A Pro Musician Answers Your Questions About Professional Music
 

So, my recent posts of some recordings reminded me that things I consider part of ordinary life are sometimes mystical to people outside of my little world. I thought it would be fun to throw open the door a bit, and give people a peak inside how things really work.

So, think of this thread as an "insider perspective" on the music industry. If you have any questions, I'll answer them as well as I can. I prefer not to answer questions about my specific career (private messages might be more appropriate for that), but about things in general. If you wonder how people get paid, who does what on an album, how people find work, what the studio process is really like, anything like that, I'll answer as best I can.

So, ask away.

My BIL is a drummer who toured with a band for a couple of years, and made enough money to live off that income at the time. But the band broke up. He's recently lost his fall back day job.

What are the prospects for getting paying work in a studio or something like that? He's in northern New Jersey and could make it in to NYC. How do you get into the studio musician world?

Networking!

Almost everybody makes it into the recording world by being a first-call sub for somebody already working. Usually that means being a student of one of the top players. There are a lot of people who pay to take lessons from the top call players specifically so that they can get on their radar, and hopefully start picking up sessions that the top call guy can't do.

My path in was a little different. I played keyboards for a major label artist on her very last tour. After she got off the road, she started working as a song-writer and producer for up and coming female artists. She pulled me in to play keyboards on the recordings, and from there I was able to network with other people in the recording industry.

The live world and the recording world are surprisingly separate from each other. The live world is sort of the slums of the music industry. It doesn't pay very well unless you're at the very top, a lot of young players get hired because they're cheap and pretty, and the standards for musicianship are usually pretty low. There are a LOT of people trying to make the transition from playing live to playing on recordings.

Are there people who are kinda not talented, but who get by because they're dependable and not assholes and maybe know a couple good jokes? Like a guitarist who can't solo anything but 12 bar blues, which he's great at but can't really do much else, but he's a good guy and people like having him around?

FWIW, the same is true from the mixing/engineering side of things. Setting the mix for a live performance is a completely different beast from running things in a nice studio, and depending on the venue can require much more skill to do it well, yet everyone I've ever worked with would still rather do anything in a studio than run a live tour, no matter how big or famous. Maybe because in the studio you're the "engineer," while on tour you're just called a "roadie."

Since you work with keyboards...

What is the best recording software? I normally use either Reaper or Soundbooth as of now, but is there anything better out there?

Have you seen the film being screened about The Wrecking Crew? http://www.wreckingcrew.tv/index2.html Ever met any of those folks?

Just saw that not too long ago at a film festival, very cool stuff I hope it makes it to DVD soon.

Converse to the guy who has killer chops but is impossible to get along with?
I've read that "not being an asshole" is among the most desirable qualities.

No, not really. Studio players are almost all amazingly versatile. I've seen players go from nylon string classical guitar solos to flamenco to face-melting power chords all on the same session. That's the norm.

There are a handful of people who have built a career out of being good at only one thing, but that one thing is usually very niche, like being good at authentic early delta blues dobro guitar, or chinese folk erhu.

Being dependable and not an asshole and knowing a couple of good jokes is important, but if you can't hang with the music, you don't get called back. You might get called to go out for beers after the session, but in the room, what matters is what matters, the music.

For the money, I don't think you can beat Apple's Logic Studio. I use that pretty much exclusively for programming, sound design, composing, film scoring. I use Pro Tools when I have to, but for everything else, I use Logic.

I have ton of respect for good live engineers. They can make or break show.

But I've never known a live engineer who can make $250k in a year, and I know dozens of studio engineers who clear that.

There are no back-end royalties on live tours.

The Wrecking Crew were waaaaay before my time, and frankly way higher up than any of the circles I'm traveling in. The closest I've come to any of them is buying a bunch of old gear that Glen Campbell used on his live rig.

I did some low-level technical work on a software instrument called the Trilogy, a bass emulator. Carol Kaye was a consultant on it, but I've never met her.

I've gotta see that. I've emailed with Carol Kaye a couple of times over the years. Great gal, incredible bassist.

Pro Musician:

Have you gotten rich yet doing local gigs for weddings? What do you eat for dinner on a regular basis? Have you considered growing your own food or raising chickens to supplement your diet?

1. Yes, most of my fabulous wealth comes from butchering Stevie Wonder tunes while wearing a tux.

2. Well, this week my wife is gone, so the answer has been mostly tequila and burgers.

3. That sounds like a very inefficient use of my drinking time. I think I'll stick with the solution provided by living in a robust free-market economy, and let some other chump do it for me.

