Depeche Mode The 12" Singles | Box set | 2018-2024

Hello. My name is Daniel Barassi, but most people who know me just call me "The BRAT". For nearly twenty years, I have been "the web guy" for Depeche Mode. The job has been much more than web work, though, as you'll read today on my "Facebook Takeover".

A fun, rarely mentioned "fan boy" fact to start off:
When "New Life" came out, I bought the UK 12" out of curiosity. I remember getting home, and dropping the needle at the beginning of the "New Life" remix. Drum drum drum...hmmm...ok, let me try the middle. Drum drum drum...hmm. Comically, every time I put the needle down, I was hitting just the drum breaks in the song. Same happened with the b-side "Shout" (Rio Mix). So, I did what any impatient, young kid would do. I returned the record.

Since 1984, I have collected Depeche Mode. Even before I started working for the band, I had been building a pretty respectable collection. Since working for them, however, it has become seriously out of hand. Not only the music, but the props, posters, magazines, videos and other ephemera. It's massive.

When I first got the web gig, it was through the band and management seeing a web mockup that I had built as a proof-of-concept. That mockup became The Archives. As my collection has grown, so has The Archives.

With my new role of "Archivist and Advisor", having local access to most of the items the band has released has come in very handy.

More than just collecting Depeche Mode, I've always had a passion for finding the best pressing of every version / mix / edit of all the songs and videos that I came across. That passion came full circle in 2015, when my job for Depeche Mode moved a bit away from web, and more into their vault. I still maintain The Archives, and I have a hand in both the main site and the social media, but I'm much more excited about what being the band's 'Archivist and Advisor' will produce.

In late 2016, Depeche Mode released the "Video Singles Collection". I first learned of the project during Dave's "Soulsavers" rehearsals in October 2015. I had a meeting with management about what the band wanted to do, and then I went and fleshed out a plan. That plan included making a comprehensive list of all of the band's music videos, as well as bonus items. With the plan ironed out, I flew out to the vault in England where the band's master tapes are located, and set upon finding the master tapes of every music video. This was intensive, as there are multiple copies of many of the tapes in the vault, including masters and sub-masters that were formally in Mute Germany, Mute France, Mute Japan and Capitol Records' vaults. In the end, there were nearly 400 video tapes that were pulled from the vault. I sat in a tape facility in London with the video guy from Sony for days, watching all of the tapes to determine which tapes were the proper masters. This did yield surprises, such as the alternate video of Stripped. Overall, though, it was a great experience to take part in a project that finally gave fans something that had never existed before: A truly complete collection of every music video. It also started me on truly organizing the band's tape vault.

Jump to mid-2017. After going through the music videos for Depeche Mode, I started working with Sony, organizing all of the master tapes for all of the singles. As many of you who collect the mostly out-of-print singles know, there's a LOT of mixes to keep track of. In the vault, there are many duplicate tapes for a number of the singles, so I have been tasked with identifying every mix, and then determining which are the masters. On some singles, that has been easy, as some songs that we (as fans) know to fade out, don't fade out! So for each tape (captured at the highest sample rate), I'm going through and not only sorting out the masters, but where needed, I am actually the one preparing the files with things like fine edits and gain envelopes (fade outs). The end goal will be a digital version of the band's vault, which will contain both true hi-res digital clones of all of the analog tapes, but also hi-res copies of my "prepared" files.