It's the last blog post of the year, and it's coming a little earlier than usual since I'll be heading back to Sussex tomorrow for the Christmas break! What a year it's been at JabunAudio and to end things, I have some awesome things to share and reflect on for the final post of 2016. Let's get to it!

Firstly this week, and this has been something which has been in the works for a long time, I'm so pleased to present on behalf of Vlad from World Beyond, the new World Beyond soundtrack album: Mindshell! I've been working with Vlad since our first collaboration "Mountains of Gold" in early 2013, and I must say, this guy is not only talented and hard working, but also just a fantastic guy to hang around and make music with! The album itself combines all the usual things I've come to expect from World Beyond: cinematic and orchestral elements with electronic and heavy rock elements in a seamless and epic way, and at over an hour long with 21 spectacular tracks, I'd say it's one heck of an achievement! In terms of my involvement with the album, I'm playing guitar on track 13 "The Rescue" and helped Vlad with the testing and finalisation of the audio in the past few weeks, acting as his second set of ears so to speak. It's great to be part of such a project! A huge well done to Vlad for all his hard work putting this together (go catch up on that sleep my friend) and if you'd like to read more about the album, I encourage you to visit this post on the World Beyond website. Without further wait, here's Mindshell (available on Bandcamp)!

Next this week and the other main surprise, as promised for before this year was out, I present to you today the first teaser for the new (and debut) Jabun album! Initially I'd hoped to have this all finished and out by the end of the year, but circumstance and work has delayed things and I figured it's much better to take my time to make it sound its best. I will not however leave you hanging and waiting for at least a taste of what's to come! There's still a fair bit of composition work to do on the album as well as production, but it's certainly coming along and I'm aiming to have it all finished by Spring 2017. Still need to think of a name too! Anyway, without further wait (as you'll have to wait a little longer to hear the full thing anyway), I present to you a taste of whats to come from Jabun in 2017! Hope you enjoy it:

Also if you're wondering, the video is a compilation of demos from the album featuring the tracks: Dreaming Pt. 1, Morning, Distance, Anxiety, Palindrome, Home, and Dreaming Pt. 3. A few more tracks are to be added to that list, as well as some which are already done but just aren't in the teaser! Keep your eyes on this blog for more updates and I'm looking forward to working more on the album in the new year!

Next this week, some Better Than The Book news! It's not often I get to look back and celebrate a big milestone for a project, but would you believe that 4 years ago this week, BTTB put out its first release, the One Small Step EP! So much stuff has happened since then, not only for BTTB but also for me and JabunAudio as a business. Heck JabunAudio didn't even EXIST back then! Since the One Small Step EP, Better Than The Book has cut its very first CDs (and yes there are still a few available), recorded its first cover song, cut it's first vinyl (none to give away I'm afraid), had songs performed live by another band, made its debut full length album Two Years On, had its first typography video, beeninterviewed in blogs and been even played on international radio! It's crazy to think what can happen in 4 years, and it's nice to look upon the thing which started it all. I certainly was a younger producer back then and had very little idea what I was doing, but One Small Step will always hold a huge place in my heart. Happy fourth anniversary, and I look forward to taking the project even further in the years to come! If you've yet to hear the One Small Step EP, then what are you waiting for? Check it out on bandcamp below, and I hope you enjoy it!

And lastly this week for things to share, more stuff from Better Than The Book! Earlier this week I received a message from Eric Conroy on Newgrounds asking whether he'd be able to use Make Your Mark (from the Two Years On album) in a video, and naturally I said "sure thing"! This morning he sent over a link to the video and I must say it is simply wonderful! Featuring clips from a whole plethora of well loved games, the music fits the video so well and so I just had to share it on the blog this week! Big props to Eric for putting this together and really glad you liked the music. Feel free to check the video below and visit the full post on Facebook here:

And I guess that means I can can add being featured in a(n animated) video to the list of BTTB achievements too! I'd love to see more of these with Better Than The Book playing in the background!

And that's it for this week and this year (no post next week)! It's been a crazy one but there's still a little left to go, so I'll reflect on 2016's achievements in the first post of 2017. It'll likely be a short one as I wouldn't have even had a full week back in the studio, but I'll also use it talk about my plans for 2017 and other stuff like that (hint: Jabun album in case it wasn't obvious and BTTB will be back too!) Until then, thank you for all your support during 2016 and years past and I hope you enjoy the new album, the new album teaser, the old EP and the new video! Happy Holidays and best wishes for the winter break and thank you as always for supporting JabunAudio and all of my projects. Take care and see you in the new year!

It's been a super busy week finishing of the Yu-Gi-Oh! episode as well as some other very cool things which will be revealed next week (so be sure to tune in!) Unfortunately I've been so caught up in other projects that the Jabun album has been neglected for yet another week, though I have had some musical insptiration with regards the project at least, so I look forward to putting that into action soon! The Cyberdevil collabration SoundCloud transfer is now complete too with "From Ash To Alabaster" being the final addition to the Cyberdevil page. As mentioned previously, I'll be taking the streams off my ownJabun page in the new year, but I'll let you know when that happens, and of course, they're all still free to download for your listening pleasure! Check out the full playlist of Cyberdevil & Jabun collaborations below, and lets get started with the rest of this week's news. Enjoy!

