The studio business.

[Comte de St Germain]

I have comments and questions and as a shop owner it seems many don't like to discuss the biz side of things but here in Bob's realm it seems to be the right environment.

Some things i've learned:

1. Some clients need to be fired and in some cases never hired to begin with. There are some "tells" that usually can be picked up on like asking for discounts without telling you their name, asking for your location before asking your rates, comparing your rates to DJ X's and telling you a 3 minute song will require 15 minutes of studio time. There are others that you will have to suffer through because it is the process that makes them termination material.

2. Some people will never be happy and it's not your job to make them happy. Sure aiming to please is one thing but making an insufferable jackass attain an impossible goal doesn't have the same reward as them just dying on Everest by their lonesome.

3. Education is part of our job description, the process can be daunting and it's our job to make it go smoothly without handing over the keys.

4. People will never understand overhead.

5. The best maintenance is one the client never notices.


Some things I have yet to learn:

Q1. How to keep the engineers that use our room happy and motivated. No, they don't get a salary, they are independent contractors but a qualified engineer pay scale is an interesting thing. Our day rate for our guys is the same as Albini's right hand man and more than the others. How do y'all handle it in a sporadic business?

Q2. What kind of pre-project paperwork do you put into place. I'm thinking more and more a CYA document of your services and extras combined with a policies script is the only way to go; any examples?


Q3. How do those of you who own a shop make the time to have a life outside of the studio? <shrugs>

[Bob Olhsson]

I want to bump this!

[mclights]

awesome subject!

Q3. How do those of you who own a shop make the time to have a life outside of the studio? <shrugs>

moreover, how do you maintain a stable relationship with a significant other...or friends, for that matter. seems like its a timewarp; i cant believe how fast the last few months have flown by...

2. Some people will never be happy and it's not your job to make them happy. Sure aiming to please is one thing but making an insufferable jackass attain an impossible goal doesn't have the same reward as them just dying on Everest by their lonesome.

guess ill fire out a question for you. when was the tipping point for you and what was it that did the tipping? ive recently (past year i guess) come to that conclusion and a lot of that stress i felt before has dissapeared.

Q2. What kind of pre-project paperwork do you put into place. I'm thinking more and more a CYA document of your services and extras combined with a policies script is the only way to go; any examples?

ive wondered about this myself. and any document/agreement you draft hold in court or do things like that need to be notarized by a lawyer? or is it a case of "if the clients sig is on it, its implied that its agreed"? and ive been a little hesitant to draft something like this (although ive wanted to) because...

a qualified engineer pay scale is an interesting thing

and its somethinga lot of people dont understand...but thats back to your 'overhead' point. ive leared a bit on this point, but not nearly enough of how much i should. learn as you go i suppose. that said, im no newb, but the business side is always something ive wondered how to solidify.

what was it that kind of cemented your going rate and what factors went into this decision?

again, cool topic:Thumbsup:

[seaneldon]

Q1. How to keep the engineers that use our room happy and motivated. No, they don't get a salary, they are independent contractors but a qualified engineer pay scale is an interesting thing. Our day rate for our guys is the same as Albini's right hand man and more than the others. How do y'all handle it in a sporadic business?

I've never owned a room. I've managed one studio that did fairly well during my stay, all things considered. Still, most of my experience is being a "staff" or "freelance" engineer at a few different rooms and never on salary...and I know exactly what keeps me happy and motivated.

It seems like common sense, but quite a few shop owners don't seem to grasp this: Pick the right guy for each job. If you have some very hairy and technical stuff coming in, don't hand it to the guy who can't follow a chart or count odd measures. Don't give me the hip hop session...give it to the guy who makes hip hop in his spare time. Pick the guy who does the best work for the best jobs. Pick the guy who does the right work for the job at hand.

If the engineer is actually very happy with what he is working on, and how it turns out, there isn't much difference between $100 a day and $400 a day.

That's not entirely true...but you can see my point.

One room in Williamsburg I worked out of quite a bit had (still has) more than a DOZEN engineers on rotation. It was mostly a mix and overdub room, so we could have 2-4 sessions per 24 hour day all operated by different guys. It is REALLY frustrating to work out of this room, no matter how good it sounds. A few of us would stress to the owner of the room to "trim the fat" every couple of months to no avail...eventually we left and the fat stayed. That room turns out pretty boring product.

Q3. How do those of you who own a shop make the time to have a life outside of the studio? <shrugs>

I spend most of my non-work time with my wife. We get along really well, so it works out. We cook a lot, we go for walks across the city when it's nice, see good live music when it rarely comes through town, sushi sushi sushi spend most of my paycheck on sushi sushi sushi.

[Dave Perry]

Nobody ever responded to this in the first place?

[Bob Olhsson]

I was rummaging around looking to re-stick the original forum introduction since we have a bunch of new people around and was amazed that I had missed this.

[weedywet]

When engineer SALARIES were actually decent, living wages, studios were charging 150 an hour and up.

The 48 tk mixing rate at record plant in 1987 was $2500 a day.

What studio now is getting anywhere NEAR that, after what should have been 30 years of inflation?

So I tend to believe that clients paying enginners directly or at least having engineer rates separated from studio rates us the only way to go. Unless you ARE getting 2500 a day in which case 25% to a staff engineer seems workable.

