The most important part of any hypnosis recording is the voice.

You have to get on with it. You must at least not find it irritating. You have to feel that you can relax with it and, more importantly, trust it.

That sounds obvious, but it is easy to underestimate just how personal that relationship is.

One of the reasons we originally recorded three voices for EnTrance was to give listeners a choice. Mick had a smooth northern cadence. Holly had a slightly well-to-do southern female voice. Then there was mine: Estuary English, with roots that were much closer to punk rock than hypnosis.

I still find it slightly amusing that my voice has ended up doing this work. But that contrast probably reflects the yin and yang of my own makeup.

Not every voice will work for every listener. EnTrance will not suit everyone, particularly now that my voice is the one carrying the work forward. Accents come with assumptions. One of the funniest comments we ever received was: “Since when did Vinnie Jones start doing hypnosis?”

I took it in the spirit it was intended.

Outside the UK, listeners may hear the voice with fewer cultural associations attached to it. But wherever the listener is, the principle remains the same: if trust in the voice is missing, the rest of the production has a much harder job.

The recording is doing more than carrying words

People often treat the sound of a hypnosis recording as packaging for the script.

It is not.

The script matters enormously. A poor script cannot be rescued simply by recording it beautifully. But the recording itself changes how that script is received.

Underneath an EnTrance session there may be binaural beats, frequency modulation, changes in pacing, delays, layered elements and extended spaces where the voice drops out and the music continues.

There is also part of the EnTrance method that I would describe as our own secret sauce. Someone listening very closely might work out what is happening, but I am not about to publish the exact recipe for competitors.

None of these elements should be there simply because they sound impressive.

Their purpose is to support attention, relaxation and immersion without demanding that the listener consciously examines the machinery.

The listener does not need to understand what is happening underneath the session. They only need the complete experience to work as a coherent whole.

Tiny decisions can change everything

Sound is full of small decisions that have large consequences.

Basic tools such as equalisation and compression may sound rudimentary, but tiny changes can make or break a recording.

Push the wrong frequency and a voice becomes tinny and thin. Push elsewhere and it becomes bass-heavy and muddy. Over-compress it and you flatten the dynamics until the voice feels lifeless. Use too little compression and the recording may lack presence, stability and impact.

The same applies to pacing, reverb, delay, editing and the balance between the voice and music.

I made mistakes on earlier productions. That is part of learning the work. By the time we created EnTrance, I had already spent years experimenting, listening and discovering what damaged a recording as well as what improved one.

We also spent a great deal of time in pre-production discussing what we wanted to achieve and listening to other work. We were not simply recording scripts and adding music afterwards. The overall sound was considered before the recording began.

That preparation allowed the post-production and mixing decisions to serve a clear intention.

Could it still improve? Of course. Everything remains a work in progress. But I am proud of how EnTrance sounds and of the level at which it was originally produced.

The studio matters, but knowledge matters more

The original EnTrance recordings were created in a central London studio that cost millions to build.

We had access to Neumann U87 microphones, an Avid mixing console, professional Waves and iZotope processing and a completely isolated, highly treated recording environment.

Had we paid commercial rates for the studio, equipment, engineering, production and voice work, the complete project would probably have cost in excess of £350,000.

For us, it was sweat equity.

Technology has changed considerably since then. Today, someone can buy a very good digital microphone for a few hundred pounds, connect it to a laptop and technically produce an excellent recording.

I think that is fantastic.

But the microphone is only part of the chain.

If the room contains fan noise, air conditioning, traffic, family noise, a dog outside, a neighbour playing drums or the natural reflections of a hard untreated space, that sound will enter the recording.

And once it is there, the engineer has to manage it.

You can also take a perfectly respectable microphone signal and make it worse through poor equalisation, excessive compression or inappropriate processing.

The equipment has become more accessible. The need to know what you are hearing has not disappeared.

Nothing should be fighting for attention

In a hypnosis recording, you do not want the different elements competing with each other.

If the voice, music, ambience and effects are all demanding attention, the listener can become overstimulated.

That may occasionally be intentional. A brief increase in intensity can be used to regain attention or introduce a significant moment. But accidental busyness works against relaxation.

The voice cannot be too loud or rushed. The music cannot be constantly rising and falling without regard to what is being said. You do not want to be talking somebody down while the music is building towards a crescendo.

Those two signals contradict each other.

The voice should not sound as though it has been recorded in a bathroom. The music should not be so busy that the listener begins following it instead of settling. The effects should not exist merely to demonstrate that effects have been used.

Everything must know its role.

EnTrance does not use silence

There is an important distinction here.

EnTrance does not use complete silence. There is always music, beat or some other continuing sound.

