It doesn’t stop me

It’s the 2nd of 3 songs written by Mick Paul and I a while back, that I have selected to upload. Ths one shows off Mick’s Bass skills a bit. I just wanted acoustic guitar and Bass in this, and I think it worked quite well. The vocals are a little off key in places. This song, and most of the others written with Mick. were written hours before they were recorded, so I’m not really surprised at the mistakes.

The song is about a contreversial subject, though I’m not going let you know what it means here. You’ll have to watch the video to discover it. I reveal the meaning at the end. It puts a whole new angle on the lyrics.

Getting back to Mick. Here’s some information on this very talented guy:

Played on 2 singles in 1970.
Joined “The Hotshots” in 1973. They had a number 4 hit.
Joined “Union express” in 1974 and toured Europe for 2 years.
From 1978, did session work for the BBC and various publishers.
Did a stint as an in-house bass player at Abbeydale studios in West London.
Co-wrote the Labour Party campaign song in 1987.
Joined “More tea vicar in 1990.
Wrote and played on a single called “Aquarius” for Yello records, which was produced by Tyrrell.
Played on the “David Hasselhoff” single “If we could only say goodbye” (Yes. The Hoff).

and more..

I’ll give a web link to his recording studio in West Worthing, southern England:

Froosound Recording Studio

This is the guy doing all the music in this song. The previous song, and the next song.

Anyway. This one is called “Losing my mind”. I hope you enjoy it, and the Bass

Losing my mind - Jeff Edwards and Mick Paul

Now here is the latest youtube account stats.
A rise in my subs to 692.
Channel views are now at 15,540.
The overall vid views are 237,970. Still on target to hit a quarter of a million by the 17th of July. climbing at about a thousand views a day.

Coming next is the third of the old original songs, featuring Mick Paul.
I’m still working hard on the album. Yesterday I woke up singing a song. Weird I know, but it was pretty good. I’m going to put the track together to see what it sounds like in real life, and if it makes the grade, then I’ll consider putting it on my album.

Half past ten

I’m going to step back in time a bit with 3 selected songs I wrote when I first started to record music seriously.
Several years ago I penned and recorded nine songs in roughly 2 weeks with a very talented musician going by the name of “Mick Paul”.
Mick is a fantastic bass player and has done a lot in his career to date. He also owns his own recording studio, and this is where those 9 songs were recorded.
I’ve selected 3 of those 9 songs to put on youtube, and this one is the first of those choices.
The title of the song is “Amber falls”. The meaning is quite dark. I wonder if you can work out what the song is about, before the video tells you near the end.

Check out the video here:

Amber falls - Jeff Edwards and Mick Paul

I have put some snippets of info about Mick in this first video, and I will be adding more to the following 2 videos. It’s possible that you may recognise a name or two from the information to come.

I put a warning in the video description of this song, because the song contains what is known as “Speaker busters”. They are very deep and loud bass hits, that can possibly cause some damage to a bass speaker when it’s on high volume. I just thought I’d let you know that.

Now for some youtube food.

I only need another 10 subs to get to 700. So the current figure is 690.
My channel views are now 15,424.
My total video viewings are 235,621. At this rate, I might get to the quarter of a million by the first anniversary of my first video upolad to youtube.

In my next post, I’ll be bigging up the second of the three selected old original songs :).

Featuring on a live channel

It’s been a really hectic week. I’ve done a little work on my own website, so that I can prepare it for the album release. I’ve changed some of the information. Put some more links in. I have also added an email registration on my home page, so that anyone can register for updates on the progress of the album.
I pointed out that the email address will only be used for album updates, and will not be given to anyone else. I’ve also put that same registration on another website.
So now I can confidently share my web address. I’ve been running it for a few years already, but I haven’t done much with it up to now

So here it is. My own website:

Jeffs music

You will find a player on there that has a number of songs that I’ve written over the past 4 years. I could have taken them off because the recording quality is not the best in the world, and vocals are out of tune in places where a lot of them were rushed. However, I want to leave them there for a while to show where my recordings started, and all the flaws with it.

Now this next bit is very interesting. A friend messaged me on Youtube, who had created a live internet TV channel, and he asked me if he could use some of my original music in his shows. I agreed, of course. He informed that when the first show aired, it received over 1,000 viewers in the first 3 hours!!!

Here is a link to his live channel:

Music for you - Live channel

This guy needs some more original music videos for his channel, so if you write your own stuff, and want it aired on a live internet broadcast channel, then go to the link above and contact him via his email address. It could provide you with some essential exposure, just like it has for me

Finally I’ll finish up with the Youtube figures.

I got 2 more subscribers, but then I lost 2 So it remains 681.
The channel viewings have increased though. They are 15,146.
Another increase of a few thousand on my total video views. The are now 229,501.

