EDIT: HOLY SHIT, THIS IS LONG! I like being thorough. Sorry.

I mulled through a number of condescending subjects before finally settling on this, which is much nicer than the working title, “Don’t Be a Fucking Idiot.” In the end, I decided that just because something is logical to me and many others, that doesn’t make it universal knowledge, and it isn’t really fair of me to penalize others for just not having the experience to know this stuff. But, whatever. Let’s get to work.

Fact: good recordings take time. The better your sound, the more time it will probably take. Sure, there are exceptions, especially since your definition of “good” is going to be different than mine, but for a big, professional-sounding recording, you need to expect to spend some time.

Fact: good recordings are usually not cheap. There are exceptions, studios and guys who don’t give a shit and want to undercut the competition, or buddies who will cut you a deal. Generally speaking, though, you need to expect to pay a couple hundred dollars a day for anything good. This is because recording gear is expensive. You know how a good guitar costs $1000 or more and then you spent maybe $1400 on your amp and cab? Well imagine doing that over and over and over and over again, never being finished. Some examples: I bought a single microphone for $1400 last year. I only use it for guitars. My A/D conversion cost about $3000, when all was said and done. My computer cost about $1000. In software, I’ve spent even more than that. There are preamps, other mics, cables, acoustic paneling — it just does not end. Everything good is expensive and that means that if a studio wants to continue upgrading their stuff so they can do the best possible work, they need to charge. In other words, if you want to use this awesome shit to record, you need to realize that it is a major investment for the studio, which means you are going to pay more than you would if your buddy was doing it with his $600 stuff from Guitar Center.

Got that? Good. So let’s keep going.

A band wanted me to record their full-length. Before committing to it, they wanted to do a single song as a demo. This is a great idea because a full-length is quite a commitment and has some special pressure attached to it, so I like making sure that a band is comfortable with what I can do before they sign on. This particular band cited a massively overproduced deathcore band as an example of what they were looking to sound like. That shit is not cheap, that shit does not happen overnight. That shit is expensive. I made all of this abundantly clear.

Back to the demo, though, the band wanted to do one song. This band plays death metal. While they are a great band, experience teaches everyone involved with recording metal that most bands have a few members who just aren’t as prepared as they tell themselves. Once you get under the microscope, tiny inconsistencies become major issues and with each successive take, your time to complete the project increases, meaning your cost goes up. This is the nature of recording and with music that requires extreme technical ability, it means that good recordings take much longer than a band usually expects. As a result, I told them to budget for three or four days. I explained everything above in very simple language. I also explained that since they were being funded by a label, it is better to ask for more money than they need and then return what is left after the fact than ask for too little at the start and need more. This is a very basic concept in budgetting. You never plan for the best-case scenario — never. So we have that.

The band balked, “Dude. We are good. With our last recording, we did six songs in one day.” Yeah, and it sounds like shit. Clearly, you weren’t happy with it, or you’d be going back there. If you did six songs in one day, you probably recorded live and unless you are Hate Eternal, there are probably mistakes all over the place. If it was tracked and fully mixed in one day, you went to someone who either doesn’t know what they are doing or doesn’t give a shit. Comparing this recording to professional practices is simply not apples-to-apples. It’s apples-to-fucking… pizza. Apples-to-sushi.

So why should a band budget three or four days to do one song? Aside from the fact that I hadn’t worked with them before and they were playing music that always takes longer to record than expected, there’s the fact that they stated that they wanted extremely high quality. One song or ten, there are certain non-negotiable aspects of recording that eat up time. Let’s go over the whole process.

No matter what you do, your setup is going to take hours. A five-piece drum kit needs to be setup, tuned, have mics placed, computer setup, tones checked and rechecked, and then the drummer has to warm up. You are looking at two hours minimum, right there. Now imagine that they are doing a five-minute song and it takes them four takes, plus time discussing them, time listening to them. That five-minute song just took forty-five minutes to do. When they’re done, they need to break down their kit, load out, I break down my mics and we clean up — another forty-five minutes to an hour. Your one five-minute song just took three and a half hours. It is now 3:30, if you showed up on time, and it’s time for lunch. Sometime between 4 and 4:30, we are ready to start again.

Time for your first guitar. We move a cab, we position a head, we plug everything in, I setup some mics, you tune, and we begin getting sounds. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will sound great right away, meaning we only spent about forty-five minutes setting up. In all likelihood, you’re going to want to play with your tone to make sure it is exactly what you want. One thing leads to another and we just spent an hour and a half getting your guitar ready to record. We start recording your five-minute song and you nail it in two takes, both of which we listened to at least once — twenty minutes there, plus discussing it with your band, so let’s say 30. Great! Thing is, standard practice for metal rhythm guitars is to double everything, so two more takes plus critiques later, you are done. You just spent an hour recording one channel of your five-minute song, plus an hour and a half setting up — 2.5 (I’m tired of hyphenating things) hours to do your song.

Second guitar! You break down, your other guitarist brings his shit in, he tunes — same process as before but we have a better idea of the tone we want, so it’s only 1 hour total. Your rhythm guitarist is also on the ball and he gets everything in a total of three takes, so 45 minutes total to record both of his tracks, but with setup you still spent 1.75 hours on this guitar, or 4:15 on guitars.

