If you've arrived here looking for another article about hypnosis, you might be slightly disappointed.

This isn't really about hypnosis.

It's about what happens before anyone ever presses play.

For years, EnTrance has been judged almost entirely by its finished recordings. That's perfectly reasonable. People download a session because they want help with something, not because they're interested in microphone techniques, script revisions or why one sentence survived ten rewrites while another disappeared completely.

For many listeners, that's enough. If a recording helps you move from one difficult chapter of life to the next, it has already done everything it needed to do.

But I've always been curious about what sits beneath the surface of things.

When I first discovered hypnosis through Paul McKenna's recordings, I wasn't satisfied simply listening to them. I wanted to know why they worked the way they did. I wanted to understand the structure, the pacing, the production, the tiny decisions that most listeners never consciously notice.

Information like that was surprisingly difficult to find.

People understandably protected their methods, but I happened to be in an unusual position. By then I'd already spent years working in broadcast audio and post-production. I wasn't approaching hypnosis as a therapist. I was approaching it as someone who spent every day taking performances apart and putting them back together again.

Once you spend long enough editing voices, you begin to hear things differently.

You notice where someone breathes.

You notice when a pause creates space instead of silence.

You notice that changing the rhythm of a sentence can change how that sentence feels.

Those lessons became the starting point for EnTrance.

We weren't trying to invent hypnosis. Nobody sensible could make that claim. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

What interested us was whether careful writing, thoughtful production and long-form listening could become another useful tool for people who wanted to help themselves.

Originally, EnTrance wasn't even designed as a collection of downloads.

The plan was much bigger.

The recordings were built as the audio engine for a flexible app that would let listeners choose different voices, inductions, deepeners and musical styles. Between Mick Crudge and me we had access to writers, studios, production facilities and years of broadcast experience. Creating the recordings was difficult, but possible.

Funding the larger vision proved to be another matter.

Looking back now, I sometimes think we missed one boat.

But we didn't stop travelling.

We simply took the scenic route instead.

That route led through YouTube, independent production and years of gradual development. Looking back, I'm not sure I'd swap that journey now. The scenic route showed us views we would never have seen from the motorway.

Perhaps that's true of change itself.

One of the questions I'm often asked is why so many EnTrance sessions are relatively long.

The answer isn't because longer is automatically better.

It's because I found something interesting.

When people know they've only got fifteen minutes, a small part of the mind keeps checking the clock. There's an invisible pressure to relax quickly before the recording ends. Give people more time and that pressure often begins to disappear.

For me, much of the benefit comes from the relaxation itself.

The stories, metaphors and suggestions matter, but they seem to arrive on more receptive ground once life has stopped shouting quite so loudly.

That idea runs quietly through almost everything I've made.

Another idea runs through it too.

I've always thought of EnTrance as a large jigsaw.

Every recording should work on its own. Nobody should feel they have to buy everything to understand the picture. But if you spend enough time with the collection, pieces begin to connect. A metaphor in one recording quietly explains something you heard months earlier in another. An observation that once seemed insignificant suddenly finds its place.

You don't need every piece to recognise the image.

You only need enough pieces for the picture to begin emerging.

That's really why Backstage exists.

Not to persuade anyone that EnTrance is different.

Not to reveal secret techniques.

And certainly not to pretend we've discovered something nobody else has.

Backstage exists because some people enjoy looking under the bonnet.

Some people like understanding how ideas are written, recorded, refined and occasionally abandoned altogether. They enjoy the thinking as much as the finished work.

So this is where those conversations will happen.

Some weeks we'll talk about production.

Some weeks about behaviour.

Sometimes about sound.

Sometimes about mistakes.

Sometimes about recordings that never quite behaved as expected.

If all you ever want from EnTrance is a recording that helps you through a difficult period of life, that's perfectly fine.

But if you've ever wondered what happens before the red recording light comes on...

...welcome behind the studio door: BackStage.