SHORTS & Social Media is so much about about personality, and not music or anything actually worthwhile... so much chasing celebrity. And this SHORT is just an excuse for an instrumental music track as a SHORT😀
The kids and grandson will be arriving shortly and staying this week, just getting this quick thing out before they arrive. 😀
But when you consider TOPGEAR was popular, not because it was a car show, but due to the personality and relationships between the three hosts mucking about in cars, that doesn't seem so bad.
BUT garbage, AI SLOP and Grifters seem to make up way to much of YouTube and Social Media now, and not forgetting the RAGE BATE side of things.
Again this uses the 7 string, DIed and free Neural DSP Modeler vst for the amp/cabinets. SDS drums and ZebraHZ for most of the synth sounds.
SHORTs have taken over the YouTube feed now, so maybe sticking with them is the thing to do, rather than go off where no one will find me with a 1080p HD 8 panel comic page with music as I was planning? But the life of 24 hours maximum for a short and the multiple posts people make of the same thing isn't something I want to spend my time doing. I do really like the music in this, but it is very close to the last few tracks too. It is my style at the moment and do I want to change it? I think I need to to not loose interest.
This week is the Japanese End of Year /New Year Holidays. New Years day used to be about the only time everything was closed, and shrines and temples did a booming trade.
The way the stores are so crowded now you would think everything was going to closed for a month.
New Years day post cards used to be a really big thing, but even Japan now has many converted to New Year messages instead.
I did my first real, multiple panels a page, multiple pages comic, TERAFORM 8 year ago now. I had made various single panel cartoons for decades before that so a long single story with drawing the same character over and over was new. I re-read it this morning for the first time in years, after seeing in my website logs a couple of visitors had read it recently.
I could only get to work on it a few hours on weekends and it took months to finish using the traditional drawing, inking and coloring each frame. My goal when just half way through was JUST to finish it.
It looks rushed, which is understandable, but I do like the take on Climate Change, AI, the Media and Corporations I have in it. My love of THUNDERBIRDS, a secret organization doing good must had something to do with the approach too. Maybe it is more like a film pitch/treatment as a comic that just hits the main points, where in a longer/better comic those points would be revealed much more slowly rather than the characters just explaining it all. I was trying to be subtle, with the intentional misdirection with the early images of Mars. Implies Terraforming Mars, but that isn't what it is actually about.
If I had spent longer on it, the art would have been better, and with more panels of world building. Even characters drawn better. Doing it in all color added many hours and I would have been better off just doing it with line and gray tone and make it more manga like.
I did 2 other related comics after it, a page from the second one:
They are what they are.
I initially posted a link to them in a webcomic related site. I have only received one comment on them in 8 years.
I imagine that the color in the first two stories took a lot more work, but I found their style a bit easier to read than the third one.
The first was very much like a documentary, which reminds me of Arthur C. Clark. The second one actually has a character, so was more like Issac Asimov. Each style has its place, but the latter attracts a larger audience.
I agree with what he said, especially with the number of years since since doing it. The second comic has a sentient robot as the main character.
Rewatching the DEVO documentary again, I feel they too were rather too subtle for the public to understand their thesis that America was obviously de-evolving. Seems all to true now.
Other Things
Well it is the Christmas/New Years break now. For me that involves the kids and grandson visiting for a week and thinking about what happened this year, and what I think I want to do next year.
So far, I think I will attend the May 2026 Osaka Sound Messe and that is about it. There are tours by KRAFTWERK and DEEP PURPLE early in the year, but I don't care for huge crowded concerts anymore. A small sound house with a band I know is a much better experience.
Haven't made any new music in about 2 weeks, as the last 30 things I did all sound the same and I need to change my composition method a bit before continuing. I need to recharge.
Thinking about other interests I could get back to too, like where to go with my comics. I haven't done a comic book in 2 years now. Am I done with them? I don't know.
I did the last Stop Frame Animated Rock Opera episode 3 years ago and I know I aren't trying that again. A bunch of too long scenes, a few I actually like, strung together that don't make ANY sense, and the music doesn't help at all. It is a mess. The 5 episodes could be edited into a single MUCH SHORT thing that is actually interesting, possible with some voice over. Maybe one year, but I just got really sick of it.
