​August 2024 Blog Post: Better Than The Book's new album is mastered and out to beta testers before the final cut, an amazing London trip (Spirited Away, Pipe Organ & meeting one of my heroes) + celebrating with collaborators and more!

Hi everyone and apologies for the slightly delayed post this month! I hope you've had a great time since the last one, and over here's it's been a super busy and exciting one to report so I hope that makes up for the delay! Lot's to go through this month so let's get to it!

First on the updates for this month, some big news from BTTB! As of yesterday, I've just rendered the first finished master test for the complete 14 track album and finally sent it over to my team of 2nd ears for a sanity check before it goes out to the world! Essentially, unless they have any specific quarrels, then the audio for the album is complete and it's just a final round of checks, exports and checking exports then the master audio will be considered finished, then just 4 quick radio edits to make/check etc... We're in the endgame now and man oh man I can't wait to share this with the world! It's been a long and difficult 5 years since Hopes and Dreams but man oh man, I think you'll hear how far 5 years of extra experience goes! Not long to wait now!

Onto some less project related and more casual fun updates, earlier last month I went on an amazing trip to London to go see the Spirited Away stage play which was phenomenal! Despite that being the aim of the trip though, that show wasn't the only highlight of the day. When we arrived at London Bridge Station, I had the pleasure of finding and playing London Bridge Station's famous recently rescued pipe organ "Henry" which was amazing (video coming to YouTube at some point)! It's likely been over 10 years now since I last had the opportunity to play pipe organ and man oh man it feels so good to be back to it! As you can expect, I've been spending even more time with my own Yamaha YC-25D organ since that day. Inspiration has been flowing like a broken tap!

That's not all for the day though, on a routine trip to Denmark Street, which has changed a lot in the few years since I was last there, I had the amazing fortune of completely by chance meeting one of my biggest electronic engineering heroes Ade Emsley! For those who don't know, he's a legend among the music tech community in a 2-fold way! On top of being head of engineering and design at Orange Amplifiers; the guy who designed virtual every Orange amp and pedal and more since the late 90s, the guy who STARTED the lunchbox/small amp head trend with the Tiny Terror, the guy who designed the very amp I use for playing organ, and live Better Than The Book performances (and much of the recording on the new record), he's also an industry legend as a mastering engineer with credits such as... the most recent few Iron Maiden albums + their entire back catalog of remasters (designing and building his own mastering rig I might add)! Needless to say, it's been a while since I was that star-struck, but I had a nice quick conversation with him and told him how much his work has inspired me before leaving him to it. I hope he enjoyed the encounter too. What a great day!

The following morning Sam, Eamon and I got together sans Andy for a Better Than The Book vocal harmonies and quiet practice session to brush up some of the tunes. It was so nice to jam again in a more relaxed setting where we weren't paying for the clock and hopefully we'll get back to some full loud-boi band practicing with Andy soon!

Onto some collaborative news now, first of all I'd like to congratulate Sif Savery and the Tales of Zale team for reaching a whopping 1 million views on YouTube for our Tales of Zale: Flickering Lights short film released back in 2022! Crazy to think that it's been seen that many times now and I'm so glad that people have been enjoying our biggest animation project so far! Hope to be working with the team again at some point and check out Sif's post on Patreon all about it. Woot woot and well done team!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/108536096

Next, a newcomer of collaboration (sort of), and man oh man is this guy crazy, but I was asked to help out with some vocal editing and the final music mastering for a genre switching, A.I and stock photos collage editing madness monster of a rap track "Smack a Fish (Motha Sharka)" by eterniTRex! The music is all real musicians and vocalists (no A.I. used) while the video is a collage of A.I. generated and stock images, animated manually animutation-style for a wacky music video crazier than anything you can possibly imagine. It was a fun project to be a part of and the track / music video even got featured on the All Metal Everything music blog (with a fun write up too)! Check it out below:

​https://allmetaleverything.com/eternitrex-smack-a-fish-motha-sharka/ 

Finally for this month, although I've been falling behind a bit on my pre-scheduled recording, I'm still keeping up with the 2 videos a week YouTube stream for now! It's been a synthy and Better Than The Book live band time recently, with more to come soon! Check out the playlist below:

​https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWEmqIhrNPvQTBoOjZdKLgL4ecTvLz6sm

And here's a list of the latest additions:

• KORG Volca Modular Live Jabun Practice
• Homecoming into Hearts Racing BTTB LIVE Practice (Clip)
• Undead Education BTTB LIVE Practice (Clip)
• Cathode Ray Days BTTB LIVE Practice (Clip)
• Plot Holes BTTB LIVE Practice (Clip)
• Hold Me Tight into Bump In The Night Full BTTB LIVE Practice
• Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight Intro cover on KORG Electribe EM-1
• Pale Waves Television Romance Intro cover on KORG Electribe EM-1

August has already started with another KORG EM-1 cover, an unattended synth session, and an 808 celebration and will continue with more synthy stuff and a guitar interlude to come! Hope you enjoy it!

And that about wraps things up for this month (unless you're a $10 patron in which case you have a download of that unattended synth session to look forward to)! Hopefully by the next time I write another of these, the master audio for the new Better Than The Book album will be complete and I'll be onto drafting up some artwork! In the mean time, I've got some video recording to catch up on too and I'm sure there'll be other things coming to keep me busy. Until next time, I hope you have a great month to come, enjoy all the new videos, and thanks as always for supporting my work! New Better Than The Book album is almost there! Get excited!

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