Want to Help Out?

It has been a little over a week since Barriers (EP) went live and it has been awesome to finally be able to share the songs with you all! We’ve had a great response so far and want to thank all of you for listening, giving feedback, and sharing the EP.

As we are an indie band doing all our own promotion, YOU make a huge difference in helping us get the word out. If you enjoyed the EP and are wondering how you can pitch in, please read on for some ideas as to how you can share Barriers (EP)!

Share where you’re active

Hanging out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or another social media site? Give us a shout by sharing links to our EP or our music video so your friends see it on your feed! Tag us so we can say thanks, and if you’re into such things, you can use the hashtags #octobervi and #barriersep. Here are some easy links you can share:

Already Gone [Official Music Video]

iTunes

Share where you listen

We released our music on as many listening sites as possible so you can listen wherever it’s most convenient for you! Check your favorite listening platform (iTunes, Spotify, etc.) for our music, add it to your playlists, and share those links with friends! If it doesn't show up, don't worry, it may still be coming soon. Here’s some quick access to a few:

iTunes

Spotify

Google Play

Share for FREE

We’ve mentioned Noisetrade before, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a great site that helps artists get their music out there by giving it away in exchange for an email and zipcode. It’s a great trade: Fans get music for free, we get info to send updates and plan tours according to where we will find an audience. You can share the free tunes with friends using this link:

Noisetrade

Share by word of mouth

Good ol’ fashioned word of mouth is a fantastic way to let people know about what’s going on. If they’re interested, feel free to send them to our website or tell them to check out their favorite distribution platform (like iTunes or Spotify) to hear the new tunes for themselves! 

Thank you for a great release and for supporting us!

- B & L

RELEASE DAY!

We can hardly believe that we get to say this, but it’s official...

Barriers (EP) is now AVAILABLE and you can find it on Noisetrade, iTunes, Spotify, and other distribution sites!

Check it out - and if you like it, please share it with friends, family, and all your social media followers. We have put everything of ourselves into this EP and hope to share that with as many people as possible. So get the word out!! 

Thanks for following along with us!

- B & L

Already Gone Music Video

From October VI's new "Barriers (EP)". ------------ Follow October VI at: http://www.octobervi.com/ https://www.facebook.com/octobervimusic https://www.instagram.com/octobervimusic/ https://twitter.com/octobervimusic

Hello one and all!

We aren’t going to say much, just that we have posted the official, full-length music video for “Already Gone”!

The video features glimpses of the crazy trip we took across the country, recording these songs and having way too much fun. If you like it, share it with your friends ‘cause TOMORROW is the full release date!

Enjoy,

- B & L

Barriers - EP

Hey everyone! We are breaking a few months of silence with some updates and exciting news!

It’s been a crazy season for us. Since our last post, we…

• Moved to Kansas City

• Wrapped up some big projects, including Ben mixing an EP we produced and recorded with the band Westport (release soon to come)

• Took on several creative gigs, including Laura developing video content for the food blog Gimme Some Oven and writing and photography content for the natural lifestyle blog Hello Glow

And now we are thrilled to be able to announce...*drum roll*...we have a release date for our EP! Set your calendars for..

Friday, September 23rd! 

That’s right, NEXT FRIDAY you will finally be able to hear the three songs that make up our EP, officially named “Barriers - EP”.

But before next Friday, we will be releasing the full-length version of our music video for “Already Gone”. Stay tuned for that and other info by following along on our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) or signing up for email updates!

The process to get to this point has been a crazy, wonderful, challenging trip - thanks for supporting and joining in with us along the way.

- L

Seeing Is Believing

We are still in the midst of the mixing process and though it has been a ton of work, it’s so satisfying to hear the songs coming together. Our week has been interrupted with some job searching and a visit to KC, but it hasn’t stopped Ben from moving forward and he is now working on the last of our three songs!

In the meantime, I have been working too, I promise…

If you've been following along as this EP has come together, you'll know that we have been taking a ton of pictures to document the process. What you might NOT know, however, is that we’ve been taking video footage as well.

So while Ben has been mixing the tracks, I've been sorting through our material from the trip and editing a music video featuring our travels. It's incredibly difficult to choose which shots to use, but that's a good problem to have so I'll stop complaining. When it's finished, we will be sharing it with you in total, but in the meantime, here's a taste!

Want to see more? Good. Stay tuned and you will!

- L

Mixing the Tracks Hard

Like we had mentioned last week, we’ve got all the raw material for our three songs gathered up and edited. Next up: mixing!

What’s this "mixing" thing? Well, when we finish the recording process, we are typically left with 70+ individual tracks that make up the entire song. That may sound a little excessive, but if you think about it, just one drum set could use 10-12 microphones to capture sound from each it’s pieces (snare top, snare bottom, kick drum inside, kick drum outside, rack tom, floor tom...you get the picture) and one microphone = one track. Also, Ben and I both really love keyboards, so there are a LOT of keys tracks layered on these puppies.

