What a wild rush. I’ve been working on so many things in the past month that it’s a literal whirlwind of musical mess.
My weekly releases are well underway. So far they’re scheduled all the way out into June at this point. Hard to imagine based on the number of years I’ve been in this journey. Once upon a time you spent time creating a full album. Spent even more time working on the marketing, the release, a tour, etc. Now it’s more like constant creation. Which is fuckin hard.
The largest recent change has been the website. I had roughly 95% of it done when I wrote the last update. As of Monday night 2025/03/10, I got another major bit solved. That bit… being able to load lyrics and song information with a click on the title on any music page.
Places like Genius, MusixMatch or Lyricfind are awesome resources and I do attempt to keep my lyrics passed along to them. However, what better place to get the actual words I sang on something than right here on my website.
Beyond the lyrics, for those nerds like myself, there is a plethora of additional information for my songs (not necessarily for any covers I may have released). You can find running time, copyright information, ISRCs, ISWCs, registration codes, etc. It’s the super geeky shit.
On the underside of the music pages there’s going to be a rotating video background. It’s harder to see on a phone which is fine because it’s probably a bit more distracting than it should be. However, on a desktop or possibly an iPad you get the fuller experience. I will be changing them fairly regularly going forward.
Still working on the storefront / shop area, but it is in working order.
Musically speaking, I’m about to be getting full on into 360RA mixes. Those along with all the Dolby mixes I’ve finished will be releasing in the future. Likely towards the end of the year. Immersive music is really damn cool and starting to get really good even for headphones.
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 though 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.
