July 2024 Blog Post: Almost time to master Better Than The Book's upcoming album (1 mix left to polish), back to Jabun ambient music, more YouTube videos + some other updates!

Hi everyone and hope you've had a good June and kept as cool as you can (it's been hot)! It's the start of another month which means time for more updates and rewards and it's a mixed bag in terms of the news this time, but things are progressing well although slowly. Let's get to it:

Starting with the upcoming Better Than The Book album, I'm about a week behind my revised schedule from what's been a super busy month of mixing tweaks and really polishing this album up to the absolute best of my ability and as it stands there's just 1 more mix left to finish before it's mastering time! It's coming on, but there's still a way to go and it's feeling slow. I'm hoping by the next update the "preliminary final" audio will be ready and out for field testing, i.e.: sending it out to a couple of people for their thoughts while playing it around on different systems on my end to see how well it's going. Busy busy, but when is that not the case these days!

Carrying on with Better Than The Book news, when I mentioned potential upcoming disruptions this wasn't what I had in mind but the BTTB live drummer Andy has been sent away for work so July's band practice has been downsized to a 3 part harmony and backing vocals session with just Eamon and Sam, which is ok as it's something we've been needing to go over, but I was looking forward to cranking amps and kicking out the jams again. Full band practices have been postponed for the moment, but I'm hoping with any luck we can get back to it in September? I'd still like to aim for a gig by the end of the year, but we'll have to see how the cards play out...

Onto some other news, with BTTB stuff shaping up in many ways, I've been back to some Jabun ambient explorations in my free evenings and it's been a great time! There's still another 70+ minutes of (less ambient; more beat based) Jabun demos waiting to be put into an album (or multiple) after this Better Than The Book album is done, but along with some live synth performances and practicing which you'll be seeing in YouTube videos to come, I've also been working on what I'm calling a hyper ambient remix album stemming for the 15-4-20 album! As with most Jabun ambient tracks it started off with simple experiments but what was probably around an hour of experimenting over the course of 3 sessions resulted in over 6 HOURS of (NOT A.I. GENERATED) dreamlike ambient soundscapes on a completely different level to anything else I've created in the past! I imagine this 3 track; 6 hour remix album will be the next Jabun release to come (maybe even before the end of the year depending on BTTB stuff). Exciting times! Let's get that BTTB album finished first though. In the mean time, I'll be continuing with practicing and experimenting with some live Jabun ambient performances when I have some free evenings! Expect to see those on YouTube soon!

And speaking of YouTube, it's another jam packed playlist this month with a load of organ videos, some Open D tuning guitar and some rotary speaker guitar experiments! Check out the playlist below:

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

And here's a list of the latest additions:

• Spyro The Dragon Inspired Organ Groove
• Crash Bandicoot Xylophone sound on Organ
• Avril Lavigne What The Hell Organ Intro Tutorial
• Open D Tuning is underated
• Post nightshift Open D slide Jam
• Come As You Are but with Leslie
• Leslie Chorus + echo on guitar Numetal inspired
• Phaser vs Slow Leslie on Organ
• Flanger vs Fast Leslie on Organ

Next month's videos are going to be full of synths, groove boxes and back to the Better Than The Book live practice videos but this time with Sam's fancy monitoring system for some cleaner audio so hope you enjoy the videos to come!

And that about wraps things up for this update, unless you're a $10 Patreon supporter in which case you have a Jabun live synth performance to look forward to! More disruptions are still potentially on the horizon but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. July looks to be busy with finishing off the BTTB album audio + a trip away including a mini-practice session + trying to keep up with everything else... I'll keep you posted with what's going on when I know, but it sure it busy at the moment! Until next time, thanks as always for supporting my work however you can, enjoy all the music and videos, and hope you have a good July to come! Take care!

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