Davi Giroux's bandmates recorded their first singles from their homes, in different cities, without ever being in the same room.
Giroux, a full-stack engineer at X-Team and the lead vocalist and guitarist of rock band To Descent, describes the process as "async" — the same word he might use for a pull request review. The band sends tracks back and forth, layers ideas on top of each other and only books a professional studio for the parts that genuinely require one. Two singles are now on Spotify. An album is in discussion.
In this story, Giroux traces how a childhood at church shaped his musical instincts, explains how To Descent writes and records across distance and shares what two years of producing music actually taught him about shipping creative work.
Music Started in Church
Giroux has been around music since he was born. His mother is a trained musician and served as the music leader at their church. When he was young, he asked if he could play a little after services. She agreed. He started on a small, low-pressure stage — Wednesday services, not many attendees — and over time built enough confidence to play and sing in front of the congregation.
He began on drums, drawn to them because he liked being noisy. At 14, he switched to acoustic guitar and then quickly to electric guitar, which remains his main instrument. But he keeps learning. "All instruments are fair game to me," he says. What holds his attention is the emotional range that instruments open up. "What I like about music is how it can make people feel. Every instrument can bring a different emotion based on how you play it." A particular drum technique makes a song feel strong and fast; a particular guitar progression makes it feel emotional or calm. When all the instruments lock together, he says, the result is something he finds genuinely remarkable.
How To Descent Records Across Distance
The band formed in Campo Grande, Brazil, where Giroux was working before joining X-Team. He and two colleagues — Brucy and Thiago — discovered a shared taste in music genres and started playing together. Brucy took guitar, Thiago took bass and Giroux played drums. Eventually Giroux moved to vocals and rhythm guitar, and the band brought in André, a drummer who lives in another city, completing the lineup.
Recording across distance is built into how they work. "We're just throwing together ideas and seeing what lands," Giroux says. Each member records at home; everything funnels to Brucy, who has the most recording experience and handles the assembly. When a track reaches a certain level of completeness, the band books a professional studio — mostly for vocals, which require better equipment than a home setup provides.
The creative process starts with melody. Members propose ideas, respond to each other's suggestions and iterate until a structure emerges. Then Giroux sits with what they have and tries to feel what emotion the song carries — and writes to that. He's candid about how unglamorous the process is. "Many people believe the writing comes naturally. Words just come out and everything comes together nicely. Let me tell you, that's not at all what happens," he says. He lost count of the number of times he rewrote a single verse. Even finished songs feel improvable.
The band name went through a similar iteration. They compiled options in a spreadsheet, voted in multiple rounds and landed on To Descent — originally Prelude to Descent, shortened because friends struggled to pronounce the full name. "Nothing really meaningful or deep for the name," Giroux says. "We just chose the one we thought sounded the coolest."
What Recording 2 Singles Actually Teaches You
Getting 2 singles onto Spotify produced 3 concrete lessons, Giroux says.
The first: recording is harder than it looks. He had never recorded before the band started, and the gap between singing in the shower and hearing yourself in a professional recording was jarring. Vocals in particular remain an area he is still actively improving.
The second: perfectionism is a trap. A song will always feel like it's missing something. "Most of the times, that's true," he says, "but use that as a lesson for the next song instead of polishing one song over and over. Don't be afraid to move on." The band is already writing more songs and working toward an album.
The third is the simplest: have fun. Playing in a band and releasing music for people to hear is, for Giroux, a teenage dream that came true. The fact that their drummer lives in a different city and their vocals get recorded asynchronously across home setups and borrowed studios is not a limitation — it is just how they work. The result is on Spotify. The album is next.
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