So once we have all 70+ tracks, they need to be massaged into one cohesive song. Enter the mix engineer. This guy gets to take all these separate pieces, edit out what isn’t needed (think the sound of an “S” that was sung too harshly and hurts your ears), boost or cut any frequencies that aren’t quite right, add effects to make them interesting (anything from distortion to reverb to delays), then adjust their levels to produce a balanced, beautiful mix. Sounds simple, right? Right.

Though Ben has experience mixing and really enjoys it, we had originally planned on hiring out this part of the process in order to get someone else’s ears on the songs. Thus, when we returned from the trip, Ben started in on some last edits to get the tracks as polished as possible before we sent all of them off to a mix engineer.

But as he did so, he was having so much fun and it sounded so good that he just kept working and working...until we realized he had just completed one of the mixes himself. 

So we switched gears, hired him as the engineer (hah), and now you can hear the songs being played over and over and over (and over and over and over) again from the room where Ben is sitting in front of our computer and speakers, mixing away. It has been a wonderfully maddening process and he is loving the opportunity to experiment, learn new methods, and sonically craft the final versions of these songs we have been working on for over a year now.

Strangely enough, even though we’ve heard these songs a billion times already, it doesn’t lessen how excited we are to share them with you. More soon!

- L

Flying Home / Finishing Touches

Well, we are back in Kansas! So what now?

The traveling has paused for a bit, but that doesn’t mean that the process is over...or that we are going to stop writing about it! Throughout the next few weeks we are looking forward to posting about next steps in finishing up the project, upcoming release dates, and extra material such as videos and photos. So without further ado...

All along the trip, we had been kicking around an idea for one of our songs that finishes with a slowly building, repeated melody line. Though we loved the character that this particular section had taken on throughout the recording process, it still was needing an extra boost of energy at the end to take it where we wanted it to go.

To see what we could do with this part of the song, we asked a group of talented individuals (bribed with cookies) to come help us out for an evening by singing some back-up lines. Though the “choir” had never sang together before (they were all friends of ours who had been involved with us musically in some way or another over the past few years), they were up for the challenge of learning and experimenting with parts that could help give the song the intensity that was eluding us.

Let me just say that they all did great, but let’s be honest, the littlest choir member stole the show.

By the end of the evening, the group had given us lots of great material to work with, from strong unison melody lines to various combinations of harmonies. Now, we will take a look at each of the recordings and see which ones add the right combination of interest and drive to build up the song’s ending just right. It’s hard to say how many of these takes will make it on the final tracks, you might not even be able to put a finger on where the additional voices come in when you hear it! But it’s these details, the ones you would feel if they were missing, that are so gratifying to see coming together here at the end.

After all the hard work that has gone into writing, recording and editing so far, these backing vocals were the last raw material that was needed for our three songs. Next, we will add a few finishing touches and do some more intensive edits to pull all the pieces together exactly how we want them, then they’ll be mixed and mastered to get them ready for you guys to enjoy.

Thanks so much to our “choir” for helping us out on this project!

- L

Coast to Coast

Remember way back at the beginning of this trip when we recorded drums? Yeah it feels like a long time ago to us too. That first creative collaboration with Aaron Sterling went so well that when he suggested we come back at the end of the trip to work on vocal production in his home studio, it was easy to say yes.

Before we even started our travels, I had written about 90% of the lyrics for our three songs, but there were a few verses in particular that were still giving me trouble. Thus, whenever we had downtime in a coffee shop or airport, I would pull out my notebook and jot down some ideas, looking for the right combination of words that not only conveyed the meaning I had in my head but also sounded pleasing and fit with the instrumentation. Finally, during our flight from New York back to Los Angeles, it all came together. *Whew*

Here’s a taste test...

Our slow steps in protest

'Til the words we’re saying, are worth the silence breaking

With the lyrics finished, we got to L.A. and relaxed a bit, then went into the studio with Aaron for two days to add the vocals on top of the song structures we had already recorded. Aaron had arranged for us to use a beautiful microphone (a Wunder Audio CM7 for all you nerdy people) and, coupled with a Avedis MA5 preamp and a glass of wine, it was the perfect fit for my voice.

For each track, we began by recording the main melody lines until we had takes we liked. Once those were in place, we started experimenting with parts, effects, and layers to fill out and back up those melodies. Despite some protest, Ben even got behind the mic to add some harmonies into the mix! After working on the instrumentation sans vocals for so long, it was thrilling to hear the project coming together to sound more and more like a finished product as we sang.

When we had finished up recording with Aaron, Ben and I had a few days to enjoy L.A. before heading back to Kansas. We drove around Hollywood, got a view of the city from the Griffith Observatory, and even got to hang out again with my brother and his family who had driven up to meet us for a few days. On top of that, we were able to experience a bit more of L.A.’s creative community as we went see the Gungors play a laid-back, improv show at the Hotel Cafe, toured the impressive collection at Vintage King L.A., and enjoyed a few random conversations with other creatives at a local park and coffee shop.

With our final recording session finished, we wrapped up almost a month and a half of traveling with a flight back to Kansas. 

Stay tuned for more as we near the finish line with this project!