It’s about sunrise, and I have officially just saved the last Master track for the Invasion remaster to our drive. I should be going to sleep, but as usual, I have a lot of feelings surrounding this project, so I decided I’d make this post while the thoughts were fresh.
Invasion was a huge first for me. It marks the first time I ever heard VISIØN’s music. It marks the first time I discovered a song co-composed with AI that I can honestly say ranks among my favorite songs of all time. It marks the first time I actually jumped in and tried out the program for myself to make a cover of said song. It’s also the first time I really started to hear a lot of RC’s thoughts, ideas, and feelings expressed musically, which was something I’d waited literal decades for. To say Invasion is special to me is a fantastic understatement.
The decision to ‘fix’ the tracks that RC had created for this project was not one I made lightly. I didn’t want to step on toes, after all… this was their work, their literal vision, and I have often fallen victim to being their ‘biggest fan’ when they create something amazing. What they’d created here was good enough that I just couldn’t stop listening to it.
Ultimately, I think that was what did it. I adored the tracks, but some of them stopped in awkward places, some of them were poorer quality recordings than others, and some of them sounded good as raw files, but somewhere in the mastering process had started to sound “squashed”. It got to the point where I literally loved this music enough I had to find a way to do it justice. Once I argued to delay City and actually got agreement, I knew a remaster of Invasion had to be in the cards.
Cue literal weeks of frustration. Some tracks were fine as they were, and I just had to work a little magic in Cakewalk to get them polished. By comparison, others were just of such low quality that even separating the stems and remixing didn’t help, and they had to be re-generated. If there was ever any evidence that this whole thing is meticulously human-curated, it’s there in the literal dozens of variants, stems, tracks, and covers of these songs as I tried to get the engine to recreate them just how I wanted. Needless to say, often, I did not get the results I was looking for, and sometimes, it ended up frustratingly bad. (“Afterglow” took literal weeks of blood, sweat and tears trying to repair… well, okay, I don’t think I actually physically injured myself, but my point stands.)
I did end up learning a ton about Cakewalk, plugins, external tools, equalizers, and how many incredibly varied ways one can set up reverb. (Also, I learned what adding reverb can fix, and what it cannot!) It took a lot of patience on my part, which is always a bit of a fraught thing… I can get very focused on working on something, and give it a lot of attention, but after a while, I just want it to work. When I got to that point, though, I put it down for a bit and came back, and found I had new energy to start hammering at it again.
That’s not to say that there weren’t some incredibly good moments. Sometimes the thrown paint lands beautifully, in ways I don’t expect, and then I have the task of trying to integrate that sound into what I already have in the works. Slowly but surely, track by track, the album began to finally come together. Many of the individual recordings are new, fresh versions with a much clearer sound, thanks to a better understanding of how tags work. I learned a lot here, too, about how to be pretty deliberate about what I want, and future albums will hopefully show it off nicely! Other tracks are the same base recordings that featured on the original album, but polished properly with my new arsenal of mixing and mastering skills. I was delighted by how much of the original album I was able to preserve just by knowing what to do in Cakewalk.
Ultimately, though, the actual music is the same. All of these tracks are undeniably the songs that changed my heart and mind earlier this year, only now they sound more like I always knew they could. The release of the Invasion remaster is slated for mid-June, and I’m really looking forward to being able to hear these remastered tracks alongside City and Chase, the latter of which will drop in just a few days!
I’m honored beyond belief to have been trusted with this album, and to have officially been made part of VISIØN. It’s meant more to me than I can say, and now that Invasion is done, I’m thrilled to keep moving ahead. We have a lot of new music in the works, and I’m very excited for everything that’s yet to come!