Star Trek leaves Netflix Jan 8 2026. In the last few years I managed to finally get to see all of Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise via Netflix. Missed most on their initial broadcasts back in the day, other than ST:TNG. They were mostly great. The original STAR TREK was on for many years, like Sunday afternoon, when I was in high school and I mostly didn't watch it. I have no memory of any S2 or 3 episodes and catching up with them at the moment. So dated, but also interesting stories.
MUSIC+COMIC on what and why I have been doing these.
My original use of my own original heavy instrumental music was as the soundtrack to my illustration sample videos. The first of those got some 50k+ views and the last one, years later before I gave up, had maybe 5 views. Google moved to promoting longer form content “more like TV” so my 3 minute music videos got sidelined. They have since changed multiple times and revised what is “best for them to promote”.
After retiring and moving back to Japan 2019 I did my JUST THINKING comic strip series weekly during COVID and a bit after. Just one of those things I wanted to do. If something strikes me as interesting and better for just a comic, I still do these sometimes.
I had moved from drawing pages like my TerraForm comic, to vector based pages as in my WHERE THE SMOKE COMES OUT and that made the process a whole lot faster. But that is possible as I am not doing emotionally charged stories with complex characters, but mostly a host character talking to camera ala GRAND DESIGNS or TOPGEAR, explaining something.
Four years ago I started doing short videos with comic characters and speech balloons, but 2024 sometime I started on YouTube Short/ X/ Instagram, square under 60 second animations with the current MUSIC+COMIC format. Had used MOHO Pro Ver 12 to do some animated music videos, and rediscovered that real animation was far too time consuming even with computer based tools, and a comic book was more for me. A comic strip with 3 to 4 speech balloons with my original music and very limited animation, that uses a lot of photo images and cartoon characters is the approach I have come too. Something I haven’t seen others doing, but was the way POINT AND CLICK RPG games were done originally.
They are a vehicle for me to make original music and a comic at least once a week. Done for my own entertainment. I sometimes feel the music is all the same, but I also think that of Ola’s SWOLA too 8^).
Ola Englund starts his SWOLA videos with this weeks original minute music piece. Partly to force himself to make music, and partly to demonstrate new guitar models. He also made the drum track available for others to do the same, and he would judge them as a segment on one of his channels. Some of us need goals to motivate us, and it helps me too.
I have received no comment at all on the format of these. I have received comments on the subject of a music + comics though.
I know of a few musicians that regularly post music clips on YouTube and Social Media, such as Jeremy Wentworth and Phillip Jackson. I have to admit I don’t listen to most of their works recently. Once you have heard a dozen or so, they all sound the same. I just know others feel the same about my MUSIC+COMICs, even if the comic part is always different.
The music in this is mostly the F# DORIAN mode. It is here on Bandcamp. It combines CHUG guitar, BOOPIE-BLOOPIE synth sequence, metal drums and synthesizers. Trying to do “my own original style”, which I think comes out being rock.
I do like to CHUG, as Ola says. I have found having a 7 string in a DROP tuning is my go to instrument, and has been for a while. I haven’t found my 8 string gives me any more usable low notes over the 7. It has a few more notes, but the sound of those doesn’t have the same punch. A 6 string with a pitch shifter would work too, but that BOSS fixed pitch shift pedal costs more than I paid for my 7 string guitar.
I think the last 3 of these MUSIC+COMICS have actually been pretty interesting, but I need a change. The format isn’t right, and I’ve only been thinking of finishing them, not working out how they could be better. That shorts are at the mercy of Googles algorithms, and whatever that is this week, as to what gets pushed to the SHORTs stream, and for how long, to people who are just filling in time and don’t care what shows up is not a great place to be either.
I don’t mind the music tracks, and feel that in the 60 seconds they have enough sections and variations that work. The mix is fine too. I think anyway, but no one goes and checks them out on Bandcamp.
That the limits for short videos went from 1 to 3 minutes on X and Youtube has also made the 60 second format I came up with obsolete. This may be more the style going forward:
But we will see. This bigger longer Looking Back MUSIC+COMIC has 9 views on YouTube, and a few of those are probably just me looking at it again. Drawing actual 8 frame comics kind of feels what I want to do, at least for awhile. The music is really important to me, but I don't think anyone seeing them cares, and probably has the sound off.
