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Hi everyone and hope you're having a great final week of February and are suitably filled with pancakes if you celebrated on Tuesday! It's been a reasonably relaxed week for the most part as my brother Eamon (Harmonica and 2nd guitarist from the BTTB live band) was over for a visit so I wasn't in the studio much while he was here. The rest of my week has been catching up on admin things and practicing more Better Than The Book live stuff, as well as topping the Jabun album demos up to 55+ minutes just about! Nevertheless there are are fair few things to report this week with new video clips and Patreon rewards to share so let's get to it! First of all, another LIVE video clip to share with you today from a mini Better Than The Book rehearsal in January 2020! This time we’re playing "Cathode Ray Days" from the Two Years On album and the main purpose of this practice was to go over vocal harmonies, of which Cathode Ray Days has a lovely 3 part section in the 2nd verse! Hope you enjoy this more intimate practice and check out the video below! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74tWk9zcn8
Line-up: Nick Standing: Composer, Guitar + lead vocals Eamon Standing: Harmonica + backing vocals Sam Brown: Bass + backing vocals Andy Forman: Drumsticks + sofa "Cathode Ray Days" and the rest of the Two Years On album are available on all major digital distributors as well as the Better Than The Book Bandcamp page: https://betterthanthebook.bandcamp.com/ Or of course you can pick them up if you haven't already when you become a supporter on Patreon! Easy peasy with a side serving of the full Better Than The Book discography and more when you sign up, and with the project going live, we could use all the support we can get to push it as far as possible! Another set of $5 rewards was just posted too (which we'll get to in a second) so come join the community: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding Just 4 more of these videos to come over the next month, but next time we’re moving from short clips to some full song play-throughs from the first LIVE and loud rehearsal session! Subscribe to the BTTB YouTube channel to get them fresh off the press, and I'll see you next week for another one! Onto the next piece of news for this week, yesterday was the final Wednesday of the month which means another set of reward posts for the $5 and $10 supporters on Patreon are out, and this time we have the next track from Jabun's discography and the only one to be released in 2014: Home! Home is another track which holds a special place in my heart as I wrote and released it in the weeks coming up to Eva and I's 1st anniversary. It's a wonderful expression of the amalgamations of my musical history and various influences, piano combining with full orchestra and many synths, a parallel to the wonderful new life I'd discovered over the past year (excuse the soppiness)! The main plucky synth was a Moog Prodigy emulator, the Prodigy (synth) being probably my all-time favourite mono-synth and my go-to for all my analogue mono-synth sounds even to this day. Amazingly enough, on our first anniversary, Eva and I went to London where we first confessed our feelings and I found and played on a REAL vintage Moog Prodigy on Denmark Street! Home was my first track as Jabun to be given a Front Page award on Newgrounds, and as with its predecessor Distance would go on to be remastered for the 2017 Jabun album: Daydream! I hope you enjoy Home: Listen on Bandcamp: https://jabun.bandcamp.com/track/home For those of you interested too, the artwork for Home was based around a picture my mum took in the back garden of our family home in Sussex, UK! Thanks for letting me use the photo, Ma! For the $10 patrons, you've got another exclusive demo from Jabun's upcoming 2nd album to look forward to as well as an article on the composition/production process for it! Become a $10 patron to access that article and many more now, and remember that you'll gain access to all historic rewards and posts for your Patreon tier too when you become a supporter! With the new REWARD ARCHIVE tag it's never been easier to catch up with all those posts and music downloads you've missed too! I hope you enjoy them :) https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding That's it for this month's rewards! There aren't any 2015 Jabun tracks to share, so next time we'll be moving onto the 2016 Jabun discography, or perhaps something entirely different, or maybe even both; I've not quite decided yet! Whatever the case I hope you have an excellent time whatever you're up to until then and thanks as always for supporting Better Than the Book, Jabun and my various projects on Patreon! Take care and enjoy the tunes :) And that's it for today's update too. I'll be back next time with the first of the full song LIVE rehearsal videos and some $1 Patreon rewards and I'm sure there'll be more exciting news to share too! Looking forward to it and until then, thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio, Jabun and Better Than The Book and I hope you have a great week! Take care!
