Reading Notes

6-8 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

Context in Marketing; Behind-the-scenes of Archive Volume Three; Fixing audio with Izotope RX; Stories overpower recording quality

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:

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Izotope RX10 DeNoising Plugins

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:

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Master Rebalance plugin for Izotope Ozone 9

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:

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Ozone’s Dynamic EQ module and Soothe2 by Oeksound

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:

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Neutron’s EQ module on Generational Fails

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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Have you ever wondered how the most perfect music falls in your lap at just the right moment?

Kin Leonn, a UK-based ambient and electronic music producer, and his music smoothly nestled themselves into my headphones this summer. I needed it, too.

I learned of Leonn from his work on the film The Breaking Ice. The movie follows three adults in their early 20's, living in contemporary northern China. Each character forms a deeper friendship with the others, while simultaneously, all of them work through their past traumas. It's billed as a bittersweet romantic drama, and it delivers.

The Breaking Ice forced itself onto my list of movies that I will watch twice. It has a solidity to it that I appreciate from good, independent movies. Besides, all I needed was to hear just a few seconds of Kin Leonn's musical score to know that this movie would slay.

I've since come to admire Kin Leonn’s work on a much deeper level. He has a way of creating music that surprises me, pushes me, and haunts my edge every time. I believe that his music effortlessly incorporates a wide and surprising degree of contrasts.

There are several techniques he uses to create this contrast in his music. And, I might do a deep-dive on that in the future. For now, I want to go deeper on how Leonn’s deliberate use of contrast in his music influenced the process I had on Lodern, the most recent release from Wicked Cities From A Distance. I also want to talk a little shop about Eurorack synthesizers.

Boring Synth Pads

In the past, I created a lot of ambient pads and soundscapes, droning out for dozens of minutes. The trouble appears when ambient music dangerously veers towards sameness, and slaps the listener with boredom. Drones can feel a little dumb, repetitive, numbing, and perhaps overdone.

This was why I felt so relieved to hear Kin Leonn’s work. It forced me to realize how important it is to think about variety, to insert some conflict inside of a song. Nothing wrong with having a little fight in you.

Discovering Leonn’s work compelled a deeper awareness of composing music that surprises and delights. I definitely attempted that with Lodern.

Creating Variety With Just Two Notes

Lodern has two notes: A root and a major third. It started as a simple drone piece. But this focus on contrast haunted me:

How on earth do I make a 15 minute long song interesting when it's just two notes, total?

To answer this, I need to nerd out about modular synthesizers. Fans of Eurorack are gonna love this part.

Granular Synthesis via Morphagene and Nebulae

The bulk of Lodern was created from two Eurorack modules, the Make Noise Morphagene and the Qu-Bit Nebulae. Both of these modules accept recorded audio and turn it into loops. Then, they can mangle those loops in so many wonderful ways. John Lennon would have flipped his wig had he had access to these two modules!

On the Morphagene, I had a piano loop running backwards. Using control voltage, I was able to change where the sound played inside of the loop (SLIDE on the Morphagene). Further, I CV’d (short for control voltage) the size of the loop (GENE SIZE), and I also CV’d the MORPH knob on the Morphagene. This formed a dynamic loop, one that changes, a lot.

The output of the Morphagene took flight after getting patched into a Hologram Microcosm with the MIX all the way up. I fiddled a lot with the Microcosm during the recording (TIME, ACTIVITY, and REPEATS). This part sounds pretty mellow just on it’s own:

Make Noise Morphagene

On the Nebulae, using a similar piano recording but played in mono, I found a single section of the loop that I liked and froze it by turning the SIZE knob all the way down while keeping the START knob static. From there, I used my fingers to manually adjust the DENSITY, BLEND, PITCH, and OVERLAP controls.

The output of the Nebulae took on a very intense sound after I violently shoved it into a distortion pedal by DOD called the Gunslinger (Shoutout to Jerry Daniels for the pedal). This noisy loop dominates the dead center of the stereo field throughout the piece. During the mixing stage, I paired it with an EastWest Spaces reverb, a pretty slick convolution reverb, just to give it a little more breath:

Qu-Bit Nebulae

These ideas were patched through to three separate tracks on my iD44 interface, and then captured in one take… One big, long, 15 minute take.

Adding Thickening Agents

I needed something to anchor the droney loops, something I could stand on with some certainty. I plugged a triangle wave output from the Pittsburgh Modular SV-1b into the filter section of the same module. I then took the lowpass filter out to the mixer. In one take, I opened the filter to get more volume when the song needed it:

Pittsburgh Modular SV-1b

Finally, I loaded up an ensemble string patch from EastWest's Hollywood Strings 2. I voiced a simple chord and mercilessly programmed it to repeat endlessly. If you've worked with orchestral samples, you know that the "sustained" sounds make interesting drones. Why? Players gotta stop at some point! The post production audio engineers who work on these sample libraries are often tasked with looping the end and beginning of a patch to create a sustained sound:

Aquiring More Contrast and Conflict

As I mentioned before, I do love long stretches of sound. But, drones need contrast to whack the livin’ hell out of a listener. I had to find places where sound could jostle things out of the ordinary.

A very good friend of mine Eddy Hobizal, who’s music you ought to check out, graciously allowed me to borrow his Fender Rhodes. I was able to plug that bad boy straight into the Hologram Microcosm. Without too much fussing about, I could play all sorts of chords and the Microcosm would throw everything back to me in a nice, twinkling way. An exemplar contrast to the lower foundational harmony.

Finally, I added some nature sounds. Why the hell not? Ambient musicians love nature sounds. Classic. Like a duck to water. Ha!

The entire session looks like this in Ableton Live:

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Lodern in Ableton Live 12

Lodern in it's Entirety

Overall, I tried to make the elements of Lodern subtly contradict the next. I wanted each solitary minute to sound a tiny bit different than the previous. Sometimes the keyboard sounds would drift casually into the background, or lift up in the higher registers, or tinker with different harmony. Sometimes, the stereo field would hinge from balanced to dangerously out-of-phase. Sometimes, the thickening agents would just wreak a fever pitch of intensity.

I didn’t know what direction this music could take when I first started working on it.

My August this year (2024) held a plenitude of change. For one, I bought a new car. Having AC felt incredible as I had been without for about 7 years. I could actually drive places without having to bathe in my own sweat. I kept on getting the nudge to write and I began doing it. I decided to get new photos taken for my sites. And, Autumn felt closer than ever.

And once that change started happening, it manifested itself into Lodern. I ended up composing in that in-between place where I hadn't yet changed into something new.

I knew I had to pivot from old Dave to new Dave, as it happens from time-to-time. Lodern is music of that transformation, but specifically the space in-between, that liminal space, where we haven't yet figured out what's going on. Where we haven’t really finished the metamorphosis. That space has intensity. A good friend of mine said it's like taking a Polaroid and having to wait to see the picture clearly, later.

All I gotta say now? My-oh-my, thank god it's fall in Austin. That's a polaroid I've definitely been pining for.