Jody Whitesides

  • Kickoff 2020

    Kickoff 2020

    Hello 2020

    We’ve made it thru 2019 and we’re still here. That’s a great thing, all things considered. First off – Happy New Year. I hope you had a fantastic trip thru your holiday festivities. As for me, I had a great time hanging with family for the Christmas thru New Years holidays.

    What does a musician do over the holidays? For this time of year I would normally be skiing most mornings (for exercise sake), though this past holiday season that didn’t happen. The reason? Your friendly neighborhood musician nearly broke his leg walking in his driveway. I was coming home from skiing where I was about to enter the house when I slipped and fell. In the short span of the fall I was thinking to myself as I was going down, ow, this hurts. Oh shit, I can feel my bones in my lower leg starting to twist. Please don’t snap, please don’t snap. Fuck that hurt as I was picking myself up.

    Somehow my right leg folded under me and twisted sideways. The end result? A really gnarly sprain for my ankle, which was in a ski boot at the time and my knee. Almost two weeks later, lots of icing plus a couple of days in a device my sister had and my ankle is almost back to normal. I did attempt to get out for some runs last week as I was already walking without a limp, but that proved to be a short-lived 2 runs before I opted to nix that. At that time my leg was feeling unstable and the pressure on my ankle still hurt. Tomorrow I will find out if my ankle and leg feel better as I plan on attempting to ski again. Fingers crossed that my leg won’t feel unstable.

    Music Backup

    Another thing I tend to do at the end of the year is make sure all projects from the year are properly backed up. This year was no exception. No exception with a twist. This time around I ended up consolidating CD and DVD backups to much larger Blu Ray discs. The process actually took a few days of organizing to get completely finished, but now I feel so much better with less overall discs in the library of data – I think I reduced about 300 discs to about 110. Not a bad reduction.

    Music Production

    The song I was working on for an artist that I was producing has been finished! The long road of a song called Divine Intervention has come to a production end. She has approved the mix and master. She’ll be picking up her finished project likely this week and releasing it to the world in 2020.

    Music Of Moi

    I’m mid production on several songs. Right now, today, as of this post being penned, I’m starting the mix of a track that I wrote some time ago but started tracking a full-on production version back in December. That’s the NOW of this post.

    Videos

    Mid production of two lyric videos. I believe I will get them both finished later this week. On the business side of it I’m still working on distribution with VEVO. I’ve run afoul of my previous distributor due to their requirement to control collecting royalties for ContentID. The problem is I have a deal with YouTube for publishing and that means I’m not willing to give a middleman money I’m collecting directly. Thus my music videos and lyric videos are stacking up awaiting release until I have a direct deal with VEVO in place.

    2020 Plan

    There’s quite a few things on the horizon. The policy I’m sticking to right now is, only discuss that which I’m finishing or have just finished. This means that in 2020 I will be increasing my output of posts here. I’m guessing my posts will start happening weekly. I already know that there will be multiple updates for January – but without letting the cat out of the bag right now.

    Have a fantastic day, awesome week and enjoy life.

  • Billie Eilish Didn’t Know Who Van Halen Is

    Billie Eilish Didn’t Know Who Van Halen Is

    The big music story this week was Billie Eilish being interviewed on the Jimmy Kimmel show. During said show she was asked about Van Halen. To which she responded with knowing who they are. For some reason this set some people off who got really upset about it. It’s as if she’s a Bad “Girl” (yes, a pun on the title of her most popular hit).

    Billie Eilish

    I’m kinda confused as to why a 17 year old girl would be required to know who the fuck Van Halen is. One reason I don’t understand why people are upset has to do with the fact that Van Halen hasn’t been relevant for at least 15 years. Thus what 2 year old would have any clue what was popular in music at that point in life.

    I would put it out there that there are a lot of people who are huge Van Halen fans that don’t know who the fuck Billie Eilish is, or even who maybe the New York Dolls. Just because she’s a famous musician now, doesn’t mean she has to know who every single artist is that came before her. That’s an unreasonable request.

    The great thing is Wolfgang came to her defense. Which is ironic since he’s Eddie’s kid and often times now plays bass for the band. Yes, Van Halen had a big career for a good long time – but that time has pretty much past. Music has changed, some people move with it, some don’t.

    Billie is definitely doing things a bit different and that’s what’s likely driving her popularity. She and her bother have hit the zeitgeist and that’s something many musicians attempt to have happen in their career and it’s rare at best. I certainly hope she is able to stay relevant for at least 4 album releases or more. The hard part about that is that the industry is bigger and there’s more artists doing so many things now that it may not be likely.

    I think it would be really interesting to hear her now tackle a cover of a Van Halen song. I doubt she’d do it though. Stranger things have happened.

    As you might be able to tell, I don’t care if she doesn’t know who Van Halen is. Though, I’m a little bummed she has no idea who I am 😎.

  • 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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