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

Hello Patrons! Here's an original song for you off the new album, Besides. ALSO we are opening for Ben Folds on September 16th in SF so if you wanna come see that you can get tickets here! http://www.axs.com/events/280499/ben-folds-ymusic-tickets

Thank you for making all this craziness possible.

WAHOOOO! My second Patreon One-Gal Band video!! This time it's special because you guys got to weigh in on what you wanted me to cover. Thanks to all the top-tier teammates that wanted to see me get angry with this one :)

Ever wonder what's happening on the other end when you hear "This call may be monitored for quality assurance?" Well, it's probably not this.

Thanks for supporting me, friends! And thank you for all the great feedback on my COMEDY ALBUM!! That just makes a person feel good, and I am that person.

G

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

Ok, my last Patreon installment was a One-Gal Band so I'm giving you guys comedy this time around. Everyone responded so well to the first episode of Ali's Adventures that it looks like I'm gonna keep the series going :D As long as I can keep living an interesting life. I'll work on that for you all haha

HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!! <3

Hiya Friendly Friends!

I'm often asked what my favorite video I've ever made is, and this is the one that usually pops into my mind.  A lot of people hadn't seen it, so I decided to give it a little re-edit and upload a new 1080P HD version with a deleted scene (visiting Ursula).  I've been wanting to redo this video for a while, and this week was the perfect opportunity since I wasn't able to get out and shoot a new video due to really nasty food poisoning and the Labor Day holiday.

If you're curious, here's the "behind the scenes" story on how we did it:

A few years ago I surprised some friends I hadn't seen in 20 YEARS by showing up at their homes while visiting Austin, TX.  They weren't hard to find (although I couldn't find a couple others I was really hoping to see) and I had to show up at their homes only once or twice to catch them on a weekend.  It was only me with my wife Kim operating a tiny camera.  They were all genuinely surprised, and after a little coaxing they allowed me to come in and shoot video.  

All the reactions you see in the video are real except I did plan a few gags ahead of time, and asked them go along with it.  For instance, James never wrote anything in my yearbook so I wrote the bit that "We'll always be BFF's" and caught his confused reaction.  And the bit at Diane's son's softball game was setup, she was actually happy to have me go along at that point.  And I asked Ursula to give me that reaction to the line about her 18-year-old daughter (at first I said that to her and she just laughed, but I thought this would be a funnier reaction).  So basically, I just wanted funny endings or bits for each situation.  

Originally I had cut out the scene with Ursula after showing the video to Kim. I always trust my wife's opinions, and she thought the daughter joke was too inappropriate.  But I always liked it so now it's back in for you guys!  

Hope you enjoy the video, and THANK YOU for supporting me on Patreon!  Next week's video is gonna be a FREEBIE (it's a really funny, big prank but it's sponsored -- so for you it's FREE!). So there will be fewer paid videos this month, FYI. :-)

Since you guys were so supportive of my first collab, I did another. And we went ALL OUT. Like... seriously. Stevie and I put in some freakin' work for this one and the results are pretty spectacular. I have a good feeling you guys are going to like this.

Let us know what you think ;)

Hey friendly friends,

I know last week I announced that I was going to release a big sponsored prank today, but it's been pushed til October 2.  It'll be worth the wait, you're gonna love it.  

So yesterday I got on the phone an called about 30 strangers before I got two people who didn't immediately hang up on me for this MOVIEFONE prank.  (NOT sponsored by Moviefone, I just love doing the voice.)  

I came up with this idea and wrote it out recently, and I've really been looking forward to doing it.  People reacted pretty much exactly as I thought they would!  (And YES, I did send them free movie tickets for being such good sports.)  Enjoy!  :-)

Thanks so much for your feedback on last week's post. Josh Woodward put it this way: 

"Nobody has it all. The best you can do is to use your strengths to muscle your way around the weaknesses."

That's something that it's hard to remember. The other aspect of that equation is that you have to find people to collaborate with who have the strengths that you lack. Finding collaborators like that can be hard. There's a lot of obstacles. For one thing, everyone has their own stuff going on. I'm happy to spend a certain amount of time giving my expertise to friends and colleagues, but ultimately their thing is THEIR thing and my thing is MY thing. Casual collaboration only goes so far. I think all parties have to have skin in the game in order for collaboration to really take off.

I'm trying to get better at this, and find folks to work with who have the time and interest in throwing their lots in with me on a variety of projects. One of those projects is a Song A Day Navigator. The first step on my end was putting together the spreadsheet of every single song (which I had) with every single YouTube link (which I hadn't done before, duh). This gives us a very basic song a day data set that he can work with. Future data points in that spreadsheet would be: lyrics, links to buy, # of views, etc. But the next step for me is to figure out some interesting ways to NAVIGATE that data. I've come up with three so far. One of them is the image above: The Pick A Number system. I'm also attaching images for how I image a "Timehopper" version would look and one that's based on words.

