Tools We Use

Friends keep asking how a band of Jamaican steampunk robots makes music videos. The honest answer: a small workshop of cloud-hosted tools, with a human at the soldering iron. What follows is the actual stack that produced our Ask Your Doctor video — in the order we used it. Different songs call for slightly different bits, but the spine looks like this nearly every time.

1. NBC Nightly News — The inspiration for the song and the video. To build a list of prescription-drug commercials, all we had to do was watch the evening news a few nights running — which yielded more than 30 brand names in days. Thankfully, we usually fast-forward through commercials when we watch conventional TV at all.
2. ChatGPT.com — images. Still one of our favorites for describing an image, generating possibly related ones (a grounding shot of a character, a photo of a hat, some other prop, a location), and getting fantastic results. We also keep Gemini, Reve.art, and a few others in the mix when we want to poke around.
3. Claude.ai and ChatGPT.com — lyrics. Our favorites for lyrics, but we bounce around to see what each model produces. It's worth cycling between your own tweaks and an AI's tweaks — always amazing what gets pulled from a model's knowledge base and cultural references.
4. Suno.com — We've used Udio.com, but at least for roots/cultural reggae, Suno crushed it. Get your lyrics together, describe what you want, and let Suno go to town. We typically generate 6–8 derivatives before committing. Once committed, we like the take and download the song as a WAV file.
5. Audacity — A free app that helps us label and split a longer song into parts that can be fed into tools with duration limits — such as our next stop, Hedra.
6. Hedra.ai — We've had the best results with Hedra for taking audio and getting good lip-syncing on it.
7. Artlist.io and Kling.ai — Our go-tos for still-to-video clips. Both can take stills, dialog, and even audio you want them to use.
8. Final Cut Pro — We love our Macs, and this is the go-to for actually putting it all together — stills, clips, audio, and a variety of effects.
9. Veed.io — For getting good subtitles done for you (mostly), we prefer Veed. It has interesting styling — like the blue/white treatment we used a few times — and the timing is generally well-synced. The ability to edit is essential when you're dealing with unique accents (e.g., Jamaican Patois) or, gulp, absurd pharmaceutical brand names. We export the entire video result with burned-in subtitles to make the lyrics more obvious to listeners and viewers. You can also export the subtitles with timing and import them into a YouTube video so they can be toggled on and off as standard CC.
10. CD Baby — Once a track is final, CD Baby is how we get it onto Spotify, Apple Music, and the rest of the streamers — all for the princely sum of $9.99 per single. For an indie release it's hard to beat: upload the WAV, fill in the metadata, and they handle distribution to the major platforms.
11. Claude Code — We have not written any significant code in more than two years. The entire anystupididea.com site, including all the stupid ideas (this one among them), is managed as a series of repos — one for the root and one per idea — by Claude Code. When you can build and deploy a site like this in minutes, why would you bother writing code by hand?

The shed door's open. None of this is locked in — we swap tools as the field shifts, and what worked last month for one genre may not be right for the next. Take this as a starting point, not a manifesto. And if you make something good with it, send us a transmission at hello@roborootsmusic.com.