Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's interview with Dustin Arbuckle Dustin Arbuckle and The Damnations are not a band you can easily associate with one specific genre, and that's how they planned it. Arbuckle, a veteran of the progressive roots music scene whose singing and harmonica playing first came into prominence in Moreland & Arbuckle, has been kicking up fresh dust with The Damnat...

Making a Scene Presents - Proximity Effect and Vocal Tone: How a Few Inches Can Change Everything About Your Voice Understanding the relationship between microphone distance, bass response, vocal intimacy, and recording quality can help independent musicians make better recordings without spending another dime on equipment. The Most Overlooked Tone Control in Your Home Studio There is a particular...

Making a Scene Presents - The Smart Tour Starts at Home: Building a Local Music Scene and a Regional Touring Business That Actually Makes Money Why independent artists should stop measuring success by miles traveled and start building a music economy in their own backyard. The Great American Touring Myth Somewhere along the way, the music industry convinced independent musicians that success was m...

Making a Scene Presents - The Next Music Industry Middle Class Will Be Built Around Relationships That Survive the Platform The music industry has become remarkably good at collecting information about fans, tracking transactions, and creating new ways to sell music. Unfortunately, the people making the music are often the last ones allowed to benefit from all that information. As AI, Smart Media,...

Making a Scene Presents - The American Music Tourism Act Is Now Law. Indie Artists Should Pay Attention to What Happens Next Washington Has Officially Discovered That Music Makes People Travel On October 9, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the American Music Tourism Act of 2025 into federal law. That sentence sounds like the sort of thing that normally causes musicians to politely nod, return t...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Reverend Raven A musician is only as good as the last gig, and a career is measured less by a list of names than by the people in the room, the groove onstage, and whether the audience leaves smiling. Still, the story is worth telling. Born and raised in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Chief Raven found the blues in 1971 after seeing Fr...

Making a Scene Presents - 25 Smart Media Products You Can Actually Build for Your Merch Table How to Turn Ordinary Merch Into Physical-Digital Collectibles Without Setting Fire to the Tour Budget The first generation of Smart Media Albums has arrived, and now comes the much more interesting question: what can an independent artist actually make with this stuff? That question matters because nobody...

Making a Scene Presents - The Album Is Not the Object Anymore How Indie Artists Can Turn Almost Anything Into a Smart Media Collectible For most of the recorded music business, the album had a fairly simple job description. It was the thing that contained the music. You bought the vinyl record, cassette or CD because that was how you got the songs, and the artwork, photographs and liner notes came...

Making a Scene Presents - We Solved Music Distribution. We Forgot to Solve Making a Living. There was a time when one of the biggest problems facing an independent musician was simply getting a record into the marketplace. You could make a great album, spend money you probably didn't have recording it, press a few hundred CDs, load the boxes into your car and then discover that most of the record...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Wren and Wilde Wren + Wilde is a Minnesota folk and Americana band led by singer-songwriter Hilary Yoder, whose distinctive “smoke folk” sound blends emotional honesty, roots-driven songwriting, and a dark, smoldering atmosphere that sets the group apart within the Midwest music scene. At the heart of Wren + Wilde is a deep respect for storytelling. Their...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Jason Reilly Owner of Jamboja Studios Jason Reilly is an Irish musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and studio owner whose work sits at the intersection of performance, recording, and artist development. Based in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, Reilly is closely associated with Jamboja Studios, a private residential recording facility cr...

Making a Scene Presents - Great Performances Beat Great Equipment Spend enough time around recording musicians and you eventually witness a familiar little ceremony. Someone finishes a take, listens to the playback, makes a face normally associated with discovering something unpleasant in the refrigerator, and decides the studio needs an upgrade. Perhaps the microphone is not expensive enough. May...

Making a Scene Presents - Smart Media Albums Enter the U.S. Billboard Charts Today The Bigger Opportunity Starts After the Sale For the past several weeks, we have been watching the Smart Media Album story with the kind of cautious enthusiasm that years in the music business eventually teaches you to develop. The idea has always been interesting because it combines something fans can physically ow...