So firstly, as mentioned earlier I finished my first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! (Episode 8) this week which was undoubtedly the biggest audio post-production challenge I've faced so far, and very much excercised my foley and sound design muscles which was a nice variation on the usual mixing-only jobs I take. Since the vocals have yet to be dubbed onto it, I've no information yet on the release schedule but I'll keep you all updated when I hear more. In the mean time, I've been given my full production list for the series: I'll be next working on episodes 16 and 24, then the thirty minute end of season film, and then it's onto the next series! Still waiting on the next RAW so it'll be the new year by the time I'm fully working on this again. Looking forward to it though and I'll let you know any further details as and when I hear them.

Next this week, on Wednesday the ADAM Audio Soundtrack competition 2016 results were announced and unfortunatly there were no wins or sets of monitors for Noir. On the bright side though it was a great inspiration to write, and now that the competition period is over, I can provide you Noir for use in your own media projects should you want to use it. If you need a short film-noir-esq insert for you series or video feel free to give me a buzz and we can discuss using it in your productions. Hope to hear from you, and if you've yet to hear the track feel free to listen again below. Enjoy!

Lastly this week, I recieved a lovely email from Jeff Bengford who earlier this year commissioned an instrumental recreation of the Charlotte's Web 1973 Animation's soundtrack for his theatre group. In the message, as well as wishing me a Happy Holiday, he shared a video about his theatre's performance of the show featuring the music I created along with live singing and dancing on stage. It's simply wonderful to see how it all came together in context and I'm thrilled to be able to take part in productions such as this one all over the globe. If you're interested, and I highly recommend it, feel free to watch the video via the link below. I look forward to be doing more of this kind of work in the future!

​westmont.cuhsd.org/apps/news/article/592143

And if you'd like to hear all the instrumental tracks I produced for the show, feel free to check out this YouTube playlist. Enjoy:
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That's it for this week! Next week will be the final update of the year and I'm happy to announce there will be a couple of cool surprises for it, so make sure you stop on by next week. It may indeed come earlier too as I'll be off for the holiday period, but I'll post a link on the JabunAudio Facebook page as usual whenever it's up! Plans for next week are mainly winding down for the holidays, definitely some chill Jabun stuff, and depending on if I recieve the next RAW, maybe some Yu-Gi-Oh! too? I'll be trying to get everything sorted and set-up so I can come back fresh in 2017 and get started up straight away (that's the plan anyways!). Until next time, hope you all have great weeks, get some hot chocolate and wrap up warm and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio. Take care!
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It's been a busy week here at JabunAudio and as you've probably already read in the title of this post, I have some amazing news to share today! Some more updates to talk about later, but for now, let's get straight to the main attraction:

​So at the end of last week, I recieved an email inviting me (on recommendation from another animation audio engineer) to an amazing project and probably the biggest opportunity of my audio post-production career so far! The email was from the head of an independent starting-up English dubbing group called Anilliance, offering me a position in their audio department as one of 7 remote engineers to bring life to their projects. My role would be to take the raw anime audio as reference, and recreate (as closely as possible) by using the soundtracks and sound effects provided, as well as recreating a lot of sounds myself and sampling the reference where possible, an off-vocal version of the episode provided (i.e.: everything apart from the voices, which would be dubbed over and mixed in by another engineer). A great mix of both an engineering and creative role, so of course I was thinking YES from the start! If I needed any convincing though, well just keep reading:

So what was the first show they were working on? It was none other than the incredibly well known (to my generation at least) "Yu-Gi-Oh!" Those of you who were teenagers on the 00s will no doubt have watched the English dub of "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters" on TV, as well as the subsequent dubbed series and movies, and for me, the series and franchise definitely conjures up great memories: the card game, the TV series itself, and of course LittleKuriboh's fantastic "abridged series" which pretty much invented the comedy abridging genre of internet videos!

Now for most of us Duel Monsters would have been our first experience of the franchise, as it was the first season licenced for an official English dub, BUT there is a previous season (often referred to in the English as "Season 0") which was never dubbed in English or even aired outside of Japan. This Season 0 will be Anilliance's first full scale English dub (referred to as a Fandub as it's not officially licensed), and my first project with them!

So just to give you an idea of the scale of all this, each episode is a standard TV length of 23 minutes (approx) and there are 28 episodes in total for the series (to give you some context, the longest animation of this type I've worked on so far was "Tales of Zale - Episode 2" which was about 7 minutes long). Now of course it'd be pretty insane for me to be doing all that by myself which is why there are 7 audio engineers working on the series, giving us 4 episodes to work on each (phew!). The first episode I'll be working on (and in fact I've done a lot of it this week already!) is episode 8. I'm not entirely sure of the schedule, but I've heard that once the series is done, it'll be aired on a weekly basis online starting (if all goes to plan) in April 2017. I'm super excited to be working on this, it's really a dream come true and I'll keep you all updated with how everything goes. If this series is successful too, I'm sure there'll be a big chance of moving onto even more un-dubbed anime in the future. Only time will tell!

That's about all the main news for this week, but a big piece of news it was and certainly, it's a very exciting time at the moment! I unfortunately didn't have any time to work on the Jabun album this week, but my thumb's feeling a whole lot better and I'm back to playing guitar so that's nice. As discussed last week with regards the Cyberdevil SoundCloud handovers, "Cyberdevi's Back" (the 2013 one) is now being hosted on the Cyberdevil SoundCloud page, and "From Ash To Alabaster" will follow shortly. I'll be removing the uploads from my own page in due time to make room for the new Jabun album (I'll keep you posted), but for now, they'll still be there as well. Plans for next week, I do wish to get something done on the Jabun album, but Yu-Gi-Oh! Episode 8 is my current priority, so we shall have to see. Until then, I hope you all have great weeks and stay warm (it's getting chilly), and I'll see you next Friday for another update. Thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio and all my projects and take care!