About

The story

Dave Garwacke started If You Make It in New Paltz, NY in 2006, frustrated that the house shows and performances happening around him weren't being documented. He began hauling recording gear to friends' shows, and when he moved to Brooklyn the project moved with him, couch and all.

The Pink Couch Sessions are the heart of it: touring bands passing through the tri-state area would stop by Dave's apartment, sit down on the pink couch, and play a song or two acoustic. The first session went up on September 26, 2007, with Laura Stevenson playing “Amphibian.” The series ran regularly through 2012, with archival videos surfacing into 2013, and racked up over a million views along the way.

The goal was always simple: keep a record of artists Dave admired and help get them heard. Alongside the sessions, If You Make It put out articles, comics, music videos, and releases on a donation-based record label.

Who played

Laura Stevenson, Hop Along, Waxahatchee, Tigers Jaw, The Menzingers, The Bouncing Souls, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Bomb the Music Industry!, Fake Problems, Mikey Erg, Matt Pryor, Mixtapes, RVIVR, The Sidekicks, A.W., Direct Hit, Aye Nako, Walter Schreifels, Spraynard, Braid, and a couple hundred more. Browse every artist.

How it was made

The early sessions were shot on a Panasonic GS-320 with no external mics and no manual gain, just the sound of the room. Later sessions upgraded to a Canon HF100 in HD with an AT-822 stereo condenser microphone. Eventually I added a Zoom Field Recorder with a mix of mics, and by the end I was shooting on a Canon T2i with the field recorder capturing the audio separately.

The intro animation that opens every video was made by Jeff Ledellaytner at jamtron.com.

Why I stopped

By 2014 I'd stopped touring and taken a full-time job as a web developer, and If You Make It wound down with it. Then in 2020 I found out my parents had accidentally thrown out a hard drive that held all of the digital footage.

That's why this archive is what it is. The earliest sessions were shot to MiniDV tape, so those still survive. A lot of what came after lived only on that drive, and it's gone.