The last versions of CorelDraw and MOHO Pro I bought were via the HUMBLE BUNDLE websites, around $25 each for perpetual one time license fees. A Bargain.
Other Things
So had my first ever ZOOM meeting to join in the FAIRLIGHT INSTRUMENTS 50th Anniversary event in Sydney Australia, from here in Kyoto Japan:
It wasn't till it was almost over I saw that you could resize and move the window to see all those that had zoomed into it.
Strange feelings. So long ago to me and there are still so many people that are fans of the machines and have renovated and using them.
Since doing the cartoon, was sent some pictures of the room:
Looks like maybe no more than 35 people were there in person. Maybe 14 on zoom. Not a whole lot it seems to me. One of the organizers is writing a book on the companies history and the people involved over the years and what they contributed.
Then they promoted their coming Fairlight 50th Anniversary FRESHWATER INSTRUMENTS release of a 19" 3U rack module running "improved" CMI SERIES 1 software on modern hardware.
That doesn't interest me at all, and was this 50th Event thing mostly to promote that? And us ex-staff being there adding validity to that venture??? 🤔
Some of the same people in this new venture were involved with the 30th Anniversary FAIRLIGHT 30A that ended in tears for legal reasons, being shut down after developing and shipping just 14 units.
Some of us ex-staffers that hung around on ZOOM after everyone else left said "how could this new venture end differently than the 30th anniversary one did?". It seemed, legally, the same situation.
TONY FURSE, the guy that started everything that the CMI turned into, had declined to be involved with the 50th Anniversary event. That kind of adds weight to the feeling it was really all about promoting the new product.
Anyway...
Been told there is a WhatsApp group specifically for ex staff, but I don't use WhatsApp and don't think I have anything to contribute to such a group the Facebook Fairlight CMI doesn't already do. My family uses LINE, and already have FB MESSANGER on my phone and don't need any more messaging apps.
It just doesn't seem relevant to me any more. Or maybe I feel my contribution isn't relevant anymore, but that may be as I have been asked technical questions on things I did, such as logic programming source, that has my name and date in 1984 on it, but I just don't remember any details now. I am a different person now.
I feel something like an old retired guy that spends all his time carving little wooden birds in his workshop that no one else cares about. So he just keeps to himself doing what makes him a Happy Camper.
My Video Call Setup
I could have just used the Mic in the Logitech webcam, and listened over my small JBL speakers, but I find using the Lavalier microphone on my collar to give a better sound without room tone, especially when slightly moving about as I do in a chair. I love the sound of my AKG headphones too, so that is what I did. I am in my studio anyway. If I was a YouTuber, I would have a fancy mirrorless digital camera or whatever and a SURE SMB7 on a podcast arm, but I don't and don't care for that stuff at all.
I originally bought the cheap maono brand mic for recording my Japanese speech during practice for our sons wedding. Not for Skyping or Zooming at all. I keep it plugged into the mixer, and many of my NOT COVERS singing were recorded with it.
So looking back at 2025 in Music & Art looking at the Concerts and Art Exhibitions. It was great, in my part of the world (and very aware other places are "not great").
Mattias's FREAK GUITAR WEEKEND was a chance to get a taste of his guitar camp, and meet a few other contributors like TOKYO METAL CITY who introduced me to the CEO of Zanshin Instruments, Mr. Ishida.
I had been worried about being outclassed and out of place at a Mattias guitar camp but it was fine. I saw Ola Englund say the same thing before he actually attended a camp. His music pieces end up being guitar exercises to me where I take a few bars and go off doing my own thing from them. All good. I don't need to learn to play them like he does.
This year was not a great year for exhibitions, and assumed it was because of Osaka EXPO. That was probably true, but then the Masamune Shirow manga artwork exhibition in Tokyo was announced. Getting to see original pages, Work In Progress copies and finals actual size of the GHOST IN THE SHELL and APPLESEED manga was awesome.
The concerts were great this year, as I wrote previously. Real BUCKET LIST stuff. A sound house or theater seating up to 300 is really the kind of concert I want to attend more of now. Kyoto MOJO with up to 100 is extra special. A 1000+ venue s not for me.