[radiationroom]

The 48 tk mixing rate at record plant in 1987 was $2500 a day.

What studio now is getting anywhere NEAR that, after what should have been 30 years of inflation?

Part of the problem is studio owners who use studios as a loss leader or who are renting their home studios out to support their gear habit. About an hour from where I am there is a very nice studio equipped with an SSL-4048, Studer A827 and a fully loaded ProTools system which I can book for $25 an hour on weekdays. The man who owns it is a real estate developer who uses the loss he takes on his studio as a tax write-down. At least his studio is in real commerical space and not in his basement.

[malice]

Nowdays, there is not even enough money to maintain the mic lockers in good shape.

All I can see is studio closing their doors or, best case case scenario, being sold to the in house staff that will sold the nicest pieces (and I mean by that, what the owner left while living) to pay the bank monthly check when they don't have enough booking.

The only place I was staff engineer in was sold to a former assitant of mine. He had to sold so far the neve rack, the EMT 250, the Pultecs, the U48 the Bosendorfer, etc ... Then he had to move because the owner omited to tell him the city hall would not renew the necessary autorisations to have a studio in a residential area, so he's has been fucked big time.

The only business plan I can think of now is to provide the walls, acoustic treatment, a patch bay and a decent monitoring console. The AE/Producer will bring his Pro tool, and will rent the mikes he didn't bought on ebay, and he will bring an assistant if budget allows.

Clients won't mix in studios in a very short term future.
They won't hire a 10 people team to record a band.
And soon, we might not even have enough places to record as it is more profitable to turn them into parking lot.

I have seen this: studio transformed into parking lots, I'm not making this up.

For the moment, we still have producers/AEs/Musicians that learned their gig in suitable place, with knowledgable staff AEs, with dedicated Studio managers and talented experienced artists...

For how long ? I don't know, but dip in quality recordings already shows, we can all agree on this.

Gee I'm so pessimistic today :D

malice

[Bob Olhsson]

This will continue until people rediscover that recording ensembles of performers rather than hosting endless '80s overdub parties is more efficient, cheaper and produces more engaging results.

This requires that the performers be good enough. Now that nobody but TV stars can earn a living from selling records, the need to put on a compelling live show will probably result in ONLY performers who are good enough surviving financially. These folks are going to need full-on studios. Hopefully some of the very best studios will survive long enough for what I believe is an inevitable development in the big picture.

[slau]

[QUOTE=seaneldon;251613 I spend most of my non-work time with my wife. We get along really well, so it works out. We cook a lot, we go for walks across the city when it's nice, see good live music when it rarely comes through town, sushi sushi sushi spend most of my paycheck on sushi sushi sushi.[/QUOTE]

Sounds exactly like me except, being in NYC, there's no shortage of great live stuff.

[seaneldon]

Sounds exactly like me except, being in NYC, there's no shortage of great live stuff.

I'm from NY and know this. Actually, most of the live music we see involves taking a trip down to NY to see it :lol:

[malice]

This will continue until people rediscover that recording ensembles of performers rather than hosting endless '80s overdub parties is more efficient, cheaper and produces more engaging results.

I think we'll have to go even deeper in mediocrity to realise that, but again, I'm not in a very good mood today ...


This requires that the performers be good enough. Now that nobody but TV stars can earn a living from selling records, the need to put on a compelling live show will probably result in ONLY performers who are good enough surviving financially. These folks are going to need full-on studios. Hopefully some of the very best studios will survive long enough for what I believe is an inevitable development in the big picture.

That last part is what worries me. What I see right now is harsher on great studios than on average ones because they are first in line when maintenance expenses are an issue.

I'm afraid the best studio will disapear eventually with a few exceptions.

People don't realise that acoustics is a science, but with a big hit and miss factor. So you need to build 20 of them to have one that will be trully magic. We are on the verge of destroying the benefit of decades of natural selection, if I may say so. The aftermath might be greater than anybody thinks.

It's like great guitars. It's not that Stratocasters were better build in the 60's than now. It's just that the ones that survived were better built.

malice

[Bob Olhsson]

I know.

The only great studios that I'm aware of that didn't have an immense luck factor going for them are the RCA designed studios from the late '30s to early '60s. Most people don't realize that these include Abbey Road, the original Fine Recording studio in New York, Motown Hitsville in Detroit and Radio Recorders Annex in Hollywood.

[weedywet]

What most great old studios had in common was a room in which musicians sounded great.
Then they found ways to deal with problems and make it work.

Once people started to build specifically for the isolation and the noise separation and the lighting and so on, they mostly went down hill


And like the old strata, the fact that they didn't really have it all down and standardized made for some lucky accidents.
There are no CAD machine accidents.

And no lucky drum rooms built by today's acoustic designers.

Show the the ballroom in a hotel or office building ( like Fine and AIR were) and they'll either tell you not to choose it or they'll deaden it down until it sounds like every OTHER generic space.

[Bob Olhsson]

RCA had learned the lesson of not using dead rooms the hard way during the early '30s. They made it work by carefully shaping the character of the bleed.

Unfortunately their designs were only for their own label or broadcast studios. The only reason we got one at Motown was because in 1964 RCA was pressing more of our records than they were of their own!