The North Country Winters album is recorded and mixed! It all began when I did an online course with Berklee called Introduction to Music Production. This was the second time I’d attempted the course, but this time I completed it. It was rather a steep learning curve to be sure, but I got there.

Through that course, somehow I was introduced to Joe Gilder and Graham Cochrane’s podcast, Simply Recording. I bombed through their back catalogue and learned absolutely loads.

I used Cubase for my Berklee course but I found it difficult to get to grips with and so I downloaded a trial of Presonus Studio One. It was waaay easier to use.

The natural progression from Simply Recording Podcast was to Dueling Mixes and it was absolutely brilliant for learning Studio One and how to mix. I simply followed Joe’s videos each week and learned a helluva lot.

I signed up for Joe Gilder’s VIP membership over at Home Studio Corner and got some courses there on EQ, compression and editing. In November he announced a 24-hour mixing contest where members were to record, mix and publish a whole song in 24 hours. That was the kick in the pants that I needed to get me off the tutorials and into making music for real. The basic studio was set up in the post office and we recorded Sweet Blue-Eyed Darlin’ with lead vocal, two harmony vocals, guitar lead and rhythm, upright electric bass and fiddle. We didn’t win, but it was a great exercise in learning how to record.

Over the next few months we tracked 12 songs in the post office over weekends and evenings. That finished in Feb 2017 and I spent the next few weeks mixing it as best I could.

The plan was to have the album released for Easter Monday, which, at the time of writing, was two days ago. I decided that I should wait until I’d done Ian Shepherd’s Home Mastering Masterclass before publishing the album, and, since he was starting it again in April, it would tie in nicely time-wise. I’ve signed up for the course now and it starts very soon.

Watch this space!