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.