A reminder for the recording nerds: get thee to Dr. Frank's. They've been doing guitars, and a bit of vocals.

His day to day account of what it's like for a band to be in the studio is fascinating to me. I suppose part of that is because it excites these sympathetic memories of Amy and I recording, and although we weren't a whole band, some of the scenarios they've encountered are intimately familiar.

One huge difference is that Amy and I were not under the budgetary hatchet. We had unlimited time. The only financial constraint was how long I could afford to be away from home with no real income, other than what the label was generously providing, as a stipend for me to cover my cost of living rather than a recording budget.

Frank's account brings home the reality of recording under a budget with great clarity. It's tough, and a real testament to working musicians and bands that they can produce the quality they do under those nerve-wracking constraints. I, in my musical endeavors, have generally not had to work under tight deadlines or budgets. In my animation/editorial work, it's the complete opposite: it's all incredibly rigid deadlines with little to no budget for overtime. Thankfully, I and the people I work with are good at what we do, so we've not missed deadlines and not had to go begging to the accountant for overtime money. If I transfer one experience to the other, I'm not sure I'd want to be making my own music under the constraints I have in TV production land. It would be gnarly. My hat's off to MTX and all the other bands and musicians who don't get unlimited--or very generous--budgets, and who manage to creatively solve the innumerable problems that crop up and still forge a winning piece of music.

I think the tyranny of the budget and the studio is one reason I've put so much into developing all my own resources for recording and writing, for live instruments as much as for MIDI/digital/synthetic. I'd rather sink the thousands I can scrape up into having the facility to do what I want when I want, on my terms, with no one but myself to account to. No label boss, no engineer, no accountant, no producer, no office manager...nobody, but myself and the other artists I might be working with. It's the reason I started investing in a decent selection of mics several years ago. It's the reason I invested in a serious recording board, and it's the reason I've invested both money and a huge chunk of time into building a serious room, dedicated to production.

Obviously, for many bands, creating their own space to produce pro caliber recordings is an impossibility. There will always be a need for serious studios that can accomodate them. Having to deal with studio time constraints and budgets is part of life in a band, and I suppose it's one of the factors that separates the serious bands from the not so serious: can you get it together in the studio. It's not easy, as the internal mental pressures and infinitely delicate relationships between fellow artists in the studio can become an intense, highly charged thing...a kind of descent into an alternate plane of existence, where the line between sanity and insanity gets dramatically shifted in the direction of the latter. What passes for normalcy in the ever-dark chambers of the studio would seem positively sick in the clear light of day.

All in the day of recording!