JoCo Looks Back creations

edited December 2008 in JoCo Projects
I thought we needed a thread for all the things people will create using the JoCo Looks Back source tracks.

So far we have the live performances compiled by Jmonkee, and a live performance with a phantom band by Javier.

I just had time today to make a very short thingy called 'Code Monkey Like Creative Commons' (or should I call it 'Code Monkey Like... and keep people in suspense for 16 seconds?) by splicing together clips from Mr. Fancy Pants, Code Monkey and Re: Your Brains. It seemed like the logical first thing to do. :) I was thinking that perhaps just the last bit of my 'song' could be used as a kicker at the end of other things created using these source tracks.

Has anyone done anything else?
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Comments

  • Not being able to speak for anybody else, my own answer is "no", but I love what you did so far. Please continue!

    I have vague plans to do things with it, but for starters I still actually need to get the source tracks; I am twisting my wife's arm into getting it for me as a Christmas present ;-)
  • Oh yes, I have plans. :) Evil, evil plans. But it may take me a while to get around to them. Lab Monkey think maybe manager wanna run goddamn assays for himself...
  • This is not really a creation in itself, but a word cloud which might give people ideas for other things we can make JoCo say by splicing vocal tracks together.

    (Hmm, I notice 'never gonna' is fairly prominent. I reckon we could make JoCo sing his own Rickroll.)
  • Wait, where do you get the source tracks? I have joco looks back (autographed by the man himself too) but it just has the normal songs.
  • The source tracks were available on a USB jump drive which you could get by donating money to Creative Commons December last year. For people who didn't get that, the source tracks were just recently made available on LegalTorrents.
  • Why am I not surprised at which word is (by far) the biggest? ;-)
  • Well that's only for that Greatest Hits. Someone do all his songs!
  • He did all of Thing A Week, and the same word was the biggest.
  • edited March 2009
    JoCo has done word clouds for his thing a week stuff, guess which word is biggest for that as well?

    Bet you didn't guess right.

    ETA: damn, first time I have been ninja'd, shall have to type faster in future.
    EATA: why is it that upon contemplating doing all of his songs in one my first thought is to write a bot to collect all the lyrics for me, the laziness or programmers knows no end.
  • edited March 2009
    My plan to work on remixing _JoCo's_ tracks has kind of been supplanted by working on _reconstructions _ of said tracks for the Mandelbrot Set. For example for "My Monkey" it's been educational/challenging/fun for me to try to recreate some of his tracks as precisely as I can.

    That said, I did have an unfinished project in mind. I think the world needs a hardcore dance mash up of "My Monkey" and "First of May," along with some other Monkey-related lyrics, and perhaps some other bits and pieces harvested from various songs, entitled simply "Monkeyfucker." Yes, I'm a bad man : )
  • Hmm, that would givea whole new meaning to 'My monkey gets busy sometimes'.
  • I don't think that's fair. You write two or three songs about monkeys, and suddenly it's the most used word in all your lyrics.
  • edited March 2009
    Well, there's also that cephalopod theme going on. Hmmm... a music video involving perverted anime, anyone? 8 )

    Probably _not_ what he had in mind when he released the source tracks. I'm not sure if that makes an argument against doing it... or for doing it!

    Wait, what am I saying? I'm a parent, I have responsibilities... an upstanding member of my community. Hehehe, I just said "upstanding member..."
  • I had plans to do something, but the USB stick has just sat there (after a little Mr Fancy Pants fiddling)
  • What I think would be really awesome, and really, really, really tedious to do, would be splitting all the vocal tracks into individual words, and putting them all in appropriate folders (maybe with a nice little application as an interface) so people could just pick which words they wanted to make JoCo say, and then, in cases where he's sung those words in a lot of different ways (e.g. 'Monkey', or boring, common conjunctions), pick which one they wanted, stick them together, and voila, a song. It would be like a giant Zendrum with an internet superstar inside, and it would totally creep JoCo out.

    You'd have things arranged so that it was also easy to find words which are part of another word, e.g, a folder called girl containing all recordings of him saying 'girl' and also containing a 'girlfriend' folder with all instances of him saying girlfriend, so you can cut the 'girl' out if you prefer it. I'm sure there's a more typically-JoCo example I could use here but I can't think of it.

