’s a status problem when someone of 21 years’ experience gigs with someone of 1 year or less.

“So, how long have you been going?”
“21 years….”
“…”
“…. yes, I know… if I was going to be an overnight success, it would have happened by now”

It’s easy to go into “Comedy Sensei” mode and try to become the “master” to these “students”. It’s easy to look like one’s lording it up over the newbies.

This leads to an interesting risk. While a charity night, mainly populated with new acts, is not a career move or a high stakes gig, going out as the most experienced act and doing badly is a massive come down from the pre-gig dynamic. “But he was talking about the secret of comedy, how come he doesn’t know it!?”.

The pressure to do well, mainly from myself, was quite high.

And on a bill where there are 8 acts and an MC on before you, there’s a big question about whether the audience have anything left to give.

Cue the act on first in the final section.

That man was good. He was great. Well written, well delivered, he roofed many of his punchlines and showed the room some of its biggest laughs of the night. Follow that one!

I’m sort of glad I didn’t video the gig. I think if I had, I’d be tempted to put those clips online, which I might feel was me taking something back from a gig which I’d set out to give to.

Indeed, in the spirit of giving, I’d also agreed to transport a couple of acts to the gig from Stoke – about an extra hour of driving for me each way. One of them I knew, and one of them I didn’t. The chap I knew pulled out a couple of days before, and then, when I was trying to arrange the lift for the other one, he too pulled out… so I got all the kudos of offering to be kind, but none of the effort.

Anyway, on to my own performance.

I had a game plan. In the middle of my set I was going to really break the 4th wall, and I was going to do something that would look like it was a one off and unplanned. In truth it was half-planned, but I attempted to make it look spontaneous.

I’d been obsessing with the name Andy’s Man Club, and how it sounded like a line from a Jungle Book song. In I’m The King of the Swingers, the lyric uses the phrase man cub a couple of times:

I want to be a man, man club,
and stroll right into town…

So I had that song, and man club/man cub in my head as a thing to do. I just didn’t quite know how to make it happen.

Watching the first part of the show, it came to me. At the back of the stage was a big poster advertising the organisation. All I had to do was sing the poster. Indeed for the dooby dooby doo, I want to be like you bit, I could sing the web address double-yu-double-yu-double-you … it would work.

How do you stage that?

Well, I decided that during my set I’d bring the poster to the front of the stage and mis-speak the name of the club, calling it Andy’s Man Cub. I’d catch myself mis-speaking it and then, on stage, challenge myself to turn Andy’s Man Club into a Jungle Book song.

All I had to do was make it look like an accident.

Boy this seems smug and self-satisfying. To be honest, I was more doubtful that I could pull it off, and slightly ashamed of using such a cheap trick to give me an in into a largely pre-prepared, though also semi-improvised and unrehearsed bit.

I asked a few people after the show whether they spotted that I was following a plan, or if it looked spontaneous.

Apparently, I got away with it.

In my head, the stakes seemed a bit higher owing to the various circumstances, especially the deep conversations I’d had with one or two acts on the path through growing as a comic.

However, the dour sound person gave me the best dour complement you can expect from a Barnsley person:

“I don’t usually like musical comedians”

That’s says it all. They didn’t end the sentiment… they didn’t need to.

I took the long gig drive home and have only the memories of that surreal experience to look back on. I’m sure I’ll recover before the next fantastic voyage into my comedy career.

A Quick(er) Virtual Choir

This isn’t the first time I made a virtual choir.

In lockdown – July 2020 – I put together a virtual choir from my children’s primary school:

This project took about 200 hours, including time spent arranging, recording tracks for the kids to sing along with, stitching together all their vocals, “aligning” those vocals, mixing, and putting together the video.

Making several people on screen lip sync with a backing track that’s similar to what they sang, but has gone through some comping, and other improvements, is no small feat. It was a huge labour of love and I somewhat burned out.

I do love putting together vocal harmonies, so a lot of my recent releases usually have several vocal layers. There are about 7 of me on the Facebook group song:

I picture three of me on backing vocals, as there are three distinct vocal parts, but I doubled them up.

Even recording my own vocal harmonies is on a spectrum of easy to hard. In the above, I just improvised the harmonies. In other songs, I may spend a few hours scoring the vocals and then trying to record what I scored, which may or may not be singable. Autotune fixes a lot of mistakes, or at least allows me to turn my own voice into a guide track so I can sing along with it on a better take.

However, yesterday, I tried out a new form of virtual choir compilation. TikTok is a great place to see people making music together independently. In this instance a chap called Andy Arthur Smith released a “When The Saints Go Marching In” track, with him singing rather athletically, while also clicking his fingers (those clicks are handy for the process that follows).