TV series Manben neo had THE OTOMO interview this year and examined DOMU. I ended up getting that and all volumes of AKIRA too. It was time. I also got all English volumes of Urasawa Naoki's ASADORA released so far. That you really get to feel for the characters is something special.
In the last few months new music has been ASTERISM, MINISTRY (Moral Hygiene & Squirrel Version), STEVE VAI (Passion and Warefare) and TANGERINE DREAM.
The DJ mix-ish soundtrack in this different MUSIC+COMIC has a clip of my FREAK KITCHEN cover and a bit of my English version of Urasawa Naoki's "Yurei" from this years LOVE SONGS album, sandwiching my "Speed In Manga". Added "MUSIC: name" to show what is playing along the bottom left of the page, which is the way Japanese TV advertisements used to be. That is how I first learnt of Enya! This is is something will add moving forward.
Still considering direction to go next with MUSIC+COMICS.
This single page comic with up to 8 panels and music, but more traditionally drawn seems something I should work with. I think YouTube SHORTS are just a waste of time, as even though they get more views, the whole system is just set up to target people that don't care about what I am trying to do. And with the 8 panel comic page format ( and maybe sometimes just 3 or 4 panels in a strips), up to 3 minute songs with lyrics that mean something to me would feel better to me too. Animating the speech balloons the way I have in the last years always made them annoying to read. Changed too slow or too fast, and all on screen at once is more comic like. You can read the comic and not bother to listen to all the music if that is what you want to do.
Other Things
The Fairlight Instruments 50th Anniversary is tomorrow. That will probably be quite something in Sydney tomorrow, but I will just be ZOOMing it from Kyoto here, which I expect to be a lesser experience. I was at the small get together at the 2018 Alan Galt memorial, but they are trying to get together all the previous staff for this big one.
And here I am in the back at the Fairlight Instruments 10th Anniversary:
My main concern is making sure the cat is locked out of my room, so he doesn't interrupt proceedings. Also if the battery in the Lapel Microphone I plan to use will last, but don't expect to say much...
I am not a YouTuber so have the most basic online meeting setup.
AVATAR3 starts tomorrow. I didn't bother to see #2, and read this new one is the same story but lots of fire instead of water. They have a subtitled, NON ATMOS, BIG SCREEN 9:30AM session Monday morning next week. I don't expect going is worth the effort though.
Nagano's first manga FOOL FOR THE CITY from early 1980s published over a year in NEWTYPE is out as a new single volume 2025 Dec 24. Post WW3 AI controlled society with suppressed art & music. At his Nagoya exhibition he had the '70s FOGHAT track FOOL FOR THE CITY playing over the exhibit corner of this.
MUSIC+COMIC on “People don’t buy music” and Bandcamp.
Music here is 7 String guitar, Synths and Drums put together in Reaper DAW. Still using the POD Express GO purely as a App/Cab simulator, The ANVIL amp and Kali 4x12 cabinet.
Have had a Bandcamp account since 2011 and a Soundcloud account much longer, where we put out original music on the Internet. Neither of these places are where “ordinary people” go to listen to music, despite artists like TANGERINE DREAM & DEVLIN TOWNSEND having their whole catalogs available to play and even buy and download.
Spotify is were the majority of “ordinary people”, listeners, stream music. They don’t go anywhere else, and it seems, rarely do anything but select a music genre. Very like a Radio station back in the 1970s, were the station you selected determined what of POP, ROCK, CLASSICAL, JAZZ, EASY LISTENING or TALK, you would hear.
Bandcamp doesn’t charge anything for an account, and you can upload your music and even sell downloads and real merchandise/ CDs/ Vinyl. Listeners can play any of the music there for free too.
SPOTIFY charges to put music on it, and an Indie artist has to use a subscription service like the owned by SPOTIFYDiscokid to get their music into Spotify. For the majority, those fees are more than they ever get from Listener plays. So for the many it is a PAY TO BE PLAYED system to access the largest audience. There is a huge number of music tracks uploaded daily there now, and with almost instant AI music generation it is probably way more now.
Many do this PAY TO BE PLAYED thing.
I don’t.
