Studio time is pretty expensive, and depending on how you handle yourself and your project before you enter the vocal booth, it can either be a little expensive, or really expensive. It’s really up to you. In this post, I’ll explain a few things that have worked for me, and what I’ve found doesn’t work that well and what I’ll avoid doing in the future.
Make Demos!! – And make them pretty extensively. I would argue it’s probably a good idea to attempt to make a fully produced composition at home and try to get it to sound clear. The more detailed the better. I used to use DAW Multitrack app on my phone and Ipad back in the day. I think it’s like $20 and the additional tracks may be another $20 or so. Buy that and spend some serious time working on your demos. Experiment a lot with your tracks. Put weird stuff onto them and see what sticks. I can’t list how many times an idea came from wherever that seemed so stupid in my head but sounded so great on the track. In this stage, the demo stage, it’s not the time to be critical. Take off the editor hat and leave it upstairs. Go in the basement, use your smartphone app and microphone and get weird.
The obvious benefit to making demos is that you’ll have a roadmap for where your track is going. You’re going to need a roadmap no matter what, and you’ll either prepare it at home, or you’ll end up preparing it in the studio. One of those roadmaps is free to create, and the other is not! You don’t need to marry the roadmap (that’s how things get a little sterile), but you do need to have something that can be tweaked and adjusted and manipulated inside the studio environment.
Think about going grocery shopping in order to produce a finished meal. You could break it down into three separate parts. The creation of the shopping list, the execution of the shopping, and the production of the meal in the kitchen. Each one requires a different type of thinking. The creation of the shopping list requires more abstract thinking than the actual shopping itself does. Each part of the process is essential to crafting the best finished product, the meal. Don’t think that one part is more important than the other or that you can make up for a lack in one area by doing really hard in another. Make the roadmap ahead of time and you’ll end up with a better work of art.
Make Charts and Print Them! – This is absolutely essential. Even if you’re working with a band that knows the song inside and out, you still want charts. You want to have the song on paper for everyone, even the drummer and engineer. Written notes, substitutions, and adjustments become so much simpler when you have a printed document that you can physically write on. It’s way easier to discuss parts of the song with your musicians when they have it in front of their faces. It’s also helpful for you. Your brain is like a computer. If you’re going to run a program that uses a lot of CPU power, what is the one thing everyone recommends doing first? Closing out all the other programs. When you’re in the studio, the program you’re running is mostly performance. You don’t want to have another program in the background trying to remember all the changes and the lyrics and the timing and oh this is where that weird thing happens…if you have it written down, you can dedicate more energy and focus to what really matters, the performance. Make your charts, ideally in roman numeral system (see mine below), and print them! It will save you a ton of time and energy and inevitably will make your tracks much better.
Bring / prepare for food – Being in the studio is a lot of fun. I have a friend who uses the term “studio crack.” It’s a little explicit, but the concept is very real. Being in the studio is so fun and exhilarating, it can feel like you’re high. Hearing your baby creations come to life in high def and sound better than you’ve ever imagined will make you extremely excited. You’ll very likely have a high adrenaline rush hitting you hard that you’ll be riding all day. Some of my favorite days ever being alive are days I was in the studio all day long.
It’s a magical place, it really is. As I write this, I can’t wait to go back. All of a sudden, you realize your body needs to be fed and you haven’t eaten in several hours. You know you could get through it and just thrive on the adrenaline, but your producer can’t and your drummer can’t, and then everyone else starts feeling it…I like to pack my own lunch to the studio and encourage others to do the same. If you’re not a lunch packer, I would advise scheduling a food delivery for a certain time and then being pleasantly surprised when it shows up. Your team will be very happy, and they’ll know you really care about them. Few people think about this kind of thing, so if you can be on it you’ll have people happy to work with you and for you on your projects. Not only that, but very few people can put out high quality work over an extended period of time without proper nourishment. Make sure you don’t forget to eat while you’re tracking.
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