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Hi everyone and hope you're having a splendid week so far! It's been a reasonably busy time here at JabunAudio, working on the upcoming Jabun album, as well as mixing the mystery cover song and doing promo work for some of the other news I'm about to share: another Better Than The Book LIVE rehearsal video + some exciting radio news! No time to wait! Let's begin! First of all this week I have another video clip to share with you from Better Than The Book's first full-band rehearsal back in December, and this time it's "Hearts Racing" (again)! Again this would have been the 2nd time ever that we'd have played this song together as a full band so it's still a little rough around the edges, but I think you'll enjoy the step up in energy since the small jam meet-up previously! Check it out below! Line-up: Nick Standing: Composer, 1st guitar + lead vocals Eamon Standing: Harmonica + backing vocals Sam Brown: Bass + backing vocals Andy Forman: Drums "Hearts Racing" and the rest of the Two Years On album are available on all major digital distributors as well as the Better Than The Book Bandcamp page: https://betterthanthebook.bandcamp.com/ Or of course you can pick them up if you haven't already when you become a supporter on Patreon! Easy peasy with a side serving of the full Better Than The Book discography and more, and with the project going live, we could use all the support we can get to push it as far as possible! Come join the community: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding 5 more of these videos to come over the next 2 months, and it just keeps getting better from here (IMO)! Subscribe to the BTTB YouTube channel to get them fresh off the press, and I'll see you next week for another one! Onto this week's exciting radio show news, last night "And I Fear" from Better Than The Book's Hopes and Dreams album made its radio debut on Union JACK Radio's Underdogs show! With "And I Fear" played, that makes a whopping 8/10 tracks from the Hopes and Dreams album to have made onto the radio worldwide, which is phenomenal! Thanks so much to Union Jack Radio and everyone else for all the BTTB love, and tune in to listen to lots of great British music over on Union JACK Radio: https://www.unionjack.co.uk/ That's it for this week's update, and I'll be back next time with another video clip, more $5 Patreon rewards, and more news to report I'm sure! Looking forward to it and until then, thanks as always for supporting Better Than The Book, JabunAudio and my various music projects! Have a fun week, and take care! Hi everyone and hope you're having a great week so far! I certainly am as I'm no longer ill in bed, so it's been back to the usual music making and practicing routines over here, though I'm still feeling restless wanting to do more ALL THE TIME! An especially inspired time working on the upcoming Jabun album has topped up the project's current duration to 44+ minutes of demos, and I've been working hard mixing this mystery cover song too which is going well! Onto the main news for this week I've got another Better Than The Book live video clip to share with you + some Spotify news as you can see from the post's title! Let's get started! First on the news this week, here's a LIVE and LOUD video clip of "Watching Airships" from the very first Better Than The Book full-band rehearsal back in December! Now bear in mind this would have been the 2nd time EVER that we'd have played this song together (the first time being maybe half an hour before the video was taken), and it was our first day gelling as a full band too, so it's a little bit rough around the edges, but I thought it turned out pretty darn good and I hope you enjoy seeing the full BTTB live band in action! Check it out Live band line-up: Nick Standing: Composer, 1st guitar + lead vocals Eamon Standing: 2nd guitar + backing vocals Sam Brown: Bass + backing vocals Andy Forman: Drums Watching Airships and the rest of the One Small Step EP are available on all major digital distributors as well as the Better Than The Book Bandcamp page: https://betterthanthebook.bandcamp.com/ Or of course you can pick them up if you haven't already when you become a supporter on Patreon! Easy peasy with a side serving of the full Better Than The Book discography and more, and with the project going live, we could use all the support we can get to push it as far as possible! Come join the community: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding 6 more of these videos to come over the next 2 months, and it just keeps getting better from here (IMO)! Subscribe to the BTTB YouTube channel to get them fresh off the press, and I'll see you next week for another one! Next and lastly on the news this week, some cool news as after being on the platform for a few years now, Better Than The Book and Jabun are now both verified on the global streaming platform Spotify! Check out the updated pages below complete with bio, extra photos and more: BTTB - https://open.spotify.com/artist/4GUCmKQoIk3bNWGiXDGkrp Jabun - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6Ig1iozkpNv4mOGHJFny73 The ONLY thing I wasn't able to update on them is the upcoming gigs sections, which are populated automatically by services such as Ticketmaster so I couldn't contribute to them manually. With that being the case, Head over to the BTTB website for the most up to date gig info: https://betterthanthebookuk.weebly.com/ (and I'll be sure to let you know if and when Jabun decides to go live too!) Hope you enjoy the new pages and enjoy listening to my music on Spotify! That's it for this week! Another BTTB full band live clip will be coming next time, and in the mean time I'll be practicing hard for the next full band meet-up while working on my current music projects and trying to get a solid practice routine sorted! Until the next post, I hope you have a great week of your own too and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio, Better Than The Book and my various projects! Take care!
Hello everyone and hope you're having a wonderful start to February! I don't say this often at all, but it's been a... "meh" kind of week here at JabunAudio, as I've been off for most of it dosed up on Lemsip which means no vocals + I burnt my left index finger on the hob which means an unwanted break from guitar too... With the time I have been here though (or typing social media posts from bed), it has been a pretty productive week working on this month's targets and goals which we'll get to in a moment, but before all that, some extra special things to share with you this week! Let's get to it!
