RC grad Brayden Haney (left) and Jack Previte (right) of Contra Collective
By the time
Brayden Haney aka B. Eazy discovered the Recording Connection, he was already serious about a career in music production. As one-half of
The Contra Collective, a trap/hip-hop duo formed with Jack Previte, Brayden says their art eventually demanded they figure out a way to take it to the next level.
“We are friends from high school,” Brayden explains. “We live in the same town, and we kind of started making music together and then kind of started to get serious…I think what inspired us the most was [the music] we were making. What we were making wanted us to keep going.”
Having already put his college education on pause, Brayden soon discovered the Recording Connection could train him on-the-job in a real studio. He decided to enroll and was placed with mentor Steve Catizone at
Infinite Music. Steve took a liking to both Brayden and Jack and tailored the training to help the burgeoning production team.
“He definitely taught me a lot about audio engineering and mixing and mastering our stuff,” says Brayden. “He’d show us how to mix and master a song, and we’d take that technique and use it for another song or even what we were recording, or the plugins on our vocals, or how to mix a beat. Literally everything…he really helped us evolve, too. He has done all genres of music. So he brought techniques from old and new…He taught us everything that we know now.”
Brayden not only went through the basic program with Steve, but also stayed on to do the master’s program as well. He says the training has enabled Contra Collective to handle all aspects of their creative and production process.
“We both produce and record and mix and master and audio engineer everything, and write our own lyrics,” he says. “We both record our own stuff and just put it all together.”
The duo doesn’t just focus on production, either. They also take responsibility for getting their music to the public using as many platforms as possible. “We used to only post stuff to SoundCloud, but now it’s on everything,” says Brayden. “We use TuneCore, and that puts it out onto Apple, Spotify, Google Music or Android, everything. And then we also have been doing more
music videos on YouTube and just trying to get all platforms covered. Then we also kind of found out that social media is very important, even for performances. You need to look at your social media and stuff like that.”
Now strongly focused on their collaborative music career, Contra Collective has the tools they needed in order to up their game, thanks in part to the Recording Connection.
“It was kind of perfect timing,” Brayden says, “We kind of evolved with exactly what we wanted to do, because we were making beats and still recording in Logic, and it wasn’t sounding good. So we’d either have to go to a studio to record or send stuff to get mixed and mastered or stuff like that. So we just learned it instead, and have gotten better.”
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