I've noticed in my experience being around the music scene around here that there's different types of bands and artists with differing opinions, goals and beliefs about what the recording process is and how it should be approached. They can be roughly broken down in to two categories: The local band with day jobs, and the signed, working band with a record contract.

The first group is generally very naive to the recording process. These are the people I work with because I don't have a real commercial facility and a large list of notable clients. I also fall in to the first group respectively at what I do because I also work a day job and I'm not a full blown professional. I'm on the same relative level of my craft as they are at theirs. It should be noted though, that just because someone isn't technically "professional" (doing it for a living) doesn't mean they aren't great at what they do. How many bands on the radio do you absolutely hate? I'd bet there's a lot of local bands you'd much rather listen to.


There's a lot of "semi-pro" or "project studios" in existence right now and I'll try to give you a little bit of background information on why that is...


Years ago, recording equipment was virtually all of the industrial nature. By that, I mean it was either consumer grade bought at a department store for people to have fun with or heavy, expensive higher voltage gear intended for professional use only with very little in between. The gear was sold by brokers to recording studios at industrial price points and the studio would mortgage it then pay it off with the money they made as a business. This scenario still exists but is becoming more and more rare as the rise of affordable recording equipment continues to lower and lower the cost of a "studio" and more and more people are either recording themselves or going somewhere cheap. The lines have been blurred as to what is and isn't a recording studio and a lot of the really beautiful Neve and SSL facilities out there simply aren't getting the business they once did and are forced to close down. Legendary studios with long histories attached to them are dropping like flies. It's sad but true..

To give a rough estimate of the cost of yesterday's professional gear compared to todays "prosumer" equipment, in 1985 an SSL console, two studer 24 track tape decks a 2" mix down deck, racks of outboard compressors/eqs and reverbs and a professional mic locker would likely cost a studio $1,000,000. This isn't even taking into account the cost to acoustically design the rooms and maintenance costs for the console (something like $10,000 a year) as well as the outrageous electricity bills.

Today, someone can buy a digidesign 003 interface, some kind of 8 channel preamp, a few rode or audio technica condenser mics, some SM57s, and an imac for $5,000 and call it a recording studio. Where years ago there would likely only be 2-3 studios in a 100 mile radius, now there's a few per town.

This is where most of the misconceptions begin to arise.There's a ton of low budget studios out there operated by people who simply don't have what it takes to make a good sounding record. These people are generally musicians themselves who bought their equipment with the intention of recording themselves and realized they could advertise themselves as a "recording studio". What most of these so called "engineers" lack is a true respect and devotion to the art of recording music. They don't have the attention to detail and patience, knowledge of the gear and room acoustics a real professional posses and the end product reflects that. Some telltale signs of this are noticeable mistakes in the performances (a good producer/engineer makes sure only your best playing goes on the record), out-of-balance mixes, overall "cheap" sounds and other flaws that pop up the second you hit play. If you feel there is something obviously wrong with your recording then whomever recorded you has failed and it's pretty common now. It seems like just about every band I know has a demo they paid someone to butcher. Just as the lines have been blurred as to what a studio is and isn't, the line between "guy with some recording stuff" and "engineer" has been blurred too... especially by the self proclamation of these supposed "engineers".

There is now a huge variance in the quality of the recording engineers you will encounter where once the title actually meant something.

It's become the standard cliche these days that "the engineer determines the quality of the recording, not the gear." and rightly so because it's now truer than ever. There used to be a guarantee that the person you were recording with busted their ass to get where they were. You knew this person spent years assisting a seasoned professional and worked for free just so that they could accumulate knowledge, learn how to treat clients and occasionally sit in and watch. You knew that other engineers likely failed and gave up where yours succeeded and that was why he/she was sitting behind the board. It should be known that a good recording engineer can make a more "expensive" sounding record with a few SM57s an MBox and a laptop than a shitty one can make in a 2 million dollar facility (assuming they can even figure out how to use it). If that sounds like an exaggeration I assure you I'm not kidding.

This is why now more than ever bands need to really find out who they're working with and not necessarily so much where. Find out what they've done and listen to the recordings yourself. All the big shiny stacks of gear in the world won't get you the sound you're after unless the geek pushing the buttons understands what you want and knows how to do it for you. There's gonna be guys out there that don't care about your band and just want to make a quick buck, then there's gonna be guys that can get you the sound you want in their basement, and I'd like to think I'm one of them.


Thanks for reading.

William