There’s a meme over the past few years of putting different music into this clip from Friends:

There are thousands of these videos online. They’re fun, and an easy way to get people to check out your music. To make one, artists had previously needed a video editing program.

I thought it would be fun to make the process easier. So this past weekend I built the “Marcel Generator.” It lets you make one of these videos, with your song, instantly & for free.

Check it out:
https://distrokid.com/marcel

A bunch of people have asked me how to works. So here’s the behind-the-scenes.

The entire process is automated, and takes about 1-minute per video.

Step 1: Make the song shorter
Our bots take whatever song the artist wants to use, and chops off everything after 30 seconds. Only 30 seconds of music is needed, and a smaller file makes the rest of the steps run faster.

Step 2: Turn down the volume
Most songs are mastered to be very loud. But a song playing in a sitcom wouldn’t be at max volume — so the song is turned down by around 20%.

Step 3: Replace song in original video with new song
The audio of the original song (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) is replaced with the new song.

Step 4: Add laugh track
I think this is the most important step.

One of the things that makes previous versions of the Marcel meme seem unrealistic, is total silence under the music. On the TV show, there’s laughing, clapping, giggling, and room noise underneath the whole thing.

So I made a laugh-track, which syncs to the video, and is overlaid on top of the music. The laughing starts about 12-seconds in:

And voila! Marcel loves your song.

To make your own Marcel video, go to:
https://distrokid.com/marcel

This is free and available now to all DistroKid members.

Please enjoy, and thanks for reading!

How I spent my weekend was originally published in DistroKid News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.