My timeline was full of variations on this track with people duetting Andy, or duetting other musicians who had duetted him. There was this family tree of different versions of the song, each with something new in the mix. Sometimes people recorded multiple versions of their contribution.

I heard these and wondered what they might sound like together.

@ashleyfriezecomedian

When the saints go marching in – hyper mix. You are all my favourite people for putting this together and I had fun mixing it and turning it into the band that never was. @andyarthursmith #whenthesaintsgomarchingin @snehaprakash_ @greg_fountaine @dultesio2 @evamarienslund @davide.dalmonte_ @kikis.page @valiati_ @bunkore @sinoxolo_vokwana @bassles @ebucs19 @lielbarz @thebretcrowshow @daniellemnarrates @alto.mama @echopicone @kenzieeofficial @tianiedacostaa @its.trevee @acoustics_bass @stevenmichaelpearman @sierrasikoramusic @frankie.j.224 @paigezilba @alexengelberg @garrettdavismusic @buffalorosemusic @bellamafia25 @naomitaysings4 @http.justina.com Big thanks go to Andy Arthur Smith for marching them saints in. I hope you guys enjoy this mix!

♬ original sound – Ashley Frieze – Ashley Frieze

Here we stumble on Ashley’s law of online content creation:

The longer you spend on creating some content, the less likely it’ll get a bunch of views.

Put another way, some of my lowest effort reels get the most views.

Luckily, though, I didn’t spent 200 hours making the above virtual choir. I was kind of hoping it might take 90 minutes or so. It took about 4 hours.

I downloaded 32 TikToks and tried to work them into a mix. I was worried that this mix would be unlistenable without quite a bit of work, and there were moments where it threatened not to sound like anything more than mush.

However, with a lot of alignment of tracks, and various bits of processing, I managed to get something that seems to contain most people’s input. If you look at one of the people in the video, you can usually hear what they’re doing.

It takes a lot of compressing and EQing to get to this place, and I still don’t have the knack of making it sound the way I imagine it should.

Anyway, the TikTok algorithm appears to have shown it exclusively to the 30 creators I mentioned in it, and to virtually nobody else:

However, the mission I had was to hear what this choir would sound like, and to do so in a way which didn’t upset the original creators. The feedback from the “participants” has been really positive, and I learned a bit more about the craft of sound mixing in yesterday’s exercise.

Gigs Pulled, Daughter in Hospital, Make the Funnies

I’ve been working on a song about Facebook. Here it is:

As with many such 90 second songs, this turned out to be way more work than I originally expected.

I’ve got a demo version of it where I just sing the lyrics, somewhat somberly, over a few guitar chords. I thought this song was good enough to try to make properly, and I kind of knew that the video would need to be a “show you the thing we’re singing about video”, much like my rather more viral Word Video:

Around 250k views across all platforms, though YouTube was strangely quiet

As usual, I underestimated how much time I’d spend on recording, editing, re-editing and videoing the song.

Current estimate – 30 hours. Perhaps more.

As always, these things start with a document. I actually emailed myself the main lyrics while out with the family. Then I put some guitar chords on. Given I was going to play the ukulele on this, not the guitar, I also put on the chords that my guitar fingers think I’m playing on the uke. I’m in C, but the fingers think the uke is in G… I know.

Then I did a lot of programming and midi recording in GarageBand, with drum loops for the main rhythm, augmented with pings and zings.

Learning a lesson from a recent recording session with a friend, I waited until the backing was in place before recording a lead vocal, so the lead vocal would take energy from the backing track.

The first mix was awful. Never mix on headphones. I don’t know why I do!

I mix on headphones because I’m often working late at night and trying both not to make noise, and also to record when it’s quiet, thus needing to make noise!

Friday night I had to cancel my gig and stay home because my daughter was taken to hospital. It was not a medical drama, but it was a big disruption. So on Friday night I properly mixed the song. We’re about 10-15 hours into creating it at this point.

Saturday was another cancelled gig, so I set about making the Facebook part of the video. I had storyboards…

That’s page 1 of 2. There were 19 scenes, apparently…

I then set about posting random things on Facebook so I could either screen capture them, or edit them directly in my browser to make them more fictional.

Nobody noticed that my Facebook posts were getting really random. I got likes for completely weird things I’d posted.

Come 1am Saturday night, I had a bunch of “screen shots” with holes in them for the video.

On Sunday, while waiting for my daughter to be discharged, I went outside and did the “principal photography”. This mainly involved singing to camera from random angles… without the backing track.

If you don’t play the backing track while recording the video, it’s remarkably hard to achieve lip syncing.

This was guerilla filming, as I was essentially fitting in quick selfie videos while also sorting out the house and washing for the imminent return of my wife and daughter from hospital. I was also a little worried the neighbours would see me doing it and wonder what the hell I was up to.

