The Hard Modes - Extra Lives, Vol. 2
New album of 2023 live recordings out now!
I’m excited to announce the latest release of my video game jazz band, The Hard Modes: Extra Lives, Vol. 2! This album has been a long time coming—it’s our first since we released The LAN Sessions in June 2022.
It’s available on Apple Music and Amazon Music as well as all major streaming platforms. Click here to see all the options!
Telling a bootleg-less man to lift himself up by his own bootlegstraps
We released the first in our Extra Lives series back in 2020, when we wanted to get music out but couldn’t get together to record anything because of the pandemic. Back then I had already decided to add “Volume 1” to the album name because I knew I wanted to release more live cuts in the future.
One of the best parts about jazz music is that every performance is wildly different from all the others due to its improvised and communicative nature. This feature makes stumbling across YouTube videos or, better yet, recorded bootlegs of shows especially exciting: the artists always take the music in directions different from the recordings you know, and sometimes you may prefer the bootleg over any official release.
Unfortunately, that also means you may never hear what could be your favorite version of these tunes. Worse yet, some live sets feature compositions and band lineups that you may never witness.
For example, there’s a group that toured for a bit called the Overtone Quartet that only exists in bootleg form. There was a proto-version of the band captured on an album as the Monterey Quartet; but, compositions that were staples for the Overtone Quartet shows like “Gummy Moon”, written by the pianist exclusive to that band, Jason Moran, can’t be heard otherwise.
The intent behind the Extra Lives series is to mitigate the above as much as possible. If we have a solid live recording, I want people to be able to hear it. That may mean that eventually we’ll have ten versions of “Ideal and the Real” on the internet, but if there’s magic that we want our fans to hear, especially as we get better (and better at playing this music), we’ll put it out there.
That said, there may never be tunes that we release on record! If we can’t get a license for a tune, we can’t release it, and unless a tune is released on an album in the U.S., we can’t get a license for it. We can pray for Nintendo to get its act together and release a stateside album of K.K. Slider tunes, but until then, “K.K. Cruisin’” will be an exclusive only found at our live shows and on YouTube.
Mixing it up
I already blogged in depth about the performances these tracks come from after we did them, but I want to go into the hows and whys of this record.
Volume 2 features only 4 tunes (over 5 tracks) of the 11 that we performed over the course of the two shows. Later this year I plan to release Volume 3, which will include the others minus two:
“Hyrule Castle” because, while overall it’s a solid take, we nerf the drum solo hits too badly—a shame, but we’ll get a recording of it out eventually!
“Fire Eyes” because, unfortunately, we can’t get a license for it. It’s absolutely maddening that this album exists, calling itself a “complete soundtrack” but not… including… all of the tracks on the soundtrack??
The albums aren’t 1:1 with the shows. The main reason for this is because I wanted to get some of the tracks that we haven’t released yet faster than the ones that we already have out. For example, “Ideal and the Real” and “Phantom Train” will both be on Vol. 3, though the former was recorded at our July show and the latter at our October one. Vol. 3 will also include two yet-unreleased-outside-of-YouTube tracks, too, though!
Another way the albums are different from the original shows is that I sent the recordings to Lance Koehler of Minimum Wage Recording in Richmond, VA, to remix and master. While the radio broadcast—engineered by WTJU’s Ben Larsen—was excellent, that all is done very in the moment. Lance was able to take his time to fine-tune each recordings’ sound and tweak according to my feedback.
The result is that the recordings both sound super fresh and, despite being from two different shows, cohesive.
Lance even ran into some real trouble with the two July tracks on which I play tenor sax because, long story short, the original audio stem was missing. When you listen to “A Chapel” and “Ideal and the Real”, you may notice something is off compared to “Kainé / Escape” and “Find Your Way”. The only tenor sound we had was coming from the soprano sax mic, not the clip-on that I used for the show—that track was somehow lost. That said, he worked miracles to make those recordings sound as good possible, which, in my opinion, is still fire.
Life support
I sincerely hope you love these recordings as much as I do! And if you do, I have a couple of asks of support:
Purchase the music! Streaming the tunes on Spotify, I get $.003–.005 per stream, meaning, on the high end, you would have to stream a track nearly 200 times to net me the dollar that you would net me by purchasing. You can always buy the tracks and then stream to multiply your support! (lol)
SHARE WITH FRIENDS! Please please please if you know someone that would like this music, share it with them. I’ve gotten so many comments on YouTube that are like “why are you all more well known!?”, and the answer is… well, first, I don’t advertise enough because I hate that grind… but second, it’s because people don’t share it with those that they know will enjoy, and therefore we haven’t gotten into the consciousness of the masses.
I’d also love for you to comment if you have favorite tracks or musical moments!
Looking forward to hearing from you about Volume 2, delivering Volume 3 in the near future, and playing live for you again in the coming months. See you then!
Peace,
Greg
PS: If you’re not familiar, the band is me, Greg Weaver, on saxophones; Brandon Walsh on trumpet/flugelhorn; Gabe Planas on keys; Andre La Velle on bass; and Pat Hayes on drums!
PPS: Extra special thanks to our friend Ruby, aka PurpleSchala, for helping to usher our release through the madness that is Soundrop, as well as giving great advice to fight for the license for “Zombie Panic”. Go listen to and buy her amazing music!!
PPPS: Our next show details as of publishing are below if you happen to be in the Charlottesville area!
