Jody Whitesides

Tag: music

  • 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.

  • Learning Curve

    Learning Curve

    I’m holed up in the studio quite a bit lately. A lot of it is putting time into things that should enhance the music I’m creating. Most specifically with video. But there’s a learning curve.

    You may not know that I originally graduated with a degree in film production. However, I never really went into the film production world after school. No, I went to more school and decided to go into music. Ouch.

    The good thing about the film background is that it gave me a working knowledge on how to deal with aspects of film/video production. Though now, like music, film is constantly changing with tech. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean there can be learning curves. Since I’m wanting to get a lot done with past releases of music to marry them with video ideas, it’s given me an incentive to get Final Cut and Motion in order to put these things together.

    I’m starting to get a stockpile of lyric videos. But I had originally been having issues with the size of the output screens from Motion. Despite setting them for 1920 x 1080 output, they were coming out at 2880 x 1080. It was driving me nuts! I got on the phone with an Apple Motion customer care rep and they started walking me thru certain things. We eventually found out it was the pixel aspect ratio that was throwing things off. But the silly thing is, it’s off from the get go based on Apple’s Motion templates!! Now that I’ve figured that out, I’ve made my own templates and lyric videos will get done faster.

    I promise to drip out the lyric videos as soon as I get VEVO to me control of my VEVO Channel (long story there where it’s controlled by a 3rd party company right now). Once I get that control back in my hands, I will have a lot of official videos to put out.

    TLDR (a this point this is about another project, not musically related to my artist career);

    Beyond the videos for my music, I’ve decided to create a podcast with a good friend of mine, Chris Hellstrom. The concept is to talk about recording and production from a musician standpoint and express it from a producing and engineering perspective. We’ve been discussing the idea for a month or two and as of yesterday we recorded our first episode. The plan is to get about 4 in the can and then launch it as a weekly thing. Maybe run about 13 episodes to a season. Or if we really get rolling then continue on weekly as long as possible.

    Instead of just doing an audio podcast, which would be the easiest thing to do, I mentioned that we should combine it with video of us talking. Much like how Stern, or Rogan do their shows. Though Stern is primarily radio first, it is fun to watch them. I didn’t really realize the complexity it would add to the podcast show. That being typed, we dove in and did it anyway.

    First thing I realized is, we recorded the audio portion at 48k/24bit. Which is my 2nd favorite audio rate after 96k/24bit. However, video tends to record at 48k. Or at least most broadcast video is output with a 48k/16bit soundtrack. I opted to use a GoPro for this first episode. Massive mistake!!!

    As much as GoPro makes it easy to get video at 1920 x 1080, the audio quality and the actual 1920 x 1080 video quality both leave a lot to be desired. Mostly because the video is slightly fuzzy at full size, which it shouldn’t be. Then the audio is actually recorded at 32k. Like who the fuck at GoPro decided that was a wise choice?!? To make matters worse it only records files to about 15 minute lengths. Which means it requires a shit ton of work to make it work well in Final Cut to sync with studio audio done at 48k.

    Step one: use QuickTime 7 pro, which won’t run after Mojave, to export the file to the right video format and upsample the audio to 48k. There’s a few hours of time wasted. This prompted me to say it’s time to use the iPhone with the Filmic app. This will allow me to use a better camera, with the right FPS and the right audio sample rate. Plus it can do 1920 x 1080 without issue and won’t segment a file in to 15 minute bits. Thus it can go from start to finish. Which will be nice.

    While those files were getting converted to workable Final Cut files, I spent time learning how to do some fancy text splash videos for our opening and closing spots to the video portion of the podcast. Then I took it a step further and made an animated logo as well. This took about 4 hours of time, that had I’d been a full time video & motion graphics guy, may have only taken an hour.

    The good thing is, they’re now made and all I need to do going forward is plant them in the video outputs. So no more hours of time creating them, they’re done. I expect episode two will take about 1/10th the time it took for this first episode. I look forward to that time reduction.

    Once we’re ready to launch, I’ll announce the website here. Plus I’m pretty sure it will be available at all the normal podcast outlets, plus video on the website and youtube.

  • Rough And Tumble

    Rough And Tumble

    Its been a rough and tumble year. Things started off looking extremely promising then in a matter of months multiple projects and one bigger one all came to a crashing halt.

    Rough and Tumble

    The rough… A person I was working with for a nice boost on streaming media ended up stealing $14,000 from me. That might not sound like a ton of money, but as a non-signed artist that is paying for everything – that puts a serious dent in your operational cash flow. This is one of the primary reasons I’ve been so quiet here on my ‘dot com’. I’ve been out money to make things happen when I should have been seeing a return.

    In turn, this slowed my process down on making the finishing touches on my website. (grrrr).

    Its made it difficult for me to upgrade gear.

    I’ve been unable to do any PR.

    Not a fun position to be in.

    Right now I have someone working on getting that money back from them, but after 3 months of trying, I’m beginning to lose hope.

    Another element of fallout from this is losing the lovely lady I had been dating for nearly a year. That was a blow as well.

    The tumble… They (whomever ‘they’ are) say “roll with the punches.” I’m feeling more like I’ve been tumbling. Whilst I’ve been recovering from the theft, I’ve been finishing music. Lots of music. Some with co-writers, some for TV placements, some for my future releasing. Writing and recording all this music is part of what keeps me sane in such a conniving business.

    In other news. A device, that I developed for my own use a couple of years ago, is now generating interest from a couple of companies. I had a meeting with one company a week and a half ago at the end of July. The meeting was scheduled for 30 minutes. That 30 minute meeting ended up lasting an hour and 45 minutes. To me that’s a very good sign and sometime next week I will reach back out to them to follow and see where their thoughts are. In the meantime, I’ve started the patent process to make sure my idea is protected.

    Some friends of mine have started developing a content platform for YouTube. As it turns out, my channel and website titled Inside The Recording Studio will get rebranded to be the umbrella for all the content. I’m looking forward to providing cool content about gear, recording and the process of creating music.

    Moving on

    As I sit here recapping on several months of what feels like waiting in a holding pattern, I’m working on keeping a positive attitude going into my birthday. I’m taking yet another trip around that sun. Despite being beat down again in my career as a musician, I can be grateful for being alive and healthy!

    As the song image for Spotify shows above – I will Rise Up!

    I’ll work on being a bit more energetic with content here. In the meantime, thank you for reading.

    BTW – if you haven’t joined my email list, please do!

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