I have read of an artist testing the viability of Bandcamp compared to Spotify, Apple Music and the other streaming services and found, using paid FACEBOOK advertising and the audience that implies, that even if he offered FREE DOWNLOADS of his Bandcamp music, no one would even bother to visit Bandcamp. If it wasn’t on the service they already used, they wouldn’t go elsewhere, even if free. But this targets “Listeners”, not “Music Fans”.
But then:
Fans have paid artists $1.62 billion using Bandcamp, and yesterday alone bought 78,852 records.
Part of the disconnect in this is that FACEBOOK is not a platform where advertising, or anything else is trusted anymore, and has turned to total garbage for users and advertisers. People I know rarely post any personal things there any more. I don't.
No one buys music anymore has to be prefaced by “ordinary people” or “Listeners”.
Fans do buy music, merchandise, CDs and Vinyl. I do. I know people that do. The “Listeners” don’t care particularly about music and don’t buy it either, but pay for the convenience of Spotify without advertisements.
For a musicians to sell music, they need to have “fans” though. Many musicians now have YouTube Channels and spend much time making video content, rather than original music, to build their fan base. I think this is like the X Factor Singing Contests, where viewers end up focusing on getting behind their personal stories and personality, rather than the actual music. Secondary things. Rick Beato says that is the way it is now, which maybe so, but I think they aren’t being musicians any more, but YouTube entertainers. They will get more views of a video unboxing a guitar than they will of one on any of their music!
I haven’t gone the Spotify route, and only have my material on YouTube and Bandcamp. I don’t see a bigger “possible” audience as something worth paying for. I made an ebook years ago and put it on Amazon, “the biggest possible market”, and have seen that by itself doesn’t help sell a very niche book. What I do is “niche” and not “mass market” at all.
Other Things
ZOOTOPIA was last weeks Friday night movie and I thought it was really well done. Bullying, Discrimination and trying to make a difference. The voice acting was amazing.
It used to be a post on X was visible for about 18 minutes before vanishing into the endless time line, but if you are using a free account like I am , think it is much less than that now, and disappears almost immediately. X is being very insistent I should get a Premium account, always saying how many/few the reach of my posts was and guess they have made the reach even worse as an "incentive". No way! A YouTube Short seems to be using a related algorithm now and is put out into the stream for about an hour, if it doesn’t get enough of it viewed before being swiped away, and you are not in the “favored creator” group. The time it is released is also thus so important to the number of views it gets, and have to say I don’t like that at all. Even those that make stupid thumbnail images are annoyed at how important a stupid thumbnail image is.
The last Manben neo was on mangaka Chica Umino, and my second hand copy from 2008 of MARCH COMES IN LIKE A LION #1 has arrived so I can check out this work. It is filled with Shogi, emotion, internal, external and spoken dialog. I will see what I can learn and apply to my own future works.
That Fairlight Instruments ex staff get together has turned into a much bigger 50th Anniversary celebration, but I joke I will still only be in 720p. Doing this interview made me realize I don’t remember much about those days, and am a terrible interview subject.
Received a Christmas Comic/ Card from a friend on their good and bad of 2025. Travel, surgery, exhibitions and funerals for 5 friends. Some don’t live long enough to have the experiences of the elders. So now feel we should be grateful to have these things happen to us.
Watched a very interesting Steve Vai with Billy Corgan Interview in his, The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan. Would be better if Corgan didn’t interrupt his guest so much, but it gave me new insight into Steve. I haven’t been a music fan. I have a G3 Tokyo DVD with Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and John Petrucci and always found Steves’s stuff less interesting to me. Skilled but lacking something to keep my interest. Have just bought his 1990 Passion & Warfare, and maybe that will change me.
It is truly shocking to see what is super popular on Social Media and YouTube. So much stupid garbage, and after seeing what the American school education system is like, leave no child behind, it is no wonder.
The year is rushing to a conclusion and we have our plans for over the year end/ New Year set with our grandson and his parents staying with us again. Doing the grandparents thing.
Expect many will be holidays now or soon too. I have one more MUSIC+COMIC ready to upload and a Mixed Media Missive to go with it, and that may be the last for 2025. May try something a bit different next time, and just forget about whatever the random changing algorithms are said to be doing, as it all seems Automated Idiocity to me.
