CD notes
JonasParker asked that I answer a few questions for him about making a full-length CD, like what's involved, why does it take so long, how much does it cost, and such as that.Well, a lot is involved. First you have to write the songs that you're going to record. This can take either an afternoon or your whole life depending on how inspired/motivated/picky/careless you are.
Next, you want to make sure your songs are arranged properly. Do the parts flow well? Does there need to be a bridge? Do you need to scrap these songs and write some that don't make your ears squirt blood?
Once you know pretty much how your songs will go, you need to think about recording them. This is where your bottomless pockets will come into play. Should you lack bottomless pockets, get ready to save up a lot of money for a long time.
Recording a professional-sounding CD can cost anywhere from a thousand to a million dollars, or even more. This varies greatly on studio time itself (which can range from $20 to $2000 dollars or more an hour), how many studio musicians you use (who will want around $300 per hour most likely), and of course, how much time you need to spend to record your music.
However long you think it will take to record your music, you are wrong. It always takes longer. You have to set up all your crap, check levels, then actually play the track. You want to get the track perfect, of course, so you need to do it over and over again until you get it right.
After you record your tracks, the studio engineer will mix them for you. This is a good time for you to fuck off and let him do his thing, because you're only going to bother him with your suggestions as he is trying to work. If you don't trust his judgement on mixing, then you need to go get an engineer that you do trust.
To give you en example, our three studio tracks so far have taken about 30 hours of time to record and mix, at $60 per hour. This does not include the money we paid a studio drummer to play for us. A huge recording artist like Dave Matthews might spend a week recording a single song without batting an eye, in a studio that is charging $2k/hr. We are not a huge band.
After you record your CD you need to get it duplicated by a duplication house. These are the people that take your master recording and turn it into those silvery discs that everyone is so familiar with. This typically costs somewhere aroudn a grand for 1000 CD's. This includes some minimal cover art and packaging, but to make a CD with a nice booklet with full color and all of that stuff it costs a lot more. You also have to be concerned with all the graphics work that goes into a package like this.
All told, our CD is going to push the ten grand mark when it's all over, and we are coming up with all of that money out of our own pockets.
Yes this sucks, but it's a lot better than the alternative.
If we were to get signed by a major label, they might spend 500k to have us record our CD, but they would essentially loan us that money. Then they would promote the cd, and any money they spent on promoting it would also basically be a loan. It's very easy to get signed by a record label and suddenly find yourself owing them a million dollars, after recording, promotion, and filming some sort of music video.
In order to pay this money back to the record company, your record pretty much has to go platinum.
I think the general public would be very surprised to find out how little some of the people you see on MTV are making. Some of these people are lucky to clear $30k a year after everyone in their organization gets their cut. The music business is designed to pay the artist last.
Which is why it pays to be an independant artist these days, meaning not signed by a major label.
It's very hard to make your living playing music, which is why I need every little bit of support I can get from you good people.
Thanks in advance. I won't disappoint you.
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