If you want the track to be good, hire someone who is actually good
· 3 min read
Not a moral argument. A practical one — the cheapest way to avoid wasting a session is to pay someone who has done it before.
There's a version of this argument that's just snobbery — real instruments, real rooms, real musicians, said in a tone. Ignore that version. The practical case is stronger and doesn't require anyone to be a purist.
What you're actually buying is judgement
Anyone can now access effectively unlimited competent musical output. Software plays in time, in tune, in any style, instantly, for nothing.
What none of it does is decide. Which take. Which part not to play. Whether the second chorus needs the extra thing or whether the extra thing is the reason it drags. Whether the vocal is flat or the arrangement underneath it is making it sound flat.
That's the job. It always was, and it's the bit that took the experienced person fifteen years to learn. It's also the bit that's now the only scarce input, because everything else got cheap.
Which means paying for it has better returns than it used to, not worse.
The cost of getting it wrong is time, not money
Here's the arithmetic people skip.
An amateur session that doesn't work costs the room hire, plus the day, plus the second attempt, plus the weeks in between where the song sits half-finished losing momentum. Songs die in that gap. Most unfinished records aren't abandoned in a decision — they just go cold.
A session with someone who's done it before is more expensive per hour and frequently cheaper in total, because it finishes. That's not marketing; it's the ordinary experience of anyone who has done both.
The specific thing experience buys is not going down the wrong road for four hours. Recognising in ten minutes that the tempo is wrong, or that the part is fighting the vocal, is worth more than any amount of technical skill applied to the wrong idea.
Where it makes the most difference
Not everywhere equally. Highest leverage, roughly in order:
Drums. The hardest thing to fix later and the biggest single difference between a track that sounds finished and one that doesn't. A good drummer in a decent room, recorded competently, does more for a record than almost any other spend.
The room. Not the gear — the room. Rooms have sound. It's the one component you genuinely cannot add afterwards.
Whoever's making decisions. A producer or engineer who's willing to say "that one, not that one" and be right. The most underrated hire, because their contribution is invisible in the credits and audible in the record.
Anything with a soloist on it. A vocal, a lead, a horn line. These carry the song and there's nowhere to hide.
Lower leverage than people assume: the interface, the microphone locker beyond the first few, the plugins.
The AI part, plainly
Generated music will keep getting better and cheaper. That's genuinely fine for a lot of uses — background beds, mood pieces, work where nobody will ever ask who played on it.
What it does to the rest of the market is raise the floor and, in doing so, make the ceiling more visible. When competent is free, competent stops being worth anything and the interesting question becomes what's distinctive. Distinctive comes from specific people making specific choices, most of which are slightly wrong in ways that turn out to be the point.
That's not nostalgia. It's what happens whenever something becomes abundant: value moves to whatever's next scarcest. The longer version of that argument is here.
How to spend well when the budget is small
Most people don't have unlimited money. Assuming you have some:
- Spend it on one thing, properly. One great drum session beats a whole record's worth of adequate everything.
- Book a shorter session with a better person rather than a longer one with a cheaper one. You'll get more done per hour and finish.
- Prepare, so you're not paying an expert to wait. Arrangement decided, tempo decided, references chosen.
- Book remote for the specialist parts. You're no longer limited to who's local, which matters most for the instrument you need one great performance of.
- Pay for the ears, not just the hands. If you can only hire one person, hire the one who'll tell you the truth about your song.
The argument isn't that everything must be made by humans in rooms. It's that if you care how this particular record sounds, the constraint is judgement, and judgement is a person.