When I first set out to track A Quiet Place To Scream, I did so in a way that I always intended to go back and re-track things and show as much of the process as possible.

I had three goals in mind when I did this: see how far I could get without spending hardly any money, show newcomer songwriters/rock producers some of the very easy to apply tricks you can use in your own productions and to keep a record of my own progress as a player/singer/writer.

I haven’t been great at showing much of the process so far because I keep feeling like I don’t quite have the set-up I’d like to do so.

In a perfect world there’d be more livestreaming and some better video footage at play here, but doing all that takes a lot of time and energy away from me from actually completing the projects I’m working on, so sorry about that (hopefully we’ll get there in the future).

That all said, now that I’m in a good place to be reworking and fine-tuning some tracks for what’ll become my debut full-length record “The Clearing”, I’ll try to actually show you what went on then and what’s going on now.

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The first song I put together for A Quiet Place To Scream was “Champagne Birthday”.

You can hear that mix on my website and bandcamp page.

Today I’ve just opened up the initial Pro Tools session for pretty much the first time since I released that record.

In this video I explain a little bit about what you’re hearing in that released mix:

Now, because of those things I mention in the video about not having the same plug-ins as I was using back in 2020 for that EP, here’s the completely dry, otherwise untouched mix as it stands before I dive into it today:

Now why am I showing this at all?

Because music production is a process and it sometimes means doing and re-doing the same track multiple times before you get it to a place you’re happy with.

And just because you don’t have access to the best-of-the-best gear, doesn’t mean you can’t create a great mix.

For another example of this, feel free to check out the initial released demo recording of “Camp” and the newly released updated mix of the same on my Bandcamp page.

This is almost definitely not the final pre-mastered mix of Camp but it sure is a lot closer to where we want it to sit. We’ll come back to it closer to the completion of the album to show you what, if any, changes are made.

Hope you enjoyed & if you have any questions at any point about what I’m doing/why I’m doing it, feel free to put it in the comments!