Hi Patrons!

This month was a crazy one. I started working on a uke video for July that is going to be my biggest production yet, both audio and video. But it turned out to be so big, there was no way to get it finished this month.

Panic.

So, at the beginning of this week, I was completely at a loss as to what to do for this month's video. Then I heard Radiohead's 'No Surprises' on the radio. Hadn't heard it in years and when I heard it this time, the chimey guitar parts jumped out at me. I wondered if I could play those bits on ukulele using finger harmonics.

Now I had something to shoot for. Turns out, it's not very easy, but I practiced for a couple of days and thought I had it pretty much together.

I planned to make a simple uke and voice performance, and doing a straightforward one-take video, just like in the good ol' days way back when I started doing these less than a year ago. 

Then, about an hour before the session to record and film it, I came up with the idea you see here.

Like the video I shot on the fly for 'Glad and Sorry' a few months back, this was a bit of a fly by the seat of my pants experiment. I pretty much knew how to shoot the thing to get both of me in the shot together, but I definitely learned some things as well. The main thing being, even if you think you've secured the camera and it's not going to move, it's probably going to move. (It moved.)

This made my two shots not quite line up exactly and I wasn't able to "lay them" on top of one another, I could only do the split screen effect. You can spot a couple of the flaws with this and it prevented me from doing what I thought would be a really cool shot of singer me "melting" into ukulele-playing me during the instrumental section. I'M STILL LEARNING, GUYS!

Still, for a last week of the month scramble it was pretty ambitious and I think it's pretty cool.

I hope you do, too. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks as always for the support and next month is gonna knock you out!

-Jim

I've decided to tackle an important moment that occurs in many relationships.

New tools coming together, I think! I felt like drawing a silly dragon after having seen baby alligator photos. Basically, I changed nothing, it's a baby alligator. Bonus wallpaper attached!

On contemplating logos for a girl gang. Bonus wallpaper attached!

Good morning!

At long last ... it's finally finished ... and here it is!!

In celebration of my one year anniversary here on Patreon, I'm ridiculously excited to have this video to share with you all, Captain and Tenille's 'Love Will Keep Us Together'.

I brought 5 ukuleles and every t-shirt I own into the studio and was filmed in front of a green screen (that's how we got all those pretty colors) as I recorded the song. The end result looks so slick that it almost looks like I lip-synced after the fact, but everything you see in the video is from the actual recording session. 

I would record a track, change into a different t-shirt, record another track, and so on. If I recall correctly, I wound up putting down 8 different uke tracks and and 14 vocal tracks. And yes, even the solo was recorded in costume. I'll just leave it at that until you see the video.

I've loved this record since I was a kid, the arrangement is insanely great and it was so much fun figuring out how to play all those parts on the uke. When mixing the recording, I wanted to try to have a similar sound to the record, so we did things with effects to try to make some of the ukes sound like tack pianos and even tried to cop the synthesizer sound in the solo (I think we got pretty close).

This thing was a HUGE undertaking, a little over two months in the making, and I leaned heavily on Kris Magyarits, Bob Schachner and all the amazing folks at Alkemy X in Philadelphia. I'm a tough taskmaster, but they really worked and worked on it with me until it delivered the goods.

So, Happy One Year Anniversary to all of my patrons here on Patreon. A year ago, even attempting a video like this would have been a pipe dream, just another idea I'd get and think "damn, it would be really cool if I could do that". All of your support has allowed me to make some of those ideas reality. Thank you. I'm so grateful. 

Let's start year two! In fact, I'll have a big announcement about that tomorrow.

- Jim