    But I'm sure nobody would ever get around to doing that; certainly not me, considering I still have two shows that I haven't even split into songs yet, let alone words.
  • Like Kerrin, I have been sitting on the USB stick, but nothing has hatched yet. Got one idea, but I wasn't going to talk about it before implementing it. Oh what the hell, here it is: "Rio Brains", using the original vocal over a rewritten bossa nova accompaniment... It works in my head; now all that is left is actually doing it ;-)
  • I'm not exactly sure what bossa nova is (I remember my sister's keyboard having that as one of the buttons, along with honky tonk, and wondering what they were), but what came into my head just then was, "Heya Tom, it's Bop bop bop, bop bop bop..." (from Jeff MacDougall's 'The Bop Bop Song')
  • @Angelastic: For a seriously smoooooth bossa nova, think "Lady Aberlin's Muumuu".
  • I still remember that time when we didn't have anything better to call "Lady Aberlin's Muumuu" than JoCo's "working title" of "Fake Bossanova (sic)".
  • This should be the wordle for the entire JoCo song lyrics. Like most things I create it feels wrong some how. I selected a maximum of 300 words. In the end I did write the bot, only reason it took so long was the funny characters in Re: Vos Cerveaux that were breaking my code but I fixed it.

    Enjoy.
  • @BenS

    My monkey is angry with your new wordle.
  • Monkey know.
    GO pants!

    Where did 'Stein' come from?

    Haha I see you got the bum-de-dum-be-dum-be-dum-de-dum from Rainbow Connection. :D
  • edited March 2009
    Stein would be from One More Score I decided there were far too may lyrics to go through and make sure no rubbish got through the lyrics acquisition process. But as I said the whole wordle feels wrong as some of those things only feature in one song so it feels wrong. But if anyone wants it I can send the text file I used to create the wordle. I would paste it here but it is 148KB, a lot of lyrics there.

    ETA: Not sure it looks so good as I put more words in it but a Mk II. Went through added all the right accents and removed some of the non lyric bits.
  • Here is the Interactive JoCo Fancy Pants Zendrum thingee I'm working on as part of a larger JoCo Flash game. In the final version, hitting the right sequence of buttons (hint: think in terms of live performances) will result in the Zendrum popping open to reveal a tarnished silver key (or maybe a Rorschack card).

    I've done my best to map the keys correctly, but if you have any corrections, I'd be grateful. And yes, I know the drum buttons are not loud enough.
  • OMG that is made of AWESOME!
  • Wow! That's fantastic Moon_Rabbit!
  • Holy Cow, Moon_Rabbit!! That rocks! Now I only wish that I had ten cursors and ten mouse buttons. :-P
  • I think some of the buttons are wrong. :p And there's no Rickroll! ~
  • There needs to be a mute button and a loop for the verse.

    But I'm already knocking myself out with this thing. Bravo.
  • When I try it 14 of the 25 buttons have no function -- that can't possibly be right, can it? I know he has more drums on there than that!
  • Yes, there are more sounds, and not all buttons work (yet) but I did the best I could with what I could get from concert footage. The drums are especially tricky. Those fingers FLY, man.

    Looking at the source tracks and the concert footage, it looks like JoCo plays the first background loop (everything except drums and vocals) twice, then the second loop once.

    The sample buttons were tough. I cut them shorter than the real thing so the sequence I have in mind works.

    I didn't put in a vocal loop because the thing is supposed to be just like the one he plays in concert, i.e., something you might find laying around his apartment/tiny house/secret lair.

    The rickroll is coming, I just have to dig through the garage to find the CD again.
  • edited March 2009
    Hey, so while listening to some of these source tracks, I've discovered I wanted to share with everyone here. JoCo's cat makes a few appearances in his music! Just listen to the "Lead Vox" tracks. On "First of May" it's right at about 1:20 and on "Future Soon" it's right around 2:33. There's a very distinct meow sound on both, but it's more audible on "Future Soon"

    Edit: Alora (limekle) is really who discovered the one on "First of May", then I found the other one on "Future Soon"
  • I also noticed that he needs to learn the Tay Zonday method of singing. That is, he needs to move away from the mic to breathe in. On some tracks, you can hear him gasp for air before a long verse line.
  • I don't think the breathing in is that big of a deal, because you can't really ever hear it when it's mixed in with the music. If that technique is what works for him, then so be it. I don't see what the problem is.

    To stay on topic: I've been having WAY too much fun playing around with these files. Everything I make just seems to be ruining the songs in some way though, haha.