What we use is a pause in the voice.

That pause can allow the mind to deepen. If the listener has just heard an important or interesting part of the script, the absence of further words gives them time to process it.

Complete silence creates a different problem. When the listener has dropped more deeply into the session, the sudden return of the voice may startle them and pull them back out.

So the aim is not silence. It is continuity without constant speech.

The background remains present while the voice gives the listener room.

Sensitive subjects require more than a good script

Some sessions deal with delicate material.

In those cases, the tone of the voice, the choice of music and the sequence of the induction all require additional care.

A phrase that works perfectly well in a general relaxation session may feel insensitive when it appears immediately before a more vulnerable subject. Sometimes the problem is not in the main body of the script but in something earlier that unintentionally jars against what comes next.

There have been recordings where we had to stop, reconsider the approach and begin again.

This is different from habit-change or addiction-related material, where timing, delay and the placement of pauses may be more central. Sensitive subjects demand close attention to tone and emotional continuity.

A technically correct recording can still feel wrong.

That feeling matters.

The listener feels what the producer misses

I have worked on thousands of voiceover sessions with professional and often well-known voices.

During my first year, I did not always understand why producers stopped a session and asked for another take. Sometimes the first performance sounded perfectly acceptable to me.

There are also producers who make people repeat a line five or ten times when the first take was already good. Anyone who has watched Toast of London will recognise the type.

But over time, I began to feel the recording differently.

If there was hesitation in a performance, I would feel it. If the intonation was wrong or the delivery lacked conviction, I would stop and ask for another take before we reached the mixing stage.

The reasoning was simple: if I could feel it, the listener would feel it.

They might not be able to identify the problem consciously. They may never say that a particular word was uncertain or that one phrase contained the wrong emphasis. They may simply trust the voice slightly less.

Years of listening create a form of subconscious technical awareness. You hear problems before you have fully explained them to yourself.

The listener may experience something similar from the other side.

They may not know why a recording feels amateur, thin, crowded, distant or uncomfortable. They only know that they do not want to continue listening.

For me, room reverb is one of the quickest ways to lose interest. I listen to plenty of hypnosis and meditation recordings myself, often shorter ones when I have twenty minutes over lunch and want to recharge.

The biggest turnoff is hearing the room around the voice.

Once it sounds as though somebody is speaking from a bathroom, I am gone.

Clichés are not automatically the problem

Relaxation audio contains familiar ingredients: soft pads, birds, water, waves, whispers and reverb.

There is still a place for all of them.

A good script, a trustworthy voice and confident production can carry a certain amount of cheesiness. Birds twittering or water moving against a shoreline do not automatically ruin a session.

The problem appears when the production feels naive or uncertain.

Then the clichés become evidence. The listener starts thinking: Why is this so cheesy? Do these people know what they are doing?

Trust begins to fall away.

Reverb and delay can also be used creatively. I like a little reverb and I particularly like delay when it is used with care. It can feel genuinely mind-altering because the listener is following the repeated sound while other words, triggers or suggestions continue around it.

That can support a confusion induction.

Production technique can therefore enhance the hypnotic structure rather than merely decorate it.

It has to work everywhere

Most people will not hear EnTrance in a perfect listening room.

They may use a phone speaker, cheap earbuds, a television, a car system or a heavily processed streaming service.

That means the recording has to survive.

It must work in mono. If the mix contains phase problems, parts of the sound can cancel and disappear. It must work on basic earphones, domestic televisions and high-end speakers.

Much of professional mixing involves finding that middle ground.

The recording should still sound convincing through a £10 pair of earbuds without falling apart when played through speakers costing thousands.

Some detail will inevitably be lost on poor equipment, but the experience must remain intact.

No invented technology and no inflated claims

EnTrance does not claim that a particular frequency heals people.

We have a sound-frequency library containing certain tones, and those tones may be useful when combined with frequency and vibration modules. But we do not pretend that we have invented unique audio technology or discovered some secret frequency unknown to the rest of the world.

These techniques have existed for decades. They appear in many recordings across many platforms. They will still exist long after I am gone.

Hopefully EnTrance will as well.

What we have done is combine voice, music, sound design, scripting and production experience in our own way.

The objective is balance.

The voice, music and sound design should carry equal responsibility for helping the listener reach a state of deep relaxation. None of them should overpower the others, and none should make promises they cannot support.

The evidence for the work is not a grand technical claim.

It is the experience of listening, the feedback gathered over more than a decade and the responses of people who have found the sessions useful.

That is enough.

Sound matters because trust matters.

And in hypnosis, everything the listener hears either strengthens that trust or quietly begins to remove it.