Before starting my own podcast on the subject of overcoming adversity, I did some research on another podcast done with the same theme in mind. I ended up listening to, and researching, "Mike Rippeth" by Dustin Nicholson as an example of the structure for this podcast. The podcast was about a man overcoming his drug addiction, how he got addicted, the steps he took to get over it, and how he got over his addiction. The podcast had some entertainment value and wasn't just a dry, scoreless, singular audio file. There was a score that changed throughout the podcast when the feeling of the story changed. There were actual quotes from the man that was interviewed, as well as narration in between segments explaining the story.

With all this in mind, the way I approached my take on the podcast was, once I solidified a person to interview (Jeremy Beech) we sat in my room and I started bombarding him with very open ended queries. There were a variety of questions I asked him that led to many different answers and different subject matters, and when there was a specific tangent he'd get on, we'd stay there until we ran out of things to talk about during that tangent. The subject matter I was looking for were more serious stories, but I was not committed to the idea of only serious stories, although that's what we ended up with. The story Jeremy and I ended up telling was his greatest personal fear: Being Disappointed. His story takes us back to his childhood where his parents constantly got his hopes up, but rarely went through with their plans for him. Now, as a kid he understood when things just came up and things just happened to where his parents couldn't go through with their promises. He had a problem when the excuses he was given didn't add up, or were just cop outs so they didn't have to do anything. Throughout the editing process of the podcast I tried keeping the score at a general feeling, then changed it as time and emotion progressed. My favorite part of editing was where I took some of the quotes Jeremy gives and layered a pitched down duplicate of that quote to signify his father's voice and his dark side voice in his head. You can listen to the full podcast on my Soundcloud here, or in the link below.

I had the opportunity to track and mix a record for a local band called, Holy Smokes. The track is called Nucifera, and a group of engineers and I did the tracking while we all had our own mixes of the song. When mixing this song, like every other band I mix for, I started out with the drums. The kick I accentuated some of the fluffy low-end while trying to maintain some of the beater head for attack. With the snare, I ran into a little trouble with a ringing tone within it, to attempt at alleviating the problem, I did some gating and heavy compression for the fills' volume to be uniform to the rest of the snare and to focus the snare's sound on the initial attack and not the ringing tones that came from it. The hihat I tucked further back into the mix and panned to the left. I split the toms accordingly and accentuated the bounce-y tone they had. I compressed the overheads and tucked them back into the mix so the cymbals wouldn't be too ring-y as to not have the mix too top heavy. I just compressed and put distortion on the bass to give it some character since it was recorded DI. Similar to the bass I just gave slight compression and EQ to the congas and tamborine (aux percussion). The lead guitar was EQ'd to make it sound brighter, so less low end more high end while taking out that mid-range muddiness, then there was an autoamated a spaced delay when the chorus comes in, there are two takes that were panned as well. The rhythm guitar was EQ'd and compressed very similar to the lead, but I didn't add any extra delay, but rather a little reverb, and a filter and chorus in the intro of the song. When mixing vox I first make sure I can get the vox as clear as possible before doing anything else to it, so taking out a lot of the super low frequencies and adding in some higher frequencies in order to brighten up the vocals; the same to the background vox before panning to each side. Then I added a reverb and delay to both the lead and background vox. Also, I used a technique learned to create more dynamics in a mix and boosted the chorus about 1dB on the master track to clearly identify the chorus from the verses. You can listen to the final mix on my Soundcloud here or at the button on the bottom of this post.