One would think that I’ve been off the reservation with how long it’s been since there was a previous update. [you can go to the last news post and see that it was in December 2022, yikes]
Tempting to say that I was a caterpillar that went into a lengthy two year cocoon, to end up as a butterfly emerging in 2025. Or maybe, a phoenix rising from it’s ashes being born anew. Nah, it’s the caterpillar example.
The cocoon I was in was the studio. After doing the remixes of the Christmas music, there was a palpable tension hanging around me in regards to the next steps of my music career. Sadly those that tension is still there, I’ve stopped waiting on it; should it come to fruition it will get announced here.
I opted take on a rather large remix and new mix situation. After experiencing the updated feel of the Christmas songs, it felt silly not to tackle other older material. Applying decades of experience to those recordings, which were done with cutting edge technology then, to improve the quality now. With console software, new audio listening qualities, newer and more refined fx, I’ve taken those old recordings and done to them what I wished could have been done when they were first done.
This includes cleaning up edits. Improving room sounds, delays and other effects. Now they sound more like records and cohesive.
Into the new frontier. Along with improving the original stereo releases (and yes that means the old versions will be disappearing from streaming services and no longer sold on physical media) I’ve also updated them with spacial audio mixes.
You might ask: what is a spacial audio mix Jody.
Welp, I’m talking Dolby Atmos. Currently making the rounds for some of the music you hear on Apple Music or some other streaming platform. There is also the forthcoming spacial audio called 360RA, it’s in beta and I’m fortunate enough to be testing it out. It’s got a different quality to Atmos. It still works in headphones and man does it make music sound great.
When those albums get re-released in the coming months and years, they will have animated cover art, and spacial audio mixes to go with. On as many platforms that make use of it.
The silence got broken a few weeks ago with the release of a version of Do You Want to Play for the Las Vegas Golden Knights. It’s been a substantially long time since I’ve updated those for all the new teams that have sprung up in the last 8 years or so. The largest group is in the G-League which appears to constantly be tweaking itself.
That means new teams for the NHL (I’m still waiting on Utah’s team to get it’s official name so I can get that one done), the NFL, the NBA, the WNBA, the G-League, MLB and a couple of surprises for a particular school in Utah.
To wrap up this overly long update, be prepared as there is a lot of material coming and it all sounds great!
I started this year with one goal and shortly after it got under way, I switched goals and went inward on myself and everything else with Christmas music. The first bit goal that switched was more of a continuation of a project I had revisited towards the end of 2021. It took a while to get that finished, meaning it carried over into the beginning of 2022. That was a remixing project for the very first album I had wrote, recorded and released. The end result will end up being a special digital download, though I can’t give a timeline for release.
The shifting of gears came when I was playing some Pickleball at a Christmas party roughly this time last year in 2021. A Pickleball Christmas party! One of my older friends who is notorious for bringing a portable speaker to the courts was looking to play Christmas music while the party was going on. I mentioned in passing that I had a whole bunch of Christmas music available for streaming (surprise surprise). He immediately logged it in and proceeded to play thru all 30 songs during the party. People dug it.
More Sleigh Bells Please
For some reason as I was playing Pickleball and listening to these songs, I got a wildly stupid idea. I wanted to remix these as well, but in addition to doing so I wanted to add sleigh bells. Because what better way to denote a song is a Christmas song than to slather a good dose of sleigh bells on them? Enter my over estimation on the time it would take to do this…
30 songs in 30 days. That’s what I initially thought to myself. Of course that isn’t how it went down. Yes, I did acquire a sleigh bells instrument (actually I already had it). However, being the musician that I am, it went further than adding the sleigh bells. I also updated my orchestrations with more modern sample libraries. Which further required some slight tweaks to make sure they didn’t come off odd. That took more time.
I went over each song with a finely made reindeer hair brush. Cue the cheesy sleigh bell to snare ending. For each song I had to make the tweaks. Put it away for a few days, then listen again to make sure I didn’t really miss something important. Then came figuring out methods of playing the sleigh bells so they weren’t the same on every song. A much harder prospect than it would seem. Why? Because sleigh bells are really hard to distinguish in the audio spectrum. They’re super brash, and can quickly overpower a song like nobody’s business.
I tackled the adding of the sleigh bells and orchestral tweaks for each song based on the album it came from. Thus I did all the Future songs, then all the Present songs, then all the Past songs. Though for reasons unknown to the Universe, I did them in alphabetical order for each release. Don’t ask, I don’t truly have an answer as to why I did it that way.
