Week 8 - Metal, and not good Metal either. - Posted on 2015-09-21 by Nathan Cunningham

This week at the studio wasn't a very eventful one in the aspect of doing huge amounts of projects and whatnot. It was more focused on Boo and I speaking about and him going through the real world aspects of being an audio engineer and basically doing your own work and recording people in your home studio. Sometimes you will have people that come into the studio and they will have issues with their electronic drums having one stereo out so it's not really possible to pan them left or right, someone might want to do close to 20 tracks and there's no way they'd actually be able to afford the work you have to do for them so you have to take the opportunity because you have to be able to feed your family and put money on the table even though you're not making nearly as much money as you should be making. It's kind of a win situation but also a loss. The win is that you're continuing to have business and the more business the more you hope to be able to have more people come to you after hearing around of how good your work is. A bad side is that if you charge $500 for the whole project and that's even with 8 hours of session for the actual recording... The amount of money done per hour of work is significantly low. Boo was telling me that some years being an audio engineer and owning your own studio can be up and down with income sometimes, depending on your location and the amount of clientel you have throughout the year. 

Nonetheless, it seems that many AEs are not really given the amount of value they are actually worth because most musicians, if they have never seen the actual work put into songs and even projects, don't understand what all must happen in order to put out something that is actually going to be worth it's weight in gold. We were discussing things of this matter when going through some Metal recordings this past week and talking about real life scenarios of what to expect if you'd ever have your own studio. Some days it'll be hard but others you'll be having the time of your life.

Planning on continuing my work in my latest project, Beyond The Veil with the drums and should have that together here in the future. I have been really busy with other things lately in my life and will be actually working on it this evening when I go back into the studio with Boo once again. 

Signing off, cheers, 

Nathan C.