BTTB bonus album official announcement, some Jabun album updates, a mammoth 20 million views for Fun Station 4 Kids + more!

It's been a few weeks since the last blog post as I was ill in bed and out of it for pretty much the whole of last week (Monday to Sunday). Hope you all had a better time than I did! Having said that, the latter half of last week was pretty exciting as it was the annual winter NAMM convention in California, where all the music tech manufacturers were showing off their new gear to be released in this coming quarter. The news feed from that kept me in high spirits while I was recovering and there's certainly some pretty cool new stuff out that I'll be restraining my wallet from! Anyway, the past week has been a productive and busy one catching up on things I've missed and working on the new Jabun album (more on that later), and I imagine the weekend is likely to continue that trend. Lots of cool things to tell this week so lets get to it!

​First of all, I'd like to take the time today to officially announce the release of the new Better Than The Book bonus album! In 10 days time it'll be exactly one year since "Two Years On", Better Than The Book's first full length album, was released on Bandcamp and to celebrate I'll be releasing this special bonus album, the contents of which will remain a mystery until the day. It's nothing super fancy, but I can tell you it's 11 tracks long and has a total run time of 29:56. The full album will go live at Midnight on February 6th 2017 on Bandcamp as well as on the Better Than The Book and HurpADervish YouTube Channels, with SoundCloud and Newgrounds following soon afterwards. Over the subsequent weeks the album will be released track by track as well on the Better Than The Book YouTube channel. Everything thing is all sorted, uploaded and ready to go live, and the album has even been approved for worldwide distribution on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and various other online places, though these are due to start appearing from February 10th onwards. Anyway, techno mumbo jumbo aside, thank you all so much for supporting Better Than The Book and making 2016 a fantastic year for the project. I hope you enjoy the bonus album and it keeps your ska punk hunger satisfied while I work on the next one. Make a note on your calendar, and get ready for some more Better Than The Book.

Better Than The Book
- ??? -

Midnight, February 6th 2017
https://betterthanthebook.bandcamp.com/music

Of course, those aren't the actual artwork and album title, just place markers for this announcement. I'll post it up on the blog properly once the album's out!

Next on the news this week is just a little update on how the Jabun album is going. With the bonus BTTB album coming up I took some time away from Jabun to sort that out and the associated admin stuff, but now that that's (almost) out of the way, I've been back this week working on Jabun again! I'm pleased to report that now 9 out of 10 of the tracks are written and recorded (and roughly mixed) and it's just the final track left to do! This last one's a little longer and is sort of in 3 parts too. Breaking it down like that, the first part is done and it's just the final 2 parts to go, which probably equates to the last 4-5 minutes of the album left to write and record! Progress is going well and I'm hoping to have it all recorded by the end of the month. After that it'll just be polishing up all the tracks with a final mixdown and master, sorting the artwork and getting all the admin stuff sorted and ready to release it! I've still not quite got a release date in mind, and I'm still pondering on the album title, but once this final track is recorded I'd love to share a track-list on the blog to give you some food for thought! I'll be back to working on it as soon as I've posted this up, so hopefully that'll be on the next blog post! Stay tuned to find out and feel free to follow me on twitter for a more immediate news feed. Can't wait to show this to the world!

Next on the big news this week, I'd like to extend a huge congratulations to Fun Station 4 Kids for hitting a mammoth 20 million views on YouTube! Such numbers are ones I've never seen before and it brings me so much joy that so many people are enjoy the content we've worked so hard to create (and when I say we, it's mostly the fantastic Anthony!). Although it's been a little break since the last animation, there is definitely more to come and I can't wait to be working on it again! If you've yet to see any, please go and watch "The Three Little Raptors and the Big Bad T-Rex", for a taste of what Fun Station for Kids has to offer. It also happens to be the first animation I ever worked on audio post-production for so it really holds a special place in my heart! Hope you enjoy it, and feel free to subscribe to FS4Ks for more brilliant animations coming soon!

One last little bit of news: earlier this week I took part in another interview with Live A Little Bit Louder (who now have a Facebook page), this time not really about my own music, but about being a musician in general. This ones a little different as as far as I know, it's a collaborative interview between lots of artists, so it'll take a while to put together, but I'm really pleased with the contributions I've made and I hope you find it fun to read when it finally comes out (especially if you're a musician). I've heard a rough ETA of March, but nothing concrete just yet, and in case you can't wait, here's the last interview I did with Live A Little Bit Louder about "Two Years On" and some other stuff. Hope you enjoy it, and I'll be sure to post up the new one once it goes live! 

That's just about everything to report this week. Hoping to have the Jabun album all written and recorded by the next blog post, and we'll just have to see what other stuff happens over the next 7 days (I'm expecting some things). I any case, I hope you all have a wonderful week and are getting psyched up for both of the new albums, and I look forward to sharing more news soon! Thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio and all my projects and have a great time! Take care!