A highlight was the moment I got into cardboard boxes in the garage:

Stitching these videos together was a slow incremental process that took much of the day.

As with previous videos, it becomes a case of playing “spot the missing scene” until all the holes are filled.

The video editor messed up the alignment of some of the videos, and since they look right in the edit page, I had to accept that done is better than perfect and just let it go.

Similarly, my attempt to have a live video of the phone with Facebook on it, with me swiping, didn’t quite work as hoped, so I went for a static view…

But, I did manage to fill the screen with a ton of details, fictional characters (all named after places in the Isle of Wight), and even a credits sequence with more jokes in…

Faces courtesy of This Person Does Not Exist.

There is one screen shot from a real local group with a “real” poster – the Jesus Spambot – I don’t believe they’re humans.

Anyway, it’s out in the world now, and it’s time to see whether the accumulated view time is longer than the 30 hours I spent making it. Let’s ignore the credits. How many 90 seconds are there in 30 hours? 1200… We’ll see!

Another Example of Putting in Needless Effort

I’ll admit that the principal filming for this video was 2minutes 30seconds:

That said, editing the video together took its time, and the underlying track is where the real effort went in.

It’s about the 4th or 5th draft of this song, with discarded entire songs along the way:

But then the hook for this song grew in my head and was the subject of a voice note to myself, as well as a lyric, which got rewritten a bit, but is essentially the same idea.

Then it was time to go into scoring mode:

Men 7 and Men 8 never got to sing, but the first 6 “men” become 8, as I sang part 6 across three different octaves, each part getting double tracked. So there are 16 of me in the “choir” in the song.

The remainder of the instrumentation is very scant, to leave room for the vocals to provide the warmth and flavour of the whole thing.

Writing and recording a 30 second song seems easy, but doing it 8 times over is more involved, as was learning and singing the choral parts, which were not always incredibly singable.

And I wrote it in C but performed it in E, though that’s mainly just a question of transposing the virtual instruments in GarageBand before recording the vocals at the right pitch.

It represents a lot of work and craft, and I’m sure I could have done it better… but it’s out there now, and completing stuff is the name of the game.

Some 2023 stats

As of 28th December this year, I’ve released:

• 25 long-form YouTube videos of various stripes
• 92 shorts

I’ve dropped stuff onto other platforms. I don’t think there’s anything that hasn’t made it to YouTube that I particularly care about.

And there’s 26 songs in there which were written this year. Mainly short ones, too many “song parodies”, but some original ones too.

And there are things I’ve written, performed, but not yet released, and my notepad has some new songs on it too.

That’s a reasonably creative year. More in 2024!

The Indignity of Life on the Road

If it wasn’t for my third life as a stand-up comic, I think I’d be getting frustrated with life. I’m getting older, I carry a lot of responsibility, and I don’t always find things easy. While family life is a privilege, and I’m lucky to do a day job that pays bills effectively, I also have some need for creativity and adventure which these don’t fully provide for.

So, I try to have my cake and eat it. I try to defy the laws of common sense and exhaustion, and do a night time job as well as a day time job; one that takes me hours away from home.

Theoretically, had I left home around 3.30pm yesterday and driven directly to Sunderland with no traffic, I’d have been there in time for the gig… but that’s a big “theoretically” and it wasn’t the approach I took.

Similarly, had I not been full of cold – my second in 3 weeks – and feeling generally old, overweight and shit – it would have been a simpler last few days.

But here’s how my feet have barely touched the ground this week.

On Monday, I was all day in Bristol with my client at meetings to plan ahead. Then I rushed home to deliver a chair for my wife, and then did about 90 minutes sofa stripping in her workshop to help ease her workload.

On Tuesday, I took my work laptop to my hospital appointments in Birmingham and did work around an MRI scan, a consultation, and getting my car repaired at a neighbouring garage.

Then I drove to Gateshead. While I’d hoped to work in the evening in the Travelodge, I was too tired, and so got up early and worked in the morning instead.

So it’s now Wednesday morning, and I’m in virtual meetings until just before checkout time. I took a meeting break to drive to the Quayside part of Gateshead. I parked behind the “Glasshouse” or “Sage”, not sure which it’s called these days, and then went into the building itself (pictured) to continue my morning’s work.

There was some nose running and sneezing, but mainly there was good coffee and friendly service from the early-20-something women at the coffee bar, who all took it in turns to make me feel old as I asked questions about how Newcastle had changed since I lived there.

Part of being a nomadic worker, both doing the day job on the move, and also being a comedy journey-man, is the random interactions with people who are being friendly, but don’t really have any meaningful social engagement to offer.