She's in the film a number of times, old footage from back in the day and interviews from more recent years. It's being produced by a son of one of the Crew, Denny Tedesco. I just got a newsletter email from the site saying they're shooting for an early 2010 release date for the DVD. It's going to have a TON of footage, interviews, etc. Licensing issues are really the only thing holding it up at this point. Plus they're working hard on releasing a soundtrack to go along with the DVD that gives credit where it's due. I can't wait.

I can't even imagine what a nightmare clearing licenses would be on something like this.

Dear Professional Musician,

I want to be a rich and famous rock star and have chicks hurling themselves at me. I have no talent, average looks, and don't want to work hard. What should my parents buy me?

Hopeful.

Dear professional musician, Please will you write a theme tune for the cellar?

Plastic surgery and Autotune.

Sure! you write the lyrics, I'll write the music.

And then we'll all perform it - can we send you files which you can tweak to make an ensemble out of, Smooth? If so, what sort?

I was thinking more instrumental.... Hmm.....

How about this:

"The Cellar - The Musical"

With full singing and dancing, choreography.

Yabbut there could be a verse or two or even just a chorus ....

Mr Pro M, (if that is indeed your real name)


Forgive me if you've already covered this at some point. I'm too lazy to search the archives for your comments on this issue.

As an outsider I enjoy the musical talents of a wide variety of artists but do not know any pro musicians personally. What little I do read of them is that they're generally a bit crazy or perverted. Or both.

Here are my questions:

Have you had the opportunity to become casual friends with a bonifide rich and famous musician? Hopefully you have so you can provide interesting answers to my next questions.

Is this person in balance meaning that they may be able to create popular quality music but can't seem to tie their laces.

Does this person know their own shortcomings? Or does his ego completely ignore any personal weaknesses?

Fame and money aside, would you like to spend time with this person?

In recent years I've met people that have very famous friends and was quite pleasantly surprised with those celebrities' personal lives and dealings with the world outside of their fame and fortune.

Completely opposite from their public persona.

I'm hoping that this is true of at least some highly popular musicians.

Can you support that hope ( and change :) )?

"keep hope alive" - Jessie Jackson {man who thinks he is uncle to Micheal}

It is. I had it legally changed after the incident with the mexican bull and the midget jugglers.

I think you're talking about artists vs. pro musicians. Artists are the ones whose names you know. Pro musicians are the blue-collar people who actually make the albums.

Yep. Good friends, families are friends, I officiated at their wedding, kids play together.

As balanced as any other person. Their perspective on what is normal is a bit skewed, but it seems like it would almost have to be, when everyone you meet treats you differently.

A little of both. They tend to have a decent sense of their character and personality short-comings, they tend to have a huge blind spot for their musical weaknesses.

Yep. We do.

When you were at the Berk did you know a guy named Thomas Anthony? How about Nate Collins?

I never went to Berklee. I did an artist certificate program with them, but it was in LA - they brought their faculty out to Claremont for the summer, and we studied there.

Is there danger of being too good? Many people say they didn't like Steely Dan because it was too precise, for example, or that slick highly produced works are unauthentic or even worse, sterile.

My own example of this is the Hooters, who started with a *wonderful* 5 song local EP that everybody in Philly heard, it just rocked. And then we were all deeply disappointed when they did some of the same songs on their major debut. They had enough studio time to slick-ify their sound, which just ruined the songs, from our perspective.

Then there's, like, Ben Folds, who is clearly quite talented as a player and yet there's a certain lovely imprecision about how he plays. He tours with a grand piano, which must be a constant tuning nightmare, and yet he throws his stool at it at the end of the show.

My ex went to Berklee. Piano player as well.

Oh, God. I must remind myself that I have work to do and I can't take the time to compose a novella-length response to this. What a goldmine of discussion this opens up. I will be revisiting this topic as soon as possible. Edit: This is drivin' me crazy. I'd like to see everyone weigh in on this.

Are you really famous and we just don't know it?

Dear Mr. P-M,

Two friends of mine wrote an EP's worth of material. I pulled some strings and put together enough equipment to get a clunky recording space set up (a basement; vocalist in the bathroom down the hall), and pulled 4 tracks with only a little bit of guitar bleedthrough on all of the mics, etc. I'm now gradually going about mixing it, after the fact, and trying to undo all the damage that a lack of experience did in two days of recording. They're across the country from me, now, and in a state of constant strife; recording more isn't really possible.

So, now that I have about 25 minutes of music that I'm quite fond of, in spite of it being very raw and unrefined and sometimes straight up crude, I'm not sure what to do with it. They're uninterested in commercial success, and my only absolute goal was to have something to set down as a semipermanent portrait of the music that they were making at the time.