Let’s add things up so far. Your drummer took 3.5, we ate lunch, we spent 2.5 on your first guitar, 1.75 on the second guitar. Plus you need to factor in some time for breaks to save our ears, go to the bathroom, whine about hearing things in the monitors, setting up the click track, (Holy shit, I forgot about that! Another 45 minutes, easily!) and general stuff that takes a few minutes here and there. We are at least 8 hours in. We break down guitars, setup bass, get our sounds, tune, all that shit, and it is now 10pm. There’s no sense in starting bass because we are tired, my ears are burnt, and I start making dumb mistakes when I work too late because of this. Day 1 is over.

Day 2, we do bass. Bassists are always problematic. I love every band who I have recorded; there is not a single person who I have not enjoyed recording. That said, I can think of a huge number of bands where the bassist derailed the entire process by just not being as tight as the other guys. Your five minute song takes the bassist two hours on the next day. It is now 2pm. We break down, load out, and your vocalist comes in. Setup is usually quick, we check levels, and he’s good to go. Standard death metal practice is to double vocals, so the whole process will take an maybe 1.5 if he is on his game.

Tracking is done and it took us a day and a half to do one five-minute song. This is assuming that everyone but the bassist is totally on their game, which is a bad assumption to make. God fucking help us if you have guitar solos, guitar overdubs, extra vocals, gang vocals, samples, or anything like that because if you do, we probably didn’t start setting up bass until day 2, meaning the entire day is spent on bass and vocals. We are somewhere between 1.5 and 2 days in and you did one five-minute song. If you had recorded more than one song, you easily have spent the first day on drums and maybe got the guitar setup, second day on the first guitar, third day on the second, bass on the fourth, vocals on the fifth — and that is all realistic, if everyone is pretty good, but it could be significantly more time if anyone isn’t where they should be or if you’re going to be REALLY anal about stuff or if your songs are long.

Let’s say that you are 1.5 days in for your five-minute song, though. We can now start editing and mixing. We start by doing my normal processing through Nebula, which is tedious and boring, applying settings and then exporting individual tracks and then importing them again. You wanted to sound like a deathcore band, so I sampled your drums (we didn’t count the time required for that!) and then had to edit those samples and import them into my drum replacement program, meaning we spent another 2 or 3 hours there. I clean up your drummer’s playing, edit out some rough fills and sloppy blast beats, even out some hits, crossfade and edit all the bass, and make sure that everyone’s performance is what they wanted. End of day two and some of that probably went into day three.

Day three is mixing. We can easily spend a whole day mixing one song. We master on the same day, probably, but my ears are pretty burnt by the end of the day. You take it, you listen, and decide that we need to make some changes because the first mix/master is never the final. Guess what? You’re booking evenings now. Cheaper than a full day but it’s still gonna cost you. The thing is, if you had recorded more than one song, your mixing time wouldn’t be all that different since we would have just taken the settings from that one song, imported them into the others, made little adjustments to account for inconsistencies in playing, and moved on. Granted, your editing time would have been greater and then we’re dealing with waiting for files to open and close, plus songs to export, but the actual mixing time wouldn’t have been all that different.

This brings up an interesting point: there are A LOT of areas that wouldn’t have been any different, had you recorded more songs. You’d have lost the equivalent of a full day on load in, load out, and setup no matter what. There are things that reduce this: if you only have one guitarist and you want to use the same amp for everything; if we’ve worked together before and I have some ideas about mics and positions that work well for your drums; if you have recorded before and you know what you want your tone to sound like; if your drums are tuned, strings are changed, everything is ready to go; if you have professional equipment, it will be easier to get the sounds that we want; if you don’t have overdubs of any kind; if you blaze through your takes; if you aren’t obsessively anal about performances. Likelihood of all of this or even half of this happening? Low, especially if I have to explain this shit to you in the first place because that means you don’t have experience in this kind of environment.

So when all of that is taken into account, you just spent three days on one song. $600, at my current rate.

In the 13 months of operating BS1, number of bands who managed to record a five-minute song in a single day: zero. Bands who got one song done in two days: two. Abserdo and Sadgiqacea. In Abserdo’s case, they setup fast, they know their material, they don’t obsess over tones, their drummer has one of the best sounding kits I have ever heard, we’ve worked together before, and they didn’t want an overly processed sound. In Sadgiqacea’s case, they setup fast, the know their material, their guitar gear is great so getting tones is simple, their stuff isn’t fast so it’s a bit easier to mix, and they like things gritty.

In the end, the guy from the death metal band who wanted me to record them turned out to be incapable of listening. He told someone that I was charging them $600 per song, didn’t understand the idea of budgetting for things to go wrong, and didn’t understand the recording process. He also completely failed to grasp my current studio investment deal, which is that I will give $1.50 in recording credit for every $1 given to me for time that is not yet booked. When someone told him that $600 would give him $900 and cover a big chunk of their full-length, he swore that I told someone (not him, but someone else — I apparently have a spokesperson) that I would do their whole album for $600. He didn’t have the courtesy to talk with me about it or let me know that he wasn’t coming in to record, he just disappeared and I was out a weekend of recording. Great!

What is a shame is that I was really looking forward to recording these guys and if money was an issue, we could have figured something so they could still get in — above all else, I want make killer bands sound awesome and continue honing my skills. But at the end of the day, I do not give a shit and this does not matter. I have no shortage of clients and fully stand behind my work. I’m also not interested in recording bands who don’t care enough about their music to make the time and financial investment required to have something they love. This dude is in for a rude awakening when he starts pricing studios and realizes that the going rate for a decent place in the area is $30/hour or more. Oh well! Best of luck, guys!