My question to you: Are any of these three ways of looking at Song A Day particularly interesting to you? Can you think of other ways that would be more interesting to interact with this massive catalog of songs?

The person I'm working with is working on his own project that I don't TOTALLY understand, but it has to do with APIs. I think he's trying to make a thing that makes it super easy for anyone to make an API to go with a data set. The idea being, in the case of Song A Day, that he's going to create this API for interacting with all 2400+++ songs that other people can just take and run with. So if you had an idea of how you'd like to organize my catalog, and you just wanted to do it, you could. 

I'm really excited about it.

Meet Jay, my editor & camera guy.  For over a year now, Jay has shot and edited most of my videos.  He's an awesome guy and does great work.  He also scares easily, so once every few weeks for the past year or so I've snuck up behind him to startle him, thinking this might make a fun video some day.  Luckily, he has a great sense of humor about it, and this video makes me laugh a lot.

Jay, if you're reading this, you're a good dude and you don't have to worry about me scaring you any more.  And I'll keep pushing this Patreon til we hit your "Jay's raise" goal!

Thanks for watching and supporting us, everybody!  And no, Jay didn't edit this one.  This was an easy one so I did it myself.  Besides, I didn't want Jay to relive all the horror. :-D

Yay!

G

p.s. If the next week goes as planned, there will be two videos on the MediocreFilms channel and you won't be charged for either one.  One is a "Best of the Daily Videos" compilation and the other is a really big prank I did for Intel!  Fun stuff, friends!!

Ok team, a lot of you said you'd be down to hear something other than current hits. So I went with a 2000s throwback + a freakin' oldie... MASHED UP. Because ridiculous.

I hope you like!!!

I was a good kid. I followed the rules and I got good grades. I took standardized tests seriously. So seriously that I’d get anxiety attacks beforehand.

But I remember a moment, some random day on my long, harsh road from little-kid-ness through puberty, I was maybe 11 years old. I was sitting in the back of the school bus having this revelation that, like, I didn’t have to follow the rules. Before that exact moment, it had seemed like all the things adults were telling me to do were somehow the only way. Their words were bedrock truth. And suddenly I realized that it was all bullshit. It was a weird, frightening and exciting moment.

I started to get into trouble. Nothing too horrible, but enough for me to be able to mark that moment as “before trouble” and “after trouble”.

Here’s the story of the “Worst Thing” I ever did as a kid. It’s actually not that bad, especially compared to stories I’ve been told by friends over the years of their worst things. But it’s pretty awful. For a pre-teen living in the backwoods of Vermont who’d never been in “serious” trouble before, this was top of the line, I think.

It was a slow weekend day, I was probably 12 years old. I have no idea where my parents were. Maybe they were working? Anyway, I had a group of 3 or 4 friends over. We were bored out of our minds. We decided to go for a walk. The town where I grew up is all dirt roads and forest. We used to just walk around for hours.

On this particular day, our first stop was a construction site - a house that was being built not far down the road from where I lived. The frame of the house was complete. It was all just concrete and two by fours. We trashed the place. We knocked stuff over. We broke some wood. We etched things into a metal tool chest. We spread nails out everywhere.

We left the construction site in search of something else to vandalize. At some point we got off the road and just started wandering through the woods. We came upon a sugar shack. This is where you turn maple sap into syrup. We broke all the windows. There were these little glass jars of syrup samples, grade A through D. We took turns throwing them at the side of the shack, syrup splattering everywhere. We broke some of the equipment.

Having gotten our pre-teen, testosterone boredom fueled jollies, we headed back to my house. Not long after, a police car rolled into my driveway. We freaked out. The cop rang the doorbell. We all hid, in closest and under beds. Still just little kids.

The cop came back that night when my parents were home. He said it was easy to figure out who was responsible because there were footprints leading all the way from where we had exited the woods straight back to my house. Dirt roads, after all. We were such idiots.

In my memory, I was being admonished by the cop and my parents for least two hours. I can’t imagine he actually stayed for more than 15 minutes. But my parents were predictably livid.

My friends and I had to collectively pay for the repairs and all the samples we destroyed. I don’t remember how much it was per person, but it was a lot for a 12 year old.All my weekly allowance went towards it for at least half a year. Finally, I saved enough money to pay, and I walked the few miles down to the house of the guy who owned the sugar shack. He wasn’t home, but his wife invited me in and gave me a brownie. She was so sweet. She said we were lucky we didn’t hang out much longer around the shack because her husband had heard us breaking stuff and had gone out to investigate with his hunting rifle. She sent me on my way with a little baggie full of baked goods.

This incident stands out so strongly in my mind partly because it felt so dramatic, but also partly because as I’ve gotten older and older, I find it harder and harder to understand why we acted the way we did. When you’re a teenager like that, you feel like no one understands you. And that’s actually true. I’m at the point now, near 2 decades later, where I’m just completely baffled.