The hour of preparation that saves you a day of studio time
· 3 min read
Studio time is the most expensive hour in music and the easiest to waste. Almost all of the waste happens before you arrive.
Studio hours cost more than any other hour in music, and a startling proportion of them get spent on things that could have been settled at home for free.
None of what follows is about being a better player. It's logistics, and it's the difference between a day that produces three finished songs and one that produces an argument about a tempo.
Decide the tempo. Actually decide it.
The most common way a session evaporates is a band discovering, at 11am, that they disagree about how fast a song goes.
Play each song to a click at home. Write the number down. Bring the list. If you genuinely can't decide, pick one, because deciding badly at home is cheaper than deciding well at the studio.
Decide the arrangement
Specifically: how many choruses, what happens in the middle eight, where it ends, and whether the intro is four bars or eight.
Arrangement arguments in a studio are expensive because everyone is present, the clock is running, and nobody wants to be the one holding it up — so they get resolved badly and re-opened later.
Change your strings. Two days before.
Not the morning of. New strings need a day to stop drifting. Same principle for drum heads — if they need replacing, do it before, not during.
Bring spares of everything that breaks: strings, sticks, a spare snare if you have one, cables, batteries for anything active. A session stopped by a dead 9V is a genuinely common and genuinely infuriating way to lose forty minutes.
Send references, not adjectives
"Warmer" means six different things. A track that sounds like what you want means one.
Send two or three reference tracks to the engineer before the day, with a sentence about what specifically you're pointing at — the drum sound, the vocal treatment, the general density. This is the single highest-value thing you can do for the person recording you.
Know what you're trying to leave with
A day of "seeing what happens" produces less than a day with a target. Decide beforehand: are you tracking drums for four songs, or finishing one song completely? Both are fine; not choosing isn't.
Write it down and share it, because it's also what stops the session drifting into the thing that's most fun rather than the thing you're paying for.
Sort the logistics the day before
- Confirm the address and the load-in. Where's the door, is there a buzzer, where do you park.
- Confirm what's in the room. If you're relying on a house kit or backline, check it's there and working. Don't assume.
- Know who's coming and when. A drummer arriving at 10 and a vocalist at 2 is a plan. Everyone arriving vaguely in the morning is not.
- Bring drives, not hopes. If you want to leave with the files, bring something to put them on, formatted, with enough space.
- Eat, and bring food. Sessions lose an hour to lunch decisions with impressive reliability.
For remote sessions
If you're sending work to a player or engineer rather than meeting them:
- Send a rough mix with the part missing, plus a version with a guide if there is one
- State the key, tempo, and whether it's to a click
- Say what you don't want, which is often more useful than what you do
- Agree the deliverable in advance: stems, how many takes, what format, by when
The hour itself
Roughly what it looks like:
- Ten minutes writing down tempos and song order
- Ten minutes choosing and sending references
- Ten minutes confirming address, load-in, parking, gear
- Fifteen minutes changing strings and heads, checking cables
- Fifteen minutes deciding what you intend to leave with
That's an hour of your time against, typically, several hundred pounds of studio time. It's the best-value hour in the whole process and almost nobody spends it.
Find a room, and once you've booked, ask the host what they need from you before the day. Most will tell you exactly.