Once the mix is done, what can I do on the low end of financial and emotional investment to get the music "out there"? Burn a few hundred copies and give them to friends?

Ask your mom.

Definitely not. I've probably played on a couple things you've heard on the radio, but no, nobody outside of this town knows my name.

Yeah, probably. You can submit it to iTunes using tunecore, and then email the link around to family and friends. You might recoup a little cash, and it'll at least be making the music public.

Get a release from the artists first. People who "don't care about the money" have a nasty way of becoming very care-about-the-money once there's some actual money to care about.

Whew.

Like Flint, I could write a novel about this.

I think I come down on this side of the argument: the cases you've cited are not a problem of being "too good", they're an issue of being very bad at artistry, and overcompensating on something technical. That technical thing can be studio editing, use of error-correcting software, or just highly technical execution of difficult playing.

Artistry is the craft of knowing what matters, at least that's part of it. It's knowing that the thing that matters most is this passionate thing here, more than this technical thing here. That's not always the case - if the guitarist hits a very passionate clunker of a note, then the technical matters waaaaay more than the passion. Artistry is knowing the difference.

I almost came to blows with an artist on an album last summer. That never, ever happens, I'm a very low-key guy. I know this artist really well, and we have a long history, so I treat him a little differently in the studio. We were recording a song that was wide open, exposed fender rhodes and voice, and that's it. The rhodes was bleeding into the vocal mic, and there were all kinds of things that were technically bad on the song. But, in the middle of the verse, he sang this incredible, soul-wrenching vocal that had a crack right in the middle of it.

The crack was wrong (technically) but it was right, in every way, for the song. He wanted to trash it and start over. I fought to keep it exactly as it was. I was right. He was wrong. He was too close to the project to see it. Eventually, he kept it in, and everyone who hears the record just goes nuts over that song.

It's not an issue of being "too good", it's an issue of knowing what matters for a particular song. Which stuff is important changes based on genre, the mood, the instrumentation, the specific song, all of that has to come into consideration, but it's the job of the artist to be very, very good at picking out the thing that matters.

At least half the appeal of the liberty bell is the crack.

Well that makes sense. I hear the area it's in is pretty run-down.

Thats a pretty good part of Philly, I believe. It was ok for a city the last time I was there. I guess it was mebbe 2 or 3 years ago (it was 5) .

Some ten or more years ago, when I talked to a composer/bandleader friend, the production of an album was considered in the several $10k range and it was hard to find this kind of money. Meanwhile, they put out at least one album per year, while I don't see that funding has improved (on the contrary rather). - So my question is: Have prices come down over the past 10-15 years, perhaps due to the fact(?) that these days anyone can setup a production studio at a comparatively low cost?

Oh can I take a shot at this one and them you can correct or add as you see fit SM?! This seems like a semi-pro question and not a pro question...

I've known a few people at the semi-pro level who have recorded albums for $5k, often at studios charging $25/hour. This is mostly guitar/bass/simple drums stuff, which people have recorded for a long time, and many people know how to do it. The result is "good enough" in that the results are accurate, pleasant, and convey the artist's songs sufficiently.

That same amount of money, invested in recording gear, would get you enough stuff to do some semi-pro recording yourself, provided you know what you're doing and depending on what you're trying to record. This is the sea change, because to record 72 tracks 30 years ago took a dedicated facility with massive equipment (huge 2" tape machines with large motors and remote automation!) and a full-time engineer keeping things running. Now 90% of that gear can be replaced with a $1k computer and $1k of software... as much as would be spent just on special recording tape, 30 years ago.

It's the "know what you're doing" part that seems to separate the pro from the semi-pro, and to take something from 90% done to 100% done, sonically broadcast-ready and marketable, etc. Furthermore there are sonic "fashions" which we minions are rarely even aware of, which go in and out of style as fast as women's shoes.

Take it SM

It is fairly easy nowadays to get a professional sounding recording from your own home.

But know which programs to use and how to use them BEFORE recording, because it is a real pain to have to go back and re-do everything.

My son Danny (17) wants to know how important is it to be able to read traditional music? Danny reads tone-notes.

And he wants me to say that he thinks you're bad ass for being a pro musician.

I never really learnt to read music and music education at my school was lousy and next to non-existent. I have been interested in seriously listening to music (jazz) since I was 14. But it was only my mid-thirties, when I struck up acquaintance with my favourite musicians, that I wish I had had a better music education.

Here is where my friends record for a number of years now: Jon Hiseman's (of Colosseum fame) studio:

http://www.temple-music-studio.com/

That certainly looks pro to me.

