Holiday Albums

[mrbeany]

So... apparently I have a Christmas album coming out on December 1st.

Also, I've decided that a Christmas album would be a good way to try to suck less. You know, eventually, like after I've done several Christmas albums. (Or maybe albums dedicated to other random holidays. My daughter wants me to do a Halloween album.)

I'm giving this one out to family for Christmas. Not because I think it'll be super awesome, but because I don't like them enough to get them something super awesome.

I started the project on November 1st. I've been trying to average about a song a day for it, but I'm only at 17. (And only four are not instrumental.)

Here's the description of the album:

The songs on this album are instrumental, secular, or explicitly focused upon Santa Claus. Suitable for use in all households!

The goal was to make a album with mostly new lyrics for traditional songs. (Specifically, I wanted to add more Santa Claus to Christmas songs.) Time got away from me, and I wound up needing to make up time by creating instrumental versions of traditional songs.

https://mrbeany.bandcamp.com/album/christmas-2014 (Preorder for money, or wait until December 1st when it will be free.)

With the abundance of public domain traditional Christmas songs featuring sheet music as well as MIDI snippets, it seems to be a good way to get experience with some areas that I've struggled with. (I'm even including sheet music for one of the songs that I've written new lyrics for as a bonus item.)

Anyone else with new holiday albums coming out? Old holiday albums folks should be reminded about? Non-traditional holiday albums?

[Tyler Zahnke]

Right here on Song Fight, if you go to the music archive, and go all the way down to December of 2003, there's a fight titled Merry Christmas. It's sort of an R-rated fight, but if you have that kind of humor, take a listen. In the Sidefight Archive, there's a Christmas Coverfight 2001, which is totally G-rated. I haven't done any holiday albums, but Jim of Seattle has an instrumental one up on his Bandcamp. And as for outside of Song Fight, there's always Meowy Christmas by Jingle Cats, and Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics from the producers of South Park (the cat one is G-rated, the South Park one not so). Moskva, a very unknown artist, did a very funny EP in 2012 called A Very Auto-Tune Christmas; techno versions of Christmas songs with a tiny bit of pitch correction software (you'd think the software would be more prevalent with an album title like that, but you can tell it's there). And if you want hardcore parody, there's always Rated X-mas by Matt Rogers, and if you want something more PG, Bob Rivers has five Christmas albums. Also, RuPaul did a crazy one called Ho Ho Ho, and the drag queens The Kinsey Sicks did Oy Vey in a Manger. Then there's Venus Envy (oh boy!, or is it oh girl?) But there's a lot of more obscure Christmas stuff out there.

[mrbeany]

I voted for an artist in the third SongFight, I think. Long-time lurker, and even though I've only recently submitted songs for fights, I think they were both before you joined. Don't worry, though, with the practice I'm getting you'll be able to beat me, soon enough.

I'm mostly wondering if anyone has any new holiday albums coming out. The season comes around every year.

Does WreckdoM have a holiday album? The Chadderandom Abyss? Doscientos? (etc)

There's a lot of folks I think could have really interesting takes on holiday music.

[ken]

Some of us from Berkeley Social Scene did a holiday album in 2011: http://berkeleyholidayband.bandcamp.com ... idays-2011

CDBaby sent out a great guide about which Xmas songs are in the public domain and which aren't. Bandcamp doesn't seem to care what you upload, but other services might.

http://members.cdbaby.com/campaigns/req ... lic_Domain

[mrbeany]

Some of us from Berkeley Social Scene did a holiday album in 2011: http://berkeleyholidayband.bandcamp.com ... idays-2011

Sweet.

CDBaby sent out a great guide about which Xmas songs are in the public domain and which aren't. Bandcamp doesn't seem to care what you upload, but other services might.

Yeah, on some sites there's some mixed messages about some of the Christmas music. Things are a little weird because music and lyrics can have different copyrights. So we have things like CDBaby's "Copyrighted" list including "Carol of the Bells" -- but if you're doing an instrumental version of it you're totally fine. I have an instrumental version on my album. I call it "Shchedryk (Ukrainian New Year's Carol)".