First of all, some celebrations! How quickly time flies and would you believe that 4 years ago today, Better Than The Book released its debut full-length album Two Years On! It's also of course the 3rd anniversary of the Two Years On [Instrumentals] bonus album, and man oh man has it been a heck of a ride since these albums came out! Check them out on Bandcamp if you've yet to hear them: https://betterthanthebook.bandcamp.com/ To celebrate (and next in this week's big news), I think it's about time we get this live show rolling, so here's a clip from the VERY FIRST meet-up of the Better Than The Book LIVE band from back in August last year! I know a lot of you have been waiting YEARS for this day, so here's a short clip of Hearts Racing from the Two Years On album from Bassist Sam's living room! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did getting this all together! The line-up is as follows: Nick Standing: Composer, 1st guitar + lead vocals Eamon Standing: Harmonica + backing vocals Sam Brown: Bass Andy Forman: 2nd guitar Andy's usually on drums, but he had his guitar this time! There are 7 more of these videos to come over the next 2 months, and it just gets better from here (IMO)! Subscribe to the BTTB YouTube channel to get them fresh off the press as they come, and support Better Than The Book and the rest of my music on Patreon for the FULL BTTB Discography, monthly rewards and more! https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding And speaking of Patreon, the $1 rewards for February have just been sent out, Mp3 and Artwork downloads for Jabun's 2013 single Distance (+ all historic rewards for your tier)! Read more and check out the rewards via the posts below: Read more: https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-rewards-have-33000130 $1 rewards: https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-patron-rewards-33000133 Finally this week, it's the beginning of the month which means time to reflect on last month goals and set some new ones! Here's what I had for January: 1) Write & record 30+ minutes of rough demos for the 2nd Jabun album (total) 2) Finish recording vocals for that cover song 3) Update the websites (change the dates, update descriptions on front page etc...) 4) Sort the next set of Patreon rewards 5) Sort the arrangement and practice materials for the next set of 7 BTTB songs 6) Set up a BTTB Instagram account and share the links on the web etc... 7) Hang up and mark up my JabunAudio world map 8) Sort through all the BTTB footage from the practice(s) and get ready to upload it And I think things went super well this month! 1) There are currently 36+ minutes of rough demos for the 2nd Jabun album, so I hit a fair bit above the target! 2) Is FINALLY DONE (just in time for another cold and bad throat). 3), 4), 5), 6) done! 7) The map is all marked up but looks like I don't have the wall-space to hang it at the moment, so it's currently rolled up with the microphone stands. I'm not too bothered that I couldn't hang it right now, but it was sure fun to fill in, and hopefully I'll have some space in the future! And 8) That's all done, and as you can see the first video has already been uploaded + published! Overall a cracking month for goals and targets! Horray! Onto goals for the coming month, I've already made a start with these so the Patreon rewards for next month are already sorted + I've already uploaded and scheduled the 7 other BTTB live videos too! That's 2 things off my goals list already. Here's the rest of them: 1) Develop a general exercise / vocal workout / BTTB practice routine 2) Get this cover song mixed and rough mastered ready to send for some feedback 3) Write 50+ minutes of rough demos for the upcoming 2nd Jabun album (total) 4) Get verified and sort my profiles for Jabun and Better Than The Book on Spotify (update socials + website with links) Doesn't seem like as many goals this month, but on top of the ones already completed, I have a handful on non-music related personal ones too, and with it being February (the shortest month), I'm sure this'll be PLENTY to get on with! 1) I've actually already mostly got the general exercise routine down, it's just implementing the other workouts around it that needs doing. 2) It's all edited now and is getting there with regards the mix, so hopefully shouldn't be too much of a strain, though it's venturing out of my comfort zone a little. 3) I think will be the most challenging, I just need to keep at it and develop more of these partially completed ideas for another 14 minutes of finished demos. And 4) I've actually already been verified (as of a few days ago), but I need to go through and sort all the profiles + update links in all those other places. Should hopefully be smooth sailing! Any goals on your end you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below so we can keep each other accountable, and best of luck! And that wraps things up for this post! Another BTTB live clip will be coming in the next one and once I've shaken off this illness I'm sure I'll be back to my usual productive self (very much looking forward to playing guitar and singing again). Until the next one, I hope you enjoy the new video and have a great time whatever you're up to and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio, Better Than The Book and my various projects! See you in the next one and take care! Get more from Jabun and Better Than The Book on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding |
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