Since A.I. music has a reputation for being easy, and I need easy content because work, and college, and car maintenance, and home maintenance, eat up all of my time – I’ll take you on the actual miserable journey of making music with A.I.

It can be an easy and fun process, when you don’t approach it knowing exactly what you want, with conditions that have to be met. Like matching an existing voice. My original vision for this song was for Dreilide to rap it, over a sound something like Primus’s My Name is Mud. That’s not exactly what I was after, just the best way I can describe it. I tried every trick I could think of, many of which worked in the past, and couldn’t get close. The music was very far off, Dreilide’s vocal either copied the singing style of the track I sampled it from, and/or the quality was very low.

I’ve given up on this track a few times, and I’m probably a couple hundred generations or more into it at this point.

The only reason I’m coming back to it is because of how well the Slop-Minus songs turned out. I discovered that a vocal sound can be triggered in Treblo by writing the lyrics in a romanized style of another language. I was able to get a Hindi style vocal, without the music that usually goes with it. I’m not sure how I could use that to prompt a vocal that could pass for Dreilide’s voice, but it works for Yaoi Hokkaido. So this is now a Yaoi Hokkaido track.

It was also originally intended to dis multiple cartoon bands, but I decided to split it up and dedicate a track to each band.

Thus begins the “Wicked Hokkaido” chronicles. She was bound to turn evil eventually. She may have even joined the Negalaxy. I didn’t expect it this soon.

Here’s the current state of the lyrics –

Gorillaz in the Mist (Wicked Hokkaido Chronicles Pt. 1)

Ohayo Gozaimasu,
Hokkaido Yaoi desu!
Very honorable,
but I come with maximum disrespect!

Who’s the biggest chump to
ever bump it through a cartoon?
Characters so ugly fat otaku
can not goon to.
We’re the realest thrillas!
Crazy hot, sexy, beautiful!
You named your band after the gorilla
because you all play with a tiny Noodle.
Yeah!
Our guy can’t make music
but at least he can draw us.
We put horny nerds to bed
spent
and glad that they saw us.

So kawaii!
When I rock the stage!
Wicked Hokkaido
Throwing all the shade
I’m the darkness at the end of Damon’s Days
Noodle’s English act is over
I sent her/him back to Band Maid.

You can try to battle
but girl power has her game on
You’re still the biggest loser
Taylor Swift ever came on
Just for once, I’m not talking about sex
You made Epic History,
Taylor won-
who’s next?

Stuka – Well, someone’s feeling herself tonight.

Dreilide – Yep.

Dreilide – It’s the same one who feels herself every night.

Stuka – Yep.

There are a few things I’m not 100% on, but I’m going to wait for inspiration to strike. Beating my head against the wall on lyrics never produces the good stuff.

Here’s a verse that got cut –

You named your act after the gorilla
because you all play with a tiny Noodle.
Yeah, I said your axe queen
has a micro penis
and the best guitarist from Japan
is Mylene Jenius
Iijanai?
Daijoubudesuka?
No?
You’re less of a threat than
Haruhara Haruko.

It doesn’t quite work, as Noodle plays guitar and Mylene Jenius plays bass. According to A.I., Noodle has been shown playing several different instruments, but not bass. The track is likely better for not going so deep into obscure anime references. Well, you read it here, you know it existed.

These are the first two Yaoi Hokkaido versions that are getting somewhere (not the first generations with Yaoi Hokkaido, there were many before these, but they sucked) –

004 has something going for it, but you can hear how much Treblo is struggling with the lyrics. It completely flubbed “very honorable.”

This version follows Dreilide Guitar Intro #10 well.

This version follows Dreilide Guitar Intro #5 better. It flubbed “maximum disrespect,” but Treblo was able to regenerate that lyric. Not on the first attempt, but it got there.

I tried using 006 as an intro to the “Gobbledygook Queen,” sound, but so far I haven’t pulled that off. It may be a moot point, since 004 and Dreilide 10 work together well.

I’m going to try a few other things and see what happens.

The above is Intro #5

The first track off the second album will probably be Dreilide Guitar Intro #10. I’m having a tough time deciding. #5 is simpler and feels more high fidelity. #5 is a breadcrumb from the better days of Udio (the guitar part is the bread crumb), the vocal was added with Treblo. #10 is all from the Sonauto era of Treblo, seeded with the breadcrumb from Udio.

#10 (below) is more complicated, but the start isn’t as catchy as #5’s. The ending is more dramatic. The fidelity scratches the bottom of what could possibly be acceptable.

Which one ultimately gets used may depend on how it blends with the next track.

How about a break from Low Effort Surf Rock? This is another entry in the “melancholic, bittersweet alternative/light rock” category. Although it’s a one-click song, it’s good enough to be a regular album song, and to get a human generated name. I’ll write lyrics for it when Treblo gets better at changing lyrics, although the mock-language “lyrics” aren’t bad. I can’t make out the words, but I’ll take that over the nonsense lyrics A.I. typically generates. This just sounds like it’s being sung in a foreign language.

The name is inspired by a guy I work with, who has the same genius master plan I do – he’s working factory to support his literary endeavors. I listened to him talk about the epic fantasy novel he’s writing. He’s young and I doubt he’d listen to my advice, but I wanted to tell him that prose is the hardest sell of all. You can ask someone to look at a picture on your phone, and they’ll do it, because that is a “small ask.” It only takes a second of their time. Getting someone to read a novel is a “big ask.” It will likely take weeks of their precious free time. Even if you’re Lieutenant Commander Data and your circle of friends are all highly educated intellectuals, you can’t find anyone to read your book. So don’t start with your thousand-page “Magnum Opus” fantasy novel – write short form fan fics to build your audience.

I’m only a “Halfway Hopeless Hemingway.” Webcomics are both images and short form stories, both of which are easy sells on social media.

The songs count as short form storytelling as well, but are a “harder sell” than the comic pages. Awstats says people are listening to the music though. I just added up the music hits – I’m not breaking records here, but the music has 390 regular hits this month. There’s also “206” hits, which are harder to count, because each “206 hit” is a fragment of the song file. So the file might be served up as five chunks, each of which would count as a 206 hit. More importantly, Awstats is showing significant bandwidth being used by the music.

Here’s a really good example of how the music web stats work – Faded Tide has 10 regular hits, 124 “206” hits, and used 80 megs of bandwidth. Faded Tide is only a 2 meg file, which equates to 40 full downloads, or much more than 40 partial downloads. In reality, most people who clicked on Faded Tide only listened to a few seconds and moved on. Which isn’t necessarily a lose – if 250 people clicked and only 10 liked the song enough to listen to it all the way through, it still shows the power of the webcomic to push traffic to the music – which is far more likely to go viral and reach a broad audience than the webcomic.

Well anyway, there’s something sad and romantic about a young man trying to make his name in the arts – because it will be a lost cause 99.999% of the time. I haven’t given any thought to what the lyrics of the song will be yet, but the tone is right.