UT is right on the money with this one, especially if you are making a "band" record, where the players are all working for free. Self-produced albums take less money, and a lot more time. If you have to pay the players, the money you saved by self-producing gets eaten up by paying players to sit there while you figure out how to make a record.

I think everyone should at least attempt to produce their own first album. You will learn more about music, about your own playing and songwriting, than almost anything else you could do.

Then, I highly recommend getting pros involved on the second go round. You'll appreciate the difference.

This is my thumbnail sketch of a budget for producing a pop singer/songwriter using everything pro, with the intention of getting songs placed on TV and Film, and major radio airplay. This is an indie budget, and includes no marketing, distribution, or even manufacturing budget.

Primary tracking (6 days)
Studio: $5000/ week (lockout with assistant engineer)
Engineer: $4500 ($450 per day)
Rhythm Section: $18,000 ($750 per day, 4 players, 6 days)

Vocal Tracking (3 days)
Studio: $1350 ($450 per day, including engineer)

Overdubs
Guitar: $1500 (2 days, his studio)
Keyboards: $1500 (2 days, my studio)

Mix (10 songs)
mix prep: $750 ($75 per song)
mix standard: $9600 ($1200 x 8 songs)
mix singles: $6000 ($3000 x 2 songs)
mastering: $3000 ($300 per song)

total: $51,200

This is what it would cost to make an album that could compete musically, sonically, artistically, with anything out there. This is hiring the best players around (maybe not the best known, but still top tier guys), great studios, high end mix, everything.

I hate the factor of money in music.

The words "music" and "industry" right next to each other sickens me.

Money just provides access to necessary resources, as it does in any other area of life.

In the most basic scenario, a musician spends money on a better quality instrument instead of other things.

So, I guess I'll just tell Danny you didn't respond to his question.

ok.

Ah yes, the old "art shouldn't be whored out for money" crap. Ask yourself why a song contains more "art" than, say, a masterfully-architectured building, and why the architect ought to be paid like any other job, but the musician should somehow belong to... what? Some completely different society where they are just taken care of, for being so special?

Music is different. If someone is getting paid a lot to do music, then they are likely popular. To maintain the popularity, the record label dumbs down the sound for the mainstream masses, which only enjoy simple, catchy tunes. Every single mainstream album has one or two good songs on it, and the rest is all filler crap. All they have to do is promote a single song, make an MTV compatible music video for it, and wala. They make money, but the music sucks. But, hey, they're making money so they have to be good, right?

Or you could just put your voice through an auto tune, the mainstream music fans today love those.

How is that different from the factor of money in anything else? Music is not different, it is exactly the same.

Thanks, that is very illuminating. The sum total is about the price tag I had from a discussion years ago. So, having the individual components spelled out like that, I understand much better now.

Edited: Having said that, it is still completely beyond me, how musicians who don't go down the dumbed down pop chaff producing lane can make a living. They are certainly welcome to the money I spend on their concerts/albums, as well as lottery funds and such. - MC, I'd rather say "The words 'music' and 'pop' right next to each other sicken me."

Ooops! Sorry Bri, I skipped over it the first time.

It depends on what he wants to do. For serious session players, it's essential. You have to read or you don't work. If you work mostly on band projects, and ear is much more important.

On about 50% of the projects I play for, I never see an scrap of written paper. I go into the studio, listen to the demo once or twice, then go sit down at the piano and play something that feels right. I have a system for sketching out a basic rhythm chart while listening to a song for the first time, so that after one listen I can play it. That matters more, most of the time, than being able to read traditional piano music.

And tell him thank you. I feel pretty bad ass. Here in my khakis and polo. Driving a jetta. To Gymboree.

What you're ranting against is how the industry worked 10 years ago.

Labels are becoming irrelevant. Every year, more and more of my work is for artists who have bailed on the traditional label structure, and who are making a living doing music that they own instead. They may release an album, or more commonly these days they record one or two songs at a time and release them online. They get placements on TV or film, those are the big chunks of money, the rest comes from merch and concerts.

10 years ago, anytime I talked to a younger artist, they all asked the same thing, "How do I get signed?"

Now, none of them ask that. They don't care. They all ask, "How can I make a living doing this"? If you can appreciate the significance in how different that question is, you can start to appreciate how much the industry has changed.

I think that's a really, really good thing. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE playing on big budget label albums, where everything is completely 1st class. But almost always, the music is unbearable. I love much more being in the room with an artist who is really, truly and artist, and where I get to become part of their thing for a little while, and make truly good music. Music I can be proud of.