Often times, people wonder with the busy lives we all have how we can still manage to put things like a new album together with our full time jobs, families, and distance between us. Below are some stories, videos and fun information that we thought woul be interesting to include in the website that tells some the inner workings of Voice Male, how we arrange and learn music, and record and produce and album.
Skyping: The new way to attend a recording or mixing session
The alternate 1st album cover
Taking promo photos in
our sounds man's garage.
COMING SOON!
Recording after hours in 2 Studios
COMING SOON!
Learning music with thousands of
miles between us.
COMING SOON!
The final mix
Skyping: Jammies and wigs optional
Producing our latest album, Jingles 3, was no easy task. Everyone's lives are busier than ever with Kids, jobs, and personal projects. Time is so valuable and precious that one of the new approaches we took this year to save as much time as we could with traveling was to use video conferencing software like Skype to participate in recording sessions when it made sense. You can see that Mike like's to give things a fun spin to keep things lively. It was very unique for us to try this so that we could collaborate and comment on how the mixes were going throughout the process. Mike Bearden and Bodie Brower (our live sound man, photographer, graphic designer, webmaster and also known as our 7th member) drove a lot of the production work when it came to recording and making the music sound as pretty as we could with modern technology and pulling from all the things we had learned from our previous albums. It's great that we could both sit in our homes to converse, comment and provide feedback on how things were sounding and make critical fixes according to how we wanted the album to sound the very best that it could. We will likely take this approach again as we continue to have projects like this in the future.
The alternate 1st album cover.
Usually with design it's not always the first idea that hits the home run (occasionally you might get lucky, but it's a good rule of thumb for sure. The Jingles 3 album cover was no exception. The overall goal with the new album cover was to see what we could do to make the album stand out from the fhe more monocromatic look of the previous albums and also rather than using clip art and repeating to create the pattern like was used in Jingles 1 and 2, the approach to set up everything using real christmas balls took place. This first idea you see below, was overall felt to be too cold and not the right color scheme that we wanted to portray in this 3rd album. It's very tricky trying to select colors that everything will feel like will work for a christmas album without repeating what we have used in the past. Overall, the concept was well recieved, we just need to hone in on the correct color scheme, make the cover feel less washed out and try to give it a bit more texture (by adding the fake snow). You'll see some behind the scenes images that our photographer Bodie Brower put together to give you an idea of how the final cover came together and the final adjustments that were made to achieve it. You might also note that trying to find Christmas balls at a local shop in town is very difficult to find in August. Thank goodness or Amazon which provided us with all the Christmas balls we needed to make this concept photographable.
The original proposed Jingles 3 album cover.
An inside look behind the Jingles 3 album cover in our Photographer's living room.
Taking Photos in our Sound Man's Garage
Here is a fun video clip we made as we were taking photos in our sound mans garage to prepare for all the visual material we needed to capture for our website, new Jingles 3 CD, and other advertising. Below is a small photo gallery that resulted from our great photo adventures.