A PetesBehr cover

There has been another cover version done of one of my own songs. This time it’s “Broadcast fantasy”.
It was performed by “PetesBehr” on Youtube. His recording of this song is a bit like an unplugged version.
He has done a cover version of one of my songs before.
I think that this differs quite a bit from the original song, but I like it. It’s interpreted in a completely different way, and that’s what I like to see people doing with songs. Especially my songs. Putting their own influence into it.

First up, is the Original version of “Broadcast fantasy”. Check it out at the following link:

Broadcast Fantasy - Jeffstunes

So now you know how the original goes. This is his cover of my song:

Cover of Broadcast fantasy by PetesBehr

It feels good when other people like your songs enough to want to record their own versions. It makes me think that I must be doing something right

Now, the regular Youtube digest:

I have now got 681 subscribers. Only another 19 to go to get to 700.
My channel views have raced forward to 15,037.
The overall viewing figures for all my videos is 227,028. Only another 23,000 to the quarter of a million, and it’s going at roughly a thousand a day.

I’ve been working on my own website recently. I think it’s important for me to bring everything up to date, considering I’m releasing an album soon. So I’m changing the info on there. I’ll be pumping out the URL when I’m happy that it’s ready, for anyone who may be interested

A job that slowly kills you

I decided to take a few days out from making my album, and I recorded a requested song, from a while ago. It’s a song I really wanted to do because it seems a very simple song, but it’s quite vocally expressive. The song I’m talking about is “No surprises” by “Radiohead”.
The making of the vid was pretty easy. Not much going on in it. Just me sitting in half shadow, throughout the song. The video of the original is just the man’s face in what looks like a space helmet, filling up with water. There’s no water in my video though
Instead, I concentrated on bringing moments of my life to mind that have strong emotional connections, so my facial expressions would go through subtle changes.

This is the final outcome:

My cover of No surprises by Radiohead

The latest numbers on my Yotube account.

677 subscribers.
14,891 channel views.
224,885 overall video views.

It would probably be a good idea for me to get back to making the album now

A tip for Youtube and an Album update

Right. This is my first album update, and also a nice little tip for musicians on Youtube

I’ve decided to select 4 tracks from my Youtube uploads. I’ve chosen 3 already, and those songs are as follows:

Broadcast fantasy - Jeffstunes

Don’t wish it away - Jeffstunes

Sight Or Sound - Jeffstunes

I’m going to make a short list of three other songs and put them to a vote. So effectively, the fourth will be chosen by voters.

I have finished two of the other songs up to now. The titles are “You think it’s all over”. Which is a different version of a song I wrote 2 years ago. The original was played on Spirit FM which covers West Sussex. The second of those songs is “Soaked to the bone”. I finished that one yesterday.
So I have got 4+ songs left to prepare. I’ve got some numbers in my mind. Some of them have been half constructed already, so hopefully it wont take too long to finish them. I would like to have them ready by the end of next week, but it will probably take longer.

OK. Here’s my Youtube tip.
For those of you who upload songs in stereo to Youtube, and get disappointed when the audio comes out in mono, and lower quality. You might find it interesting to know that Youtube do have a higher quality version of your video.
When you make links to your videos, you will normally use the video URL. To get the higher quality version, all you have to do is add “&fmt=18″ to the end of the URL. I suppose you could do that with the embedding too, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Here’s an example for you. This is a link to one of my original songs:

Don’t wish it away - Jeffstunes

Now the same song, but I’ve added “&fmt=18″ to the end of the URL

Don’t wish it away - Jeffstunes

Can you hear the difference?

Now for my youtube figures.
I now have a total of 670 Subscribers.
My channel views are moving faster now, and are currently at 14,702.
My overall video views are moving forward at over 1,000 a day now and are 221,328

More updates on the album progress coming soon

Going on sale

I was trying to find ways to bump up my daily Youtube viewing figures, when I came across a tool that is in Beta stage at the moment. They call it “Annotations”.
It allows you to add linking text or hotspots to your videos. When I watch videos on youtube, I don’t normally pay much attention to what else is on that web page. As a video author, that’s not good news. With this little toy, I can put a link on my video, and that is more likely to be noticed.
So I went through most of my videos and added annotations that link back to my channel. It took me ages. It’s early days, but I’ve already noticed a jump in traffic. Especially in my channel views. So it seems to be working.
This is a link to my Channel on Youtube. Where most of the Annotations point to:

Jeffstunes Youtube Channel

So here are my latest Youtube figures, followed by some news

My subscriber count is now at 662.
My channel views have jumped up to 14,509.
My overall video views are 216,799. It’s looking like the quarter of a million figure will be passed before the end of July.

Now for a bit of news. I’m releasing an album!
It’s going out on digital release only to start with. If things go well then It will also be released on CD.
The album will consist of some of the tracks I’ve uploaded to Youtube, and a good number of songs that haven’t been heard yet. I’m feeling quite excited by it all. Just the fact that it’s being released. I’ll keep my blog up to date with the progress as the release date gets nearer. Naming tracks etc

Broadcast fantasy - The latest

This is a bit of an update on the last post I put up. I recently uploaded a new song to Youtube, and the response exceeded my expectations. The title of it was “Broadcast fantasy”. It was an amusing view of TV addiction.

The honours I got for this video were more than I could hope for, and there were a couple of firsts too. Literally.

Youtube runs an honours system. Which calculates on a daily, weekly, monthly and all time basis. There are top 100’s for Most viewed, Top rated, Most discussed, Top favourites, Most responded, and some others too. There is a collective set of top 100’s that are global, and then there are those that are broken down into countries. These are also broken down into categories. So you could have a video in the top 100 Most discussed of all videos in the world, or you could have one in the top 100 most discussed Music video in the UK.

It’s easier to get into the top 100’s of some countries because there are less people using Youtube in those countries. The U.S. is the most difficult, and the U.K. is quite difficult as well. Which makes my achievement better in my eyes

I regularly get honours for each video I upload, and this is because I have a decent amount of subscribers and friends to my Youtube channel, but what I got with this latest video topped it all. I got my first number 1. Not just one, but two!

#1 - Top Rated (Today) - Music (United Kingdom)
#1 - Most Discussed (Today) - Music (United Kingdom)

That was on the 4th June. I was so pleased with them, that I put them in the video description.

Here’s an update on my Youtube statistics.
Subs - 651
Channel views - 14,196
Overall video views - 211,513

I’ve got some interesting things going on at the moment, and I’m going to be talking about them in my next few posts. It’s all exciting stuff

Living a Broadcast fantasy.

I was busy writing another song when this one popped into my head. So I halted progress on the initial song to develop it. It’s title is “Broadcast fantasy”.

Well, i’ve just gone past the one year membership on Youtube, and I wanted to upload a song in celebration, and this one seems perfect. The song is an amusing poke at addiction to television. As Youtube shares a lot of similarites with television, it seemed like the right choice to make.

The style of this song is again different from my previous compositions. This one is a bit more pop than I’m used to writing.

I hope you enjoy it like I did:

Broadcast fantasy by Jeffstunes

I put this video up less than a day ago, and the reaction so far is excellent. The daily honours have been building nicely
So back to the numbers. Here’s the Youtube latest.

There are now 639 subscribers to my Channel.
The channel itself has been viewed 13,842 times, and all of my videos have received a total of 205,218 viewings.

I’m aiming to make the song I was originally working on, my next upload. Though I have been known to change my mind at the last moment

The best song in Europe

I’m going off track a little here to talk about a certain European song contest. Music being my priority.

I watched the Eurovision song contest yesterday evening. My main reason was to be entertained by the commentary of Terry Wogan.
Those not in Europe may not be aware of this competition, but in Europe, it’s normally a big event.
I have to say that the general outcome was really no surprise at all. With neighbour countries having a habit of casting votes for each other. Especially what I like to call Eastern Bloc Europe. So Russia won it this year. What a surprise!

I had to laugh when one judge said “The best song in Europe”, and one of the judges unknowingly got very close to the truth when they said it was a “Great concert”, because a concert is pretty much all it was. It’s not what I would call a fair competition any more. Terry Wogan said something like that. He is even considering not commenting on the competition next year, I mean concert

Am I sore that the British entry came joint last with votes from ony 2 countries? No, I’m shocked though, because it was in my top 5, and I know a bit about cutting edge music.
It’s even more amazing if you look in all the European charts. There’s always British and American music there. And why is that? Well, because it’s cutting edge.

I thought it was between Turkey and Norway for the title. Turkey’s song was a modern sound, that was not too far removed from a band called Muse, and for pure songwriting craft, you have to give it to Norway. Well at least those two got into the top 10. The British song was a pretty good song, and also deserved to be in the top 10. My sympathy to Poland and Germany too (The Polish entry was pretty good) who were holding up the table with us. I wonder when Europe started seeing them as politically close to the UK? Political, you hear me say?
That’s what I said. I’ve come up with a new name for the competition. The Eurovision Political Popularity Contest. Well, it’s certainly not about the qualities of the songs. I think that was made quite clear last night.

So what are my thoughts on Europe?

I love it, and would like to visit all the European countries in my lifetime, and meet the locals. I’m just a normal individual who loves people and doesn’t colour them for the deeds of their fellow countrymen.

You can accept or refute my views. I wouldn’t say I am qualified to pass judgement on that show. After all, I’m only a Songwriter