Arts This Week: WXTJ Jamz
By Ben Larsen
Dana Sun:
You’re listening to WTJU, Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we chatted with WXTJ Jamz director, Blake Cabral.
Blake Cabral:
I’m Blake Cabral. I’m the current director for WXTJ Jamz. I’m a third year and I’m majoring in music and history. WXTJ Jamz is a program where, essentially, we get guest artists to come in, usually they’re bands that have a plethora of originals. At some point, we record their content and we ship it back out to them, and with that content comes an audio kind of mastering, producing, and also fashion a video to go along with it, and they could use for promotional materials, all for free, essentially. And as well as it being a benefit for the players, it’s also a benefit for our team. We have a team of about 10 individuals, where each member wants to learn how to produce more, mix more, and kind of gain these audio technical skills that a lot of people don’t have. And so we kind of provide that opportunity for both the artist and our team. What’s really great about it is that there’s no skill level required at all. A lot of when I started, when I was a first year. I had no skill at all. I just kind of showed up. Was part of the team, just kind of helped maintain the stage. And then piece by piece, you learn a little bit more about the software you’re using. Kind of practice, practice, practice, until you know what to listen for. And the great thing about it is that it really just, is just kind of like a skill. Anyone can pick it up. Know what to listen for. You don’t have to be essentially musically trained, and it’s a whole lot of fun. So like I mentioned previously, we aim to have bands, either with original content or in the past, we’ve had bands that kind of have like a more unique sound. We’ve had some in the past that we’ve had DJs in the past even we’ve had bands out from Richmond and Roanoke come in and provide some really interesting content, some with backing tracks, and they all each band provides a unique kind of challenge for our team to set up. Know what to tackle. We produce it, and it’s been really great for all the groups that come in. We’ve, I’ve always been more than happy with every single group. I couldn’t say there’s one that I wasn’t excited about. One band we had, Almost Nothing, come in, 9-10, person band, horn section and everything, and wasn’t enough room on the stage to fit everyone, but we got it, got them all miked, got it all for we got it all in the mixer, all downloaded and yeah. So we had a really exciting first Jamz session. We were out at the lawn, lawn room four and rotunda, kind of a blustery day, a little cloudy, luckily, the rain came in later, but we set up kind of a mobile studio out in a lawn room. Made it all fit four person band, four person rock band, Sage is Alive. Had to come up with a plan of how to adapt the stage for this room, adapt the setup. Plug it all into the to the little mobile mixer, plug it in the computer, and as well as recording all of it. We made sure to kind of have some audience. We wanted a little bit of audience, so we brought a PA out and made it a little bit of a unique experience for anybody on the lawn that day. And it was a lot of fun. Everybody in the band was great. Worked with us through the challenges, and, yeah, brought just like, a really interesting vibe that, you know, you can’t say when you’re sitting on the, you know, the lawn for it’s like 200 year history that, you know, there’s a rock band that was playing over here one day, but we have that recorded and and it’s a really cool experience that we got to share with people around us. Yep. So that Sage is Alive Jamz video, hopefully to come out maybe three weeks from now, probably the beginning of November. It’ll take a little bit for the team to get everything in ship shape, but yeah, expect that soon. Hopefully. We’ll have a couple others coming out soon after, depending on our schedule, we have a couple more bands coming in recording this month and into the next month. So coming in, we have next we have Last Call with Simone. A lot of people know her. She was on The Voice well, last year or a couple semesters ago, great vocalist. Really excited to have her come in. We’re gonna have a really great episode that day. Yep. So we are online. We have a YouTube channel, WXTJ Jamz, where we upload all of our content. You can see all of our content from years past as well, as we generally try to promote them on Instagram as well, and you can find us at WXTJ Writes.
Dana Sun:
You can find all things jams on our YouTube channel and Instagram at WXTJ Radio. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theatre and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Dana.
