How to Set a Recording Budget

Series Summary

The Greek philosophers believed that music was an orderly array of notes, which comprised melodies and harmonies floating in a linear fashion. Music has explored countless boundaries and styles, which in turn has created a variety of new forums for listeners. From bands like the Velvet Underground to singers like Luciano Pavarotti, music has captivated audiences throughout the world.

In this free video clip series our expert David Jackel will walk you through an entire process of music recording preparation. You'll learn how to make a budget as well as manage your time efficiently so as to get the most out of your sound engineer. David will teach you the importance of choosing a studio along with hiring session musicians to create the ambiance you've always wanted. Rehearsing is important if you want to polish your sound and making music sheets never hurts either. Learn how to save money, avoid unnecessary problems and in no time you'll be sharing your music with the rest of the world.

Video Transcript

"So the first thing we need to tackle is your budget. Before you can go into a studio, you need to know how much money you have available to spend. Now of course, if you have no budget, you're not going to be gong into a recording studio. Don't even think that you can do it on the cheap. You can do it on the relative cheap but the relative cheap for a full length record is about $1,000 and you're not going to get it much cheaper than that. You have to figure that a studio is going to cost you between $30 to $50 an hour if it's a good studio. And many studios are going to be higher than that. So you're going to be paying quite a bit once you're in the studio and you have to figure out what actually needs to be done in the studio. For one of my recent projects, we realized that we could record a lot of the record at home, bypassing the studio and bypassing those expenses. So what we did is figure out just what it is that we need to do at home and what we need to do in the studio, and we looked at the amount of money that we had. And we realized that we could afford about $1,000 worth of recording so we said OK, we're going to put aside this much for the necessities for the studio, and of course you have to budget a certain amount for extra items like hard drive space which you'll be using if you're doing a home recording, or just to save files that are done in the studio. You need to budget a certain amount for mastering for afterwards. So your best bet is to budget items in such a way that the most important things of course are put first. Something that you cannot do outside of a studio, no matter what, like drums, that you're going to have to put in your budget and that may be the lion's share of the budget. And then smaller items like new drive space can be put aside. You can say to yourself, well, maybe what we'll just do is use hard drives that you already have and just not waste the money. But either way, these things become very expensive very quickly, so watch your spending."