I have to be mindful to avoid falling into a common musician self-promotion pitfall. You know the one, especially if you have a friend who's a musician:

“You should check out my music. I’m on Spotify, Apple Music, and all the streaming services. Tell me what you think.”

I'll admit, I've done this to many friends! The last time I complained about how promotion like this doesn't really work (because it doesn't), a friend of mine patiently reminded me that context is everything in marketing. Paraphrased:

"If I met a musician on the street and he said, 'Hey check out my music,' I wouldn't do it. But if he spoke more generally about the ideas surrounding music that he likes, if he talks about things about music that he gets fired up about, and then told me how his music fits into that context, I'm far more likely to check it out.”

It was so simple that I forgot it for a moment: Context means everything.

I recently began these Behind-The-Scenes articles to give some context (the first one was for Lodern by Wicked Cities From A Distance). They’re similar to the commentary you used to get with DVD releases: You learn about how the music was crafted and hopefully gain some insight into what inspired it. And of course, if you dig the music, it's great for both of us. If you’re not into the music, you might be interested to see how it all came together, and what inspired the album in the first place.

Today, I want to do a behind-the-scenes look about Grande Valley Auction Incident's new album Archive Volume Three:

The origin story of Archive Volume Three

As I mentioned before on this blog, I recently unearthed some old tapes in the closet of my studio. My curiosity got the better of me. I had to know what was on them. I dusted off my old cassette tape player and popped one of those tapes in. I was horrified by what came out of the speakers.

The horror gave way to a little bit of shock, which led quickly to annoyance. Couldn't I have done better than that?!?

After a couple of days of mental back-and-forth, I became curious about the songs. Isn't there a curious force, a weird magic behind these recordings? Couldn't I possibly fix them up? Couldn't I use it as a chance to get better at audio engineering? I was willing to try. Besides, things were far getting too serious and I needed a chance to poke fun at myself a little bit. What better way to have a little fun than to publish some excessively personal, depressing songs recorded almost twenty years ago on a terrible cassette recorder?!?

The process of repairing the audio

The first problem I ran into was fixing the audio because the songs were recorded on a subpar cassette recorder using an internal microphone. It would be generous to say that the sound quality was... rough. I needed to eliminate the hum of the gears and the grinding sounds picked up by the internal microphone. It took some experimentation to figure out how to get rid the audio of the nasty artifacts, but Izotope RX10 ended up the winner:

Since both the voice and guitar were recorded in one take with just one microphone, I couldn’t adjust the vocal volume seperately afterwords. I had to grab the Master Rebalance plugin for Ozone 9 to boost the vocals back up:

Finally, I needed to control the “ss” sound in the vocals, often called sibilance. If sibilence gets out of control, any "ss" I sang would sound harsh, piercing, jarring, and downright bad. I relied upon Ozone’s Dynamic EQ module and Soothe2 by Oeksound for "De-Essing," and it sounded passable:

When I approached each track individually, I needed to surgically remove offensive frequencies lest they take over the mix. Neutron’s EQ module allowed me to do just that. For example, on the third song, Generational Fails, I made these adjustments:

Overall, the changes I made up to this point accounted for 80% of the results. The remaining processing involved addressing smaller issues on each track and adding light touches to the master track. I enjoyed figuring out how to make this sound as appealing as possible. To be brutally honest, I don’t think I achieved much. Lo-Fi music is still lo-fi music, and you can't really polish a turd.

The origin story makes the music interesting (hopefully)

Still, despite the white-hot emotional mess I was in when I recorded these songs, I feel a tiny bit proud of them. I try to remember that it isn’t really the recording quality that matters. I mean, sure, we musicians all want our music to sound really dope. Yet, throughout the history of recorded music, there have been a great number of songs that told such great stories that listeners looked past the poor recording quality and loved them anyway.

Not like that’s gonna happen with Archive Volume Three! Let’s be realistic here!

Putting my bias aside, perhaps the story of these songs transcends the bad quality of the recordings... that sincerity about what is true, open, unembellished, and raw in life. Maybe the strangeness of my life filters through the music. Maybe the isolation I felt echoes around after a listen or two. Maybe there's something endearing about watching a train wreck happen in real time. I highly doubt it, though. I can only be certain that these songs are proof that I used to wear my entire heart on my sleeve, and damn, it was pretty heavy.

I could barely conceal my feelings from anyone during that time. I was in a dark place. These songs documented that time of my life almost too perfectly, and maybe that's why I was so embarrassed about them at first. I don’t mind sharing them now. I guess I have enough distance! It’s fun to look back and shudder at the dumbass I used to be, and I’m sure that when I’m 60, I’ll feel the same way about who I am now.

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