Jody Whitesides

Author: Jody Whitesides

  • Reinventing Tradition: Embrace the Magic of Remixed Christmas Tunes!

    Reinventing Tradition: Embrace the Magic of Remixed Christmas Tunes!

    The Quiet Year

    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…

    Christmas Future on my website

    Christmas Past on Spotify

    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.

    Christmas Present on my website

    Christmas Past on Spotify

    Let The Remix Commence

    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 🤷🏼‍♂️]

    Christmas Past on my website

    Christmas Past on Spotify

    Pick Your Fancy

    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.

  • Gaining peer acceptance is intoxicating

    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.

  • Rejection sure can hurt

    There’s no doubt that anyone and everyone on the planet can relate to the hurt of rejection. Unless of course you’ve got a screw loose and have no concept of E.Q.

    I don’t outwardly show a ton of emotion, but that doesn’t take the sting off of any rejection. Here’s one of the biggest stings I ever got in my music career…

    As a fan of the show Heroes, I ended up writing a song called Hero Unexpected. This was a turning point in my songwriting and production chops. I knew I had a really awesome chorus. But the verses initially were translating to people if they didn’t know the TV show. I agonized over that and had nine rewrites of them until I was finally happy with it and other people could relate to it without knowing the show.

    The recording process went equally as painstaking for me at the time. I really spent time thinking thru the arrangement. Making sure every layer of every sound I put into it would fit nicely with all the others. Most of the time up to that point I was winging it and sticking to primarily a two guitars, bass, drums, vocals thing. Expanding my potential was the goal.

    What made the recording even more fruitful was having a good friend of mine, George Leger III, who wanted to help me record the vocals. He really wanted to produce the vocal recording. He felt he could draw the right performance out of me to really make the song shine.

    We spent an afternoon into an evening as his Glendale studio where he guided me thru recording the vocals. Take after take, part after part. The lesson I learned from that session was valuable. He had a sheet of my lyrics and as we were recording it, he’d be taking notes on which take had the right inflection for each word, or phrase. Mind you I didn’t see him doing as I was singing in another room. I saw it after.

    When we finished, I took the tracks back to my studio and spent a good deal of time working on the comps and mix of the song. I may have spent close to a week, then took a little time off and would come back to it.

    As fortune would have it, in the months leading up to the finished mix of Hero Unexpected, I had befriended a mastering engineer who had won several Grammys. If I haven’t written about the lead up to that friendship, it’s probably being saved for a book on my career because it’s pretty damn random.

    Gavin Lurssen and I spoke about the song for a rather lengthy bit and talked about what I was hoping to get out of the master for it. However, the best bit about the conversation was his reaction to finding out that I not wrote and performed it, but that I had also recorded and mixed it [minus the vocal producer George]. It was a two word response that started with F and ended with U.

    Gavin did a marvelous job with the master and I was super happy with the end result.

    Fast forward some months later when I find out about Iron Man. Since people up to this point were telling me how awesome the song was for anything superhero related, I made a valiant effort to get it in front of the music supervisor for that movie. Major brownie points to the lawyer that helped make that happen, Steve, you know who you are.

    Anyway [enough of the long preamble], we were fortunate enough to get a phone call with the the music supervisor. He proceeds to tell us that he really loves the song and that it would be perfect for the movie. But… [here comes the brutality and I will quote this]: “You are not famous enough for us to be able to use it.”

    Zing. Bang. Pow. Zowie. OUCH!!

    Up to that point, I had never given a moment’s thought to a song getting rejected due to lack of fame. Usually they will pick a song because it’s the right song for the part. Then to be told that it is essentially the right song for the part, but you lack the fame?!? Oophff. That stung.

    It came back to sting me again when the movie released and multiple industry people told me Hero Unexpected would have been the better pick over the famous song they did use. There are things you can’t control. I still hold out hope that it will one day get used for a superhero movie.

    That moment really taught me rejection can hurt, but I can’t take it personally. No matter how much it hurt, I had to soldier on.

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