Jody Whitesides

Category: News

  • Setting Up Shop

    Setting Up Shop

    Little by little, bit by bit, step by step. It’s a different storyline that is starting to develop here. I’m setting up shop. Here’s the proposed roadmap…

    I’ve never really been one to blatantly sell merchandise from my website. From a show, sure. But not from my website. At this point I’m looking back at things and thinking to myself – I’m a moron. If someone is interested in what you’re doing, why the hell not offer something in exchange for a little cash?

    I’ve had this long standing view of it always being about the music, only about the music. In one sense it’s noble, in reality that’s stupid. A lot of missed connections with you. It probably has left a cold feeling between us and I’m a much warmer person than that and I know you are too.

    Getting into this world of e-commerce is a process, at least for me. I’m learning as I go. Don’t we all? I know I need to keep it simple and I should be proffering things on the front of the store that are directly related to my latest release. They probably teach that in Marketing 101, setting up shop 101 or something of that nature 101 at university.

    However, I’m not that organized outside of the music. Which means, you’ll have to bear with me as I slowly add things to the store and figure out how to sort them appropriately. The easiest thing for me in this initial phase is transcriptions of songs. Namely my songs. If you’re a musician and you purchase things like Guitar Magazine for the transcriptions (something I used to do when I was a budding musician), you know that often it was hard to get super accurate transcriptions. The beauty of my transcriptions is that they’re exactly what I played on the recording, because I’m the one doing them and I’m pretty sure I know what I played. I better, I wrote this stuff. And if you’re really into it, MP3 downloads of singles. Of course I’m offering them at a price that makes sense – the amount I’d make if you didn’t buy it on iTunes or somewhere else where they still sell music downloads. The store front makes this fairly easy for me and for you. So that’s a plus.

    My next steps as I add more transcriptions and singles is to do Deluxe Digital albums. You know, kinda interactive like. With original album art, liner notes, lyrics, photos, some videos and full blown audio with the stories behind each song. As I’m sitting here writing this, I’m thinking I should do this for singles too.

    I’m also going to be setting up shop for limited run T-shirts. Meaning you can be one of a lucky few to get a particular print of a shirt before they sell out and can no longer be found. Add baseball caps to that as well. For the sports minded fans of mine, I’m going to be doing Jersey’s that can be customized with your name on the back.

    This is just the beginning. There will be more.

  • The Remarkable Long Road

    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!

  • Little Step Back Big Leap Forward

    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.

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