Making a Scene Presents - When AI Becomes the Music Fan’s Personal Shopper Spotify, Meta Muse, and Why AI Agent Optimization May Become the Next Battleground for Independent Artists For most of the internet era, musicians have been told that success begins with getting somebody to click something. First we worried about getting people to find an artist website through Google. Then musicians were t...

Making a Scene Presents - What Independent Musicians Can Learn from Netflix, Disney, and the Streaming Wars The movie and television business has figured out how to turn entertainment into an ongoing relationship with an audience. It is time independent musicians stopped thinking like content suppliers and started thinking like entertainment companies. There is something wonderfully strange happen...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Teni Rane Teni Rane is a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Americana and folk singer-songwriter whose music grows from the landscape around her and the questions that have shaped her life. Appalachian songbirds, white oaks, wildflower fields, and the changing seasons find their way into songs that explore belonging, identity, longing, and the complicated beauty...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with The StereoGang THE Stereo Gang is a high-energy rock band from Kochi Prefecture, Japan, bringing the raw power of classic hard rock, the rebellious spirit of rock and roll, and the soulful foundations of the blues into a sound built for a new generation. Formed at Kochi University’s light music club, the band came together around vocalist Miu an...

Making a Scene Presents - Move the Microphone Before You Buy Another Plugin The Science of Microphone Placement and Better Guitar and Vocal Recordings How distance, angle, reflections, and a little understanding of acoustics can transform your recordings without transforming your home studio into another expensive equipment collection. There is a peculiar ritual that takes place in home recording...

Making a Scene Presents - Facebook Just Gave Independent Musicians the Best Argument Yet for Owning Their Fan Relationships Meta’s new subscription plans and reported restrictions on outbound links expose a problem independent musicians have been living with for years. Artists have spent decades building audiences on social media, only to discover that having thousands of followers and having cont...

Making a Scene Presents - The Great Engagement Lie How Indie Musicians Became Free Labor for the Platforms That Charge Them to Reach Their Own Fans We Were Told to Chase Likes, Followers, Hearts, and Streams. Nobody Explained Who Was Actually Making the Money. There is a strange ritual taking place in the independent music business. Every morning, thousands of musicians wake up, reach for their ph...

Making a Scene Presents - Your Song May Already Have Made Money You Never Collected Somewhere Out There, Your Music May Be Making Money Without You Imagine spending months writing a song, recording it, paying musicians, mixing it, mastering it, and finally releasing it into the world. You upload the finished master to your distributor, announce the release on social media, send an email to your fa...

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Cassandra Cole Cassandra Cole is a California-born, Minnesota-based singer-songwriter whose music occupies the space where alternative soul, indie folk, and emotionally charged songwriting meet. Now rooted in the Twin Cities, Cole has developed a sound that is intimate without being fragile, atmospheric without losing its human center, and driven by a will...

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Austin Walking Cane Austin Walkin’ Cane plays what he proudly calls “Damn Fine Blues” — a gritty, soulful mix of original songs and classic Delta blues built around slide guitar, raw vocals, and the deep pull of American roots music. Whether performing solo, as a duo, or with a full electric band, Cane brings the spirit of Highway 61 to the stag...

Making a Scene Presents - How Microphones Hear Why the Voice in the Room Is Not Always the Voice in the Recording One of the strangest experiences in a home studio happens before anybody has touched an EQ, compressor, reverb, or one of those plugins that promises to make your vocal sound like it was recorded in a million-dollar studio somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. A singer stands a few feet in...

Making a Scene Presents - Five Things You Can Sell and the One Thing You Should Keep There is a habit in the music business that we probably should have questioned a long time ago. An artist spends months writing a song, recording it, paying musicians, fixing vocals, choosing mixes, mastering the final recording, building an audience around it and eventually creating something with real economic v...