    Example: Creepier Doll
  • That's like the Scary Roll.
  • edited March 2009
    I had noticed the cat in the source track for "The Future Soon." I tweeted him about it but he does not often respond to tweets. (Per later tweets, apparently it is a nasty, stealth-barfing cat too!)

    That doll is not only creepy, it is in fact quite ill!
  • Yeah, tweeting JoCo is...almost useless. It's much more satisfying to just lean back and watch.
  • edited March 2009
    I originally came to this thread to post something else I had made, but I chickened out at the last second and posted Creepier Doll instead. But after playing this for my friends they are insisting that I post it here too.

    I should warn you first that these are somewhat offensive mp3s, and you should avoid clicking on them if you aren't looking to hear an excessive amount of swearing. They are all NSFW... obviously.

    My friend Neil and I have this sort of history remixing songs to amuse each other by just taking one word and using it over and over to get a whole new comedic effect... we're also like 12 years old, apparently. A couple examples: he took Weird Al's song Headline News and turned it into Headline News (Weiner Mix), and I also turned Neil's song Ben Bernanke into Ben Bernanke (Prick Remix)... so you can imagine my pure and utter joy when I realized that I now had singled out audio of JoCo saying "fuck" 13 different times. The possibilities were endless.

    So without further ado, I present to you:
    Fuck of May

    (Now with 546% more use of the word "fuck"!)

    There are still several parts in the song that I didn't get around to messing with, but I just can't bring myself to edit this thing anymore. Enjoy.
  • Okay, yes, it's puerile... But the end of the first chorus had me giggling like a naughty schoolboy !!

    ;' )))
  • I only giggled like a naughty schoolgirl when I got to the chorus entirely made of fucks. did you also use the 'fucking' from Mandelbrot Set?
  • Damn, I forgot about the Mandelbrot Set one. Oh well.

    This was a quick experiment gone horribly wrong:
    Tom Cruise Mountain

    I still think someone could probably make a really awesome version of that with a little work, I just don't have the patience for it. We pretty much just sped up the vocal track, pasted it as is into Tom Cruise Crazy, and were like "Okay, great! It's done!" Some parts match up, some do not.
  • More schoolboy giggling here. It's a bit like Paul and Storm - you know exactly what's coming, but it's still funny when it happens. I love the pitch-shifting at the end of FOM too.
  • I liked them!
  • edited March 2009
    I'm 41 years old but at heart I am still an obnoxious high school kid, I guess... because I laughed a lot! I suppose it helps that the song makes me think back to some adventures in college on a golf course in the middle of a warm summer night...

    I'm not sure if JoCo would... _approve_, exactly... but I'm sure he would at least grin... he has a naughty sense of humor at heart. What is intriguing about that has been to watch different audiences react. The Pontiac audience laughed at "First of May," but it was kind of a nervous titter. The Ann Arbor audience was roaring with a much more approving laughter, and you could hear them thinking "Yeah! How long until spring?"
  • edited March 2009
    Fuck the ants off! :) :) :)

    ETA: Laughed heartily all the way through. Thank you!
  • Fuck of May was fantastic!
  • I've seen some people complain that they love The Future Soon, but hate that annoying beep that runs all through the last verse. If that describes you, you can click here, and download "Future no beep." Nothing fancy, I just used audacity to remove the beep; otherwise it's the same old song that everyone loves.

    While you're there, feel free to grab PG versions of Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Ikea. Again, nothing fancy.... I just took out the "offensive" words and replaced them with a moment of silence. Not ideal perhaps, but it will allow you to listen with the kids in the car!
  • I get YouTube comments on my TFS video all the time saying that the beeping drives people crazy. Not a majority of the comments, but noticeably some.

    People also get confused/annoyed by the background radio talking in the middle of "Shop Vac". They're not sure if it's intended or is some kind of corruption in the file.
  • I had a large stretch of free time in front of my computer (a LAN party, to be precise... I don't usually play games at LAN parties) on the weekend, so I implemented an idea I mentioned in the Mandelbrot Set thread: The Future Soon Cyborg Remix, in which JoCo's voice is eventually replaced by more roboty ones (specifically, the Mac voices Alex and Trinoids.) I also replaced the beeps, since people find them so annoying, with something more Mac-y. There is some more boring detail on my blog post, but basically I taught my robot choir to read the UltraStar Deluxe files that Spektugalo made, and then fiddled around with the output to improve the timing a bit.
  • edited December 2009
    I just posted this JoCo medley, using the vocal tracks from Looks Back:

    http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=1360&page=1#Item_2
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