I’d had a rather extended and awkward conversation at the front desk of the travelodge (living the dream) the night before too, where I’d asked the very friendly staff members about where I actually was – apparently nowhere near the bit of Gateshead I wanted to be near – and where to park – they had no idea… and then the conversation couldn’t really find an end. I was tired after a long drive and had a sore throat, and I wanted to get to my room. I had to bring it to a close by announcing that I was going to use a vending machine and go to my room, which I then did.

I bought a drink. I didn’t really eat out of a vending machine that night, even though I’d suggested in a WhatsApp conversation with my wife’s aunt that that was my only prospect of an evening meal. That said, my actual evening meal was what I’ve delicately termed road beef – the food of the road… fast food with no actual food in it.

Anyway, the Sage is a lovely building to spend time in, even if the Christmas music they were playing was pretty overbearing.

But, in social interaction good news, I had a lunch appointment to keep with a couple of old friends/workmates. I’d say both. Our shared history is that we worked for several years at the same company, and I also went to university with one of them. It was in that social circle, that I reinvented myself after a long-term relationship broke up in 2002, and they were the people I spend most of my time with until I left the company we were all at in 2005.

So, I wandered across the lovely millennium bridge across to the Newcastle Pitcher and Piano, where we had lunch.

After lunch, they went off to the match and I stayed on, working, drinking coffee, and generally being useful.

Then I needed a toilet break before heading to Sunderland. The indignity of being functionally homeless between appointments is never too far away. The toilet cubicle I decided to visit revealed itself to have a loose toilet only once I’d sat on it, and things had set about being underway. This didn’t affect using the toilet for its primary purpose of receiving and flushing things away, but it did affect the clean up operation.

Not to be too indelicate, some people clean while still sitting, and some stand. For me, neither was possible comfortably. I don’t stretch well for a standing clean, and the sitting clean kept making the toilet tilt.

I ended up bracing my arms against the toilet walls to give me the necessary reach to sort out the last phase of the clean up, and it was, quite frankly, demeaning.

Then back to the car park, which is significantly higher than you think. I had many stairs to climb from the river level back up to the Sage and its multi-storey car park.

Out of breath from lack of fitness and my cold, I drove to find some Sudafed. Sainsbury’s in Sunderland offered the opportunity for cheap drugs and a drink… but their cafe was closed.

So I sat in my car, took my pills, and wrote more code on the computer, balanced on the steering wheel. The glamour!

With the day’s coding all done (I’d had more engineering hours nomadically than I usually get when at home), I drove to the gig.

The gig offered a green room behind a step ladder up a bunch of stairs. While it was useful to decompress there with a nice cup of coffee, I was also alone up there, which was relatively lonely…

… but the gig itself was fun and I managed to push through my frankly awful voice. I’ll score me a 6/10, the audience a 7… we got there.

Then back on the road.

Four hours home listening to a podcast, punctuated with a food and a wee break.

By the end, I was periodically blasting myself with cool air to keep fully alert. Not ideal, but not at the terrifying end of the spectrum.

I was quick to bed, and I’m still knackered.

And that’s showbiz, kid.

4K Video Downloader: A Vital Tool

A quick word on process.

I occasionally make parody songs, which usually require some sort of remixing of an original song. I use Vocalremover.org to turn real tracks into karaoke tracks, but to get those real tracks, I need to be able to download originals from somewhere and it’s usually YouTube.

I couldn’t have made this without being able to download videos from YouTube:

And for YouTube video downloads, I always use 4K Video Downloader;

This is the one

The downloader lets me pull down a whole video, so I can muck with the original visuals if I want to, and it also lets me rip the MP3 directly.

I generally mix studio and live recordings with either pop videos or live videos to make things possible.

For example, the Tom Jones WHY WHY WHY was based on a live recording:

And the Harry Styles video involved clips of studio recordings and videos (taken from the YouTube videos) with bits of live recording, from other YouTube videos.

So Why 4K Video Downloader?

4K Video Downloader is quick, efficient to use, and a massive part of the videos I’ve released on my channel in the last couple of years.

Using it is very easy. You go to the video on YouTube you want and copy the link. Then you press the “Paste Link” button in 4K Video Downloader. It immediately works out the options for that video. You can choose to extract just the audio, or download the video at one of the available resolutions.

It’s unaffected by any ads, and seems to be both compatible with all manner of YouTube videos, as well as really quick to download and save the file. The list of all videos extracted sits in the app, ready for you to right click to go to the extracted file on the file system.

Reviewing this app is hard because it simply WORKS. It sits quietly ready for action and gets on with its job. They release loads of updates for it, no doubt to keep it compatible with different ways YouTube might change, or videos might be glitchy.

I’ve really enjoyed using it, and recommend it thoroughly.