A painful start to the month, JabunAudio sends its first newsletter article, Better Than The Book album updates, reflecting on June + setting some new goals for July!

Hello everyone and I hope you've had a good and not too hot week since the last blog post. It's been a time of mixed emotions for me, but we'll get onto that later in the post. On a positive note, JabunAudio sent out its first newsletter article this week and it's all about metering! If you sign up this month, you'll get it straight into your inbox + the usual sign up article about preparing for mastering. You can sign up for the JabunAudio monthly music production article on the home page of this website! Some great feedback on the first article so far so I'm looking forward to sharing more stuff with you soon. With that said, let's get onto the main updates for this week.

Starting with updates on the Better Than The Book album, it's been a mixed but mostly productive time since the last blog post. As of Friday, all the main vocal parts have been finished, and as of yesterday, there's only 2 out of 5 tracks of gang vocals left to finish too! It's been a very hot week though and my vocal endurance has been weakened by the heat and trying to stay hydrated so progress in that department has been slower than I'd have hoped. I should hopefully have it all finished soon. In other news, I've also migrated the project to the newly fixed up desktop computer and MAN OH MAN, this machine has power I couldn't have fathomed before! Very exciting! I've taken some time too this week to start sorting some of the extra production details such as 808 booms, claps and samples too which has been quite the adventure. Now onto some bad news this week...

If everything had gone according to schedule, June was supposed to be a month for guitar solos and keyboard recording would have been a job for July. Illness and other things pushed everything month ahead, making July the new month for guitar solos as well as keyboards. Unfortunately on Sunday in an act of carelessness, I sheared the end of the middle finger of my fretting hand between the fridge door and the kitchen surface it sits under, a major ouch both physically and mentally. I don't think I have much option other than to just let it heal which may take a few weeks but it's difficult to tell at the moment how long it might be until I can get back to it. Guitaring is currently out of the question, but I'll try to go through the keyboard parts as I can do them with my right hand only (overdubbing any left hand parts with my right hand afterwards). Overall, not a great start to the month, but nothing much I can do about that. I'll keep you updated on progress as and when I can and I hope to be back to it properly soon. Thanks for your patience.

Finally this week, let's go through June's goals, see how I did, then get to setting the goals for July. Here's what I had down for June:

1) Finish recording Vocals for the new BTTB album
2) Write up the next 3 months of articles for the JabunAudio newsletter
3) Sort out & update all my ISRC registrations (Not exciting but it needs to be done)
4) Finish sorting out the new Desktop computer ready to make music on it
5) Get started on lead guitar for the BTTB album *
6) Sort out the Patreon Page *
(* indicates low priority)

So it's been a reasonably successful month. There's just 2 tracks of gang vocals to do which should hopefully be finished by the next blog post, and goals 2) 3) & 4) despite some hitches have been completed well. The low priority 5) and 6) I've yet to make progress on. Setting some new goals for July, here's what I'd like to get done: 

1) Finish recording vocals for the new BTTB album (2 tracks left)
2) Finish lead guitar and solos for the BTTB album (10 tracks)
3) Finish keyboard parts for the BTTB album (5 tracks)
4) Sort out the Patreon Page *
(* indicates low priority)

Now due to injury, goals number 2) and 3) are very much dependant on the speed of my recovery, but I really hope I can get all the album stuff sorted ready to move onto horns next month, which'll put things back on the original schedule. The Patreon Page is still waiting on a video, but I really want to make sure I stay on track with the album as a high priority. I also have a fair few non-JabunAudio goals to sort this month, so we'll see how those do as well. Any goals you'd like to share? Feel free to leave them in the comments to keep yourself committed!

And that's about everything to report for this week. Hopefully finishing off the vocals and making a start on keyboard parts in the following week for me, and hopefully my finger will be all healed and ready for some guitaring soon too. Until the next blog post, hope you have a great week whatever you're up to and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio and my various projects. Take care!