Getting to the actual remixes proved to be another avenue that required more thought. This is where I get nerdy as hell, so be prepared. I was working to learn a new DAW (Digital Audio Workstation – a fancy name for recording/mixing software). I already knew this DAW, called LUNA, was better sounding than my trusty old DAW that I still use to track everything I do when it’s new music to write and record. However, I wasn’t super versed in all the little ins-n-outs of the DAW (I’m still not, but I’m quick with it).
I made the artistic choice to do each album on a different console. A console is the old-school term for the hardware desk musicians, producers, artists, used to record and mix on before the digital versions came along. Now there are a plethora of emulations of classic consoles that can be gotten for pretty much any DAW these days [** I do believe there is one DAW that is an actual emulation of a console 🤷🏼♂️]
What this means is that I could now choose which console to mix a song with. Something that isn’t super common yet with DAWs and mixing engineers. I did a little research and made the determination to mix Christmas Past on a Neve 88rs. A console that was a large format desk meant to be an update to an older Neve design thus a cleaner but classic sound. A very vibey console that I believe gave great character to our beloved public domain Christmas songs.
Christmas Present was mixed on a Focusrite. This is a very rare console created by the Focusrite company of which only 10 were made but have been sought out to be used for many a popular song or album you may already know. It’s a low noise, low distortion console that I felt would really tackle the songs people are familiar with.
For Christmas Future I chose the SSL 9000 J. A very modern sounding, super clean, console for all the songs that are destined to become Christmas classics! (hint, hint – you need to add these songs to your playlists and get all your friends to do the same, or at least tell two friends to do the same).
End Result
The end result you can now hear for yourself. The albums have more character. They have more life. They sound fuller. Plus, a vast majority of the songs now have proper sleigh bells in them. What more could you possibly ask for?!?
Not all people reading to this point will be Spotify users, which is why I did link to the releases on my website. Those links will take you to updated release pages that contain links to all the major streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, Tidal, YouTube, etc). For the truly bold, I implore you to go pick up the deluxe version of Christmas Brought Me You which includes some extra goodies. Or if you’re getting cold and need a great jacket to help keep you warm with that special Christmas feeling, I do have a lovely Christmas Brought Me You jacket.
Thank you for reading all the way to here. Have a wonderful set of holidays no matter what you celebrate or who you celebrate it with. See you next year with more new music, cause yes there is a lot of music I have coming.
When your peers start to recognize you, it’s an intoxicating experience. Especially when those peers are much further up the ladder of success than you are.
When I started getting better performance slots it was a kick in the pants. I did some shows at a place called Martini Blues. Several were styled after songwriter in the round style setups. Where they put 3 to 4 songwriters in a row on a stage and they take turns playing songs they’ve written and talking a little bit about the stories behind the song and it’s creation.
Particularly this is about the 2nd time I got invited to do this. I was on stage center left, to my left was Dee Biggs, to my right was Warren Sellars, to his right was James Grey. All these guys had been working with bigger artists as songwriters – I was the “odd” man out.
It started with James, then went to Warren and then to me. Because of the songs James & Warren had chosen, I opted to kick off with a song called Falling In. [if you’re paying attention to my emails, you know some history about that one].
I proceed to play the song and as the last note is ringing out Warren immediately said (I’m paraphrasing a bit because it was a bit more swearing than this) “Holy shit, did you see the way he was playing that?!? Not only is that an amazing song, but damn his fingers!”
Mind you, he blurted this out in front of an audience.
I may have blushed a bit at that statement. Because now the spotlight is on me and someone the audience is familiar with has exclaimed something to another of the more famous songwriters on stage in front of them.
Of course it made me feel amazing inside. Aside from the blushing I was feeling really energized as well. These are the kinds of things that give me a huge boost to perform even better.
For the 3rd time I was invited back, it was a similar situation but it was Warren, James, and instead of Dee it was another writer by the name of Kevin Fisher. You’ve likely heard music that Kevin has written – he’s had cuts by some very popular artists.
This time around, no one made massive exclamations from the stage, but then Kevin was on the opposite of the stage from me. What did happen is that when we finished the set, Kevin came over to me and asked for my phone number so that he and I could get together and do some writing.
That right there was a really amazing shot in the arm to me.
Yes, we did get to write together. I look forward to writing with any one of them again in the future.
