This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Joshua Laboca, known around Juneau as Jbo, is the music producer and content creator behind dozens of artists in Southeast Alaska. He and his nine-year-old daughter, Harmony, also produce music together.
You can hear their song “Growing” and others on their YouTube page, Harmony & jboaudioe.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Joshua Laboca: Full name is Joshua Laboca. I go by JBo Audioe, J-B-O A-U-D-I-O-E. That’s what a lot of people know me as in town. And we are here at our home studio, where a lot of artists and bands come in to record and perform in the booth over here. So, I went to school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
So we had some family issues back here in Alaska. So I decided to continue going to school here, online. And then I ended up opening up a studio, but I never wanted to do music for artists. And then, so I had to tell myself, “I want to keep doing this. So how do I? How do I merge what I know about sound design, editing, Foley and effects? How do I apply it to music, like for artists?” So as I was mixing artists, like beats and stuff, and their vocals, I would apply it. And then I eventually grew a passion for mixing and producing for artists in town.
My daughter and I, we do have a YouTube. It’s Harmony & jboaudioe, where we make instrumentals. I’ll have the beat down and I’ll do the mixing, and Harmony will do the guitar and pianos.
Harmony Laboca: Alright, Dad! Play my pre-roll please.
Joshua Laboca: She got inspired by the movie Sing. And there’s this character named Ash that plays the guitar voiced by Scarlett Johansson. And then the only way that I knew for us to continue to work on her playing guitar was that we had to make instrumentals. So every week she would play chords, she would lay chords down on instrumentals that I had. And every week it was just improving on that and that’s how she, she’s four years in now, she plays it pretty good now.
Harmony Laboca: Um, usually we do a guitar first, and then if we’re making a song, we do guitar, vocals and then piano.
Joshua Laboca: And she knows like, the basic controls of when to record, when to stop, going at certain bars and stuff, so.
We usually film this whole process. So even during the mess-ups we still put it in the edit. So because it’s just, you’re never gonna get anything perfect.
But aside from that, once we get it mixed and edited, I’ll put some visuals to it. And then we put it on YouTube. And we just, yeah, that’s our process.
Harmony Laboca: It’s actually really fun. ‘Cuz we do it, he usually like, told me what’s wrong or like, what to improve on. And then he was like, and then sometimes we do games that we made up and like, practice together and sing stuff together, make videos together.
Joshua Laboca: We have a back and forth too, like it’s not always like Brady Bunch or anything. It’s like, ‘No, we should do this. No! No, yeah, no, I know, I know.’ You know, we have this like back-and-forth banter that we always do. But that’s kind of like the relationship that we have. And it makes it so that, you know, if I’m not doing something right, she calls me out, she’s not doing something right, you know, I call her out.
Joshua and Harmony Laboca: The saying that we go, when right before we end our session is, “It’s never a good day without a challenge. So, fail fast. Fail forward. Fail a lot.”
Joshua Laboca: We say the word failure more than we say success. Because we’ve grown in the knowledge of music. And we’ve grown in making music from all of that.