​June 2023 blog post: Illness, BTTB recording updates, website updates, an upcoming podcast interview and LOTS of YouTube guitar videos to share!

Hi everyone and hope you've had a great May (full of bank holidays over here in the UK)! It's been an increasingly busy time over here with wedding preparations and other stuff (only 3 months to go now), so things have been a bit distracted from music unfortunately (definitely nothing to do with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom either... DEFINITELY NOT...), but a little bit of progress has been made at least. Gang vocals and screaming are now complete for Better Than The Book's upcoming album so now it's just the rap and main singing stuff left to do recording-wise! Unfortunately before I got to start on that, I fell ill accompanied by a lingering very sore throat, so I'll have to wait for that to fully heal before I get back to it... Hopefully not too long. I think the plan will be to tackle things track by track now so its certainly coming on, although as usual slower than I'd hoped. There's lots of cool videos and news to share this month though so let's get to that! 

First on the news this month, something super cool that I can't wait to show you NEXT month! Out of that blue I was invited to be a guest on Newgrounds' "Off The Wall" podcast to talk about music, art, animation and other stuff for a little over 2 hours! This was my first time recording a live podcast (edited down but all recorded in one session over discord) so it was a bit nerveracking but an incredible experience. The episode is due for release on June 30th so I'll post it up in next month's rewards. Thanks so much to Aalasteir the host and the OffTheWallShow Podcast team for having me on and encouraging my ramblings!

Next, I've been continuing with my 2 guitar/gear videos a week on YouTube goals and so there's a lot of stuff to share from there! To save on links I've compiled a playlist now which'll be updated with new videos as they're released! Check it out below:

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

And here's a list of the new additions since last time! I hope you enjoy them (especially the Hurt cover)!

• Guitar Tapping Lick with 3 Variations
• My modified Crybaby Wah Wah Pedal sounds more like a "Whoa Whoa" Pedal?
• 6 vi IV I V Chord Sequence Variations Simple to Complex
• 10 Punk Strumming Patterns
• 10+ Punk Strumming Patterns for compound (triplet) time
• Johnny Cash / Nine Inch Nails - Hurt [Acoustic Cover]... but...
• Killswitch Engage - Rose of Sharyn (2 Parts on 1 Guitar chorus Cover)
• A John5 inspired octave rolls guitar lick

Finally this month, just another quick update. With the new habits and branding I've done some revamping on the Patreon front page as well as my websites! It's mostly done, though I'm still umming and ahhing about changing the bannners, and I've still got to properly sort out my portfolio on jabunaudio.com (eeeerghhhh), but it's getting there. I'm hoping the new layout will be a bit less TL:DR and keep as much of the essential stuff on the front page as possible, as well as trim down some of the excess content so to speak. Feel free to give some feedback and suggestions, and hopefully this'll be done soon too!

https://nickstanding.weebly.com/
https://www.jabunaudio.com/

That's it for this month, unless you're a $10 patron in which case you have an off-vocal demo of Better Than The Book's "Red Kite" (from the upcoming album) to look forward to! More wedding planning in the coming months until September, and I'll be aiming to get back to BTTB vocal recording as soon as I'm able to. In the mean time, there's still more guitar/gear videos to record, and I've been playing with some alternate tunings lately so that could be an interesting topic to cover! Until next time, I hope you enjoy all the new content and thanks as always for supporting me here and however you can! Take care and have a great June!

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Find out more: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding