Jody Whitesides

Category: In The Studio

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 Future 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 Future 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.

2022-12-01
The Remarkable Long Road

Sitting here waiting, like I’m on the remarkable long road, for my studio machine to export video to a podcast. As if I don’t have enough to do. Much like you. As I’m twiddling thumbs waiting on the export, I’m thinking about the vocals I’ll be tracking later tonight. Then I got the wild idea of writing a random stream of thoughts instead of filling my head with things I can’t control.

That’s not entirely true, I could control when I tell the computer to crunch the video / audio data. I could even stop it right now if I desired. However, that would be putting the work off until later. Experts call that – procrastination. I’m not a good procrastinator.

Knowing that I have a data backup that I need to do tonight as well, I opted to let the machine do its thing while I get some busy work done for the podcast. Getting the YouTube page ready. Getting the website page ready. Writing out the description of the episodes coming up for Tuesday and Friday. Monday has become my relegated Podcast prep day.

Yet another facet to my musical life, passing on the knowledge I’ve learned about recording, mixing, mastering music. The remarkable long road of a career musician who puts in too much time.

Speaking of which, I read an article earlier today about a famous musician that passed away a couple of weeks ago. Of course the initial tributes that came out for Eddie Van Halen were warranted. I wondered how long it would take for the dark side stories to start cropping up. I had heard some of them prior to his death – the music business isn’t that large. Then again, it isn’t that small either. Today was that day. I came across an article written by a film maker talking about his time spent with Eddie.

To paraphrase, there were DEFCON one moments and apparently kinda often in his remarkable long road of a career.

One of the things I learned in reading the article was Eddie’s work ethic. It was tireless. Borderline merciless. Which got me thinking…

I know there are several musicians who have played with me that would agree to the following statement. I am notorious for doing long rehearsals to make sure everyone knows their part. I don’t care how long it takes to get everyone on the same page, so long as they really want to be working on the music. I often would rehearse songs for hours and hours on end. The goal was to make playing the music, the songs, 2nd nature to the point where I didn’t have to think about it for it to be done right.

Pushing myself for that type of practice and rehearsal is normal. That’s how I roll. Unfortunately I also expect from the musicians that I play with or who play with me. Some handle that well, many don’t. Which leads to frustration on their part and on my part. I expect people to do their musical homework. To come prepared. I always feel like I’ve let other musicians down if I haven’t gotten the music memorized and into muscle memory before a rehearsal. I don’t want to rely on reading charts.

Turns out, Eddie had this type of drive too, according to the filmmaker. I had no idea. I figured he was an alien. However, one paragraph struck me. I’m paraphrasing here but, Eddie would play guitar when writing/recording songs 15 to 18 hours a day, then sleep. As if sleep were only there as a necessary evil. He’d go to sleep for several hours, get back up and go back to the studio and the guitar. Doing it day in and day out.

In the studio he would expect the same of the the musicians. He expected they would put in the same work he did. Often, they didn’t and he’d get bummed out. Did you know Eddie played the bass on all Van Halen records other than Van Halen I? Learned that today too…

Oh that is so familiar to me. I work alone much of the time as I find I can get things done quicker that way. Not always true, but often enough. I learned to sing, because I couldn’t find a singer with that kind of work ethic.

When I do work with others, whether I’m bringing them on for something I’ve written, or I’m producing another artist – the most common phrase I hear is: Damn, I’ve never worked so hard in the studio. I’ve got multiple stories of musicians like that. When striving for that type of perfection, it can take a toll. Especially on others. I know I’m not the easiest guy to work with musically, based on that work ethic. Though I have had multiple musicians that prefer to work my gigs because – I’m consistent, I know what I want, and they don’t have to guess. I will always go back to guys and gals that I’ve worked with who can handle the work.

Getting asked how I’ve managed to make a remarkable long road career out of music, I think it stems to that work ethic.

BTW – **ding** my export is done and I need to get on with the uploading of the video and podcast audio, so that in an hour or so I can get to tracking vocals. Have a great evening!

2020-10-19
Little Step Back Big Leap Forward

It’s been a bizarre Thanksgiving holiday. Bizarre may be too strong a word. Reality is it was mellow.

What made it weird is that I ran into an issue in the studio on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. That translated into a technical issue regarding file backups. As a musician who takes work a tad to serious some times, I have a tendency of making a lot of backups of files. This started after I had a hard drive meltdown a bunch of years ago while I was attempting to make backups of 20 songs worth of material. I lost it all. No means of recovery. There was something that shattered the head of the hard drive and it destroyed the platters.

That changed my life from a computing and studio standpoint. I started making backups of projects to a 2nd hard drive after every recording session. Then once a project was finished, I would also make two optical backups to CDs at first, then to DVDs. Now I’m doing all backups to Blu Rays. The main reason why is because Blu Rays hold 50gb of data. Though I’m thinking my next batch I’ll grab 100gb Blu Rays.

Getting back to what happened right before Thanksgiving 2019… I had a need to get out a project. For all of this I’m running an optical data library that keeps track of all the files I have and on which disc. This allows me to call up a disc, check it out of the unit, put it into the computer, transfer files, then put the disc back. Its really handy. However, the unit is getting old and I’m thinking the power supply is going bad so sometimes one or more of the units don’t respond well (whole other tech story going on there).

Thus, I made a decision that its time to upgrade a bunch of old DVDs/CDs from those formats to sit on Blu Ray. This takes time. Lots of time. So for several days I’ve been pulling data of old backups, reorganizing the data and burning it back onto Blu Ray. As I’m writing this, I’m about 90% done. Organization of files is key. Especially if I have a client that wants something changed, I have to be able to recall old sessions. Or maybe I want a remix of one of my tracks or maybe I need to chart a part from one of my songs. The process of doing such things becomes real easy if I have a simple method of recall for the data. Which I do, and now I’m improving it.

Whenever I burn an optical disc I always burn a 2nd one. Why have one when you have a 2nd? That’s my motto. Mainly for the reason that if one gets scratched, I have a backup of that. I also attempt to make a hard drive backup as well, but with this much data it gets to be a bit much.

If you’re not one to backup data, and I’ve met many who don’t – I find I have no sympathy when people lose data. I realize it isn’t fun to lose data, but if you don’t take time to actually back it up, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Anyway, until a better means of backup comes along from Blu Rays, I’m now at least up with the times of getting my data on to a new format for the time being. Mind you, I am seriously considering microSD as some companies are now selling 512gb microSD for $6. The issue becomes, how do I keep track of it what’s on said microSD when there’s no clear method to making it easy. But the format is getting cheap. If you have a great easy way to keep track of what’s on a microSD hit me up as I’d like to know how to keep track of them as an additional means of backup.

I should be done with this mess tonight. Which means getting back to making more lyric videos and finishing more singles in the near future.

2019-12-02

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