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Recording tips - can your grandmother suck eggs?

Artists who are new to recording might want to note a few key points here. Old(er) lags can skip this bit.

1. Do you want to use the studio to write songs, or to record songs you know well?
   We can do either. If the latter, rehearse a lot, unless you are happy to pay for our time watching you work it out or do retakes because somebody missed a change.
2. Think about the final product you want.
   If you are a guitar band and really would like to put a string part on a chorus, we can do it. But have you written that part yet, or are you hoping it will "just happen"? If you are new to orchestration, send us a demo (any old quality) and we can maybe come up with some ideas for you before you turn up?
3. Who is your target audience? If you are hoping to get signed by a major label, it is better to do your best three or four songs as well as you can, rather than a dozen songs with an inadequate time/financial budget. A&R people probably won't listen to more than three songs! If you want a CD of a dozen songs to sell at gigs, that's a different equation. You might be willing to make more compromises in the interests of - er - maximising revenue from your fan base! If you are a singer/songwriter looking for a publishing deal, publishers are probably much more interested in the quality of the songwriting rather than the production and performance, and (to some extent) you can just slap it down. If you want to do a 74 minute CD with a view to independent release, you need to allow enough time to do justice to all the material. Think about these questions.
4. Keep mobile phones off in the studio. Not only can they ruin a great take by ringing at just the wrong time, they can also interfere with sensitive equipment. (Besides, all that Baptist ironstone means you won't get much of a signal in the studio!)
5. Work with us to plan agreed meal breaks etc - we need to eat too!
   Enjoy yourselves, but don't ruin a session by overindulgence in drink (or whatever…). It won't sound so good the morning after!
6. Carry spares
   Be they drumsticks, strings, instrument leads, batteries for stomp boxes or whatever. Put new strings on guitars etc a day or two before the session so they can settle in and sound great. Tune the drum kit (and bring the tuning keys anyway)!
7. Bring a good book or two. Inevitably some band members may have little to do while we concentrate on perfecting the overdubbed bouzouki solo or whatever! Don't put pressure on us - let alone your soloist - by going on about "how much longer is this going to take?"
8. Mixdown will take a long as it takes, and that may be longer than you think. If you really want to try out 2,000 different reverb presets on the second guitar part, without even beginning to tweak the parameters on each of them, we can do it. Then you will probably find the decision you make does not sit well in the mix with other instruments! There are a huge number of decisions to be made in mixing.
9. Mastering is a black art and we do not claim any great expertise in it. Nor do we choose to invest megabucks in specialist equipment that might get used once a month. We can give you a "feel" of a finished product but this area is best left to a professional mastering engineer. However, if you are interested in a one-stop facility so that you can track, edit, mix, master and burn to CD for a small release, then we can at least provide an additional impartial pair of ears so that you might get an idea of what Joe Public might make of your efforts.
10. Our job is to help you achieve your own creative vision.
11. We can also help you come up with a realistic time estimate to do a proper job.