I was just wondering what your experiences were recording your and producing a CD.

Did you do it yourself or in a studio?

How many hours did it take?

Did you record live or track by track?

How long did you spend on mixing?

How many CDs did you print?

What were the costs?

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Did you do it yourself or in a studio?

At Transduction Productions studio in NE Albuquerque.

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How many hours did it take?

About 13 hours in total (includes recording {4 hours}, overdubbing {4 hours}, and mixdown {5 hours}). We laid down 4 songs.

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Did you record live or track by track?

Live for the basic drums, guitars, bass, and scratch vocals, overdubbed all the vocals and a few guitar parts here & there.

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How long did you spend on mixing?

About 5 hours.

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How many CDs did you print?

We printed them all ourselves, and we're still doing it that way. I reckon we've given away about 80 CDs and sent 20 out for review.

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What were the costs?

Right around $300 for the recording & mixing. As to the CD burning, etc., our drummer (animal here on RS.com) would know, but I'll guess we've spent less than $100 on that.

We are quite happy with the results, especially for the time & $$ spent. We strongly recommend Transduction Productions - the setup is comfy and state-of-the-art, the personnel are experienced and personable, and the atmosphere is relaxed...

Transduction Production:

(505)-299-7443

or

TransductionProductions@Yahoo.com.

Where do you send a CD for a review?

--Third Hour
www.myspace.com/3rdhour

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Where do you send a CD for a review?

Read this thread.

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Did you do it yourself or in a studio?

Lesmen's Music... Dont ever go there... they delete your files.

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How many hours did it take?

45, 3 tries, The first two were deleted "by mistake"

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Did you record live or track by track?

Live

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How long did you spend on mixing?

24 hours

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How many CDs did you print?

50.

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What were the costs?

$700 (Just for the recording part)
$250 (Just for mixing/printing)

We record with Sean at SilverChord Studio.
It's our practice space and Sean's equipment.

Each time we record, we spend more time that previously. I think the current WMD effort has close to 20 hours behind it. We keep scrapping stuff though because the performances are weak.
The last Bellmont cd took around 25 total hours of tracking, overdubbing and mixing.

We start with live recordings in hopes of getting the drums and bass lcoked in tight with one another. Then we overdub.

Mixing takes as long or longer than tracking.

We printed 1000 copies of the last bellmont cd.
We'll be printing 1000 copies of the new WMD cd/ep. And who knows about that new Bellmont cd that's in preproduction right now? We may only print 10 copies of that bastard.

recording costs - $200+
mastering costs - $400+
pressing costs - $1300

our projects usually cost us a little under $2000. Most bands pressing cds spend A LOT more money than that. And a lot of those bands do a better job. I don't think we're willing to spend more than what we currently do.

Did you do it yourself or in a studio?
We always record at the Wall of Sound Studios (Albuquerque) John Wall the engineer is a total bad ass! Super nice, professional, helpful and has a great ear. Plus we always have a damn fun time in the studio.

How many hours did it take?
Depends on what your doing, LP, EP, Single…. And how much your putting into it, I know when we start getting other instruments (piano, cello, harmonicas) or start really exploring our music we tend to use more time. But we use it as we want to, I’m always down to burn some studio time to get something sounding the way I want.
Probably about 4 or 5 songs in a 20 hour block.

Did you record live or track by track?
Overdub everything, takes more time but you can REALLY focus on every part.

How long did you spend on mixing?
I don’t know a couple hours,,,, maybe.. not sure really

How many CDs did you print?
For our Ep we got 1000 Replicated we still have some but 1000 seems good
For our single that’s coming out first week of April we are starting with 300 dupes in a cardboard sleeve and will get more if we have to.
Then for our full album due out in the summer, I’m sure we’ll go with the 1000 replicated.

What were the costs?
Recording and mixing I think its 35 bucks an hour
Mastering I can’t really remember, we’re sending out our single tomorrow so I’ll let you know then.

Mass-production
Replication for 1000 can be anywhere from $900 to about $1500 depending on packing options. Just google cd replication you’ll find a million sites.
Duplicating costs are less but the quality is much less, I say go with replication unless its just a single or a Demo then duplicate.

Anyway Good luck guys let us know what you decide to do.

thanks guys this is useful info!

Here's a former band I played in: www.purevolume.com/solidify

That was done live over one afternoon with drums and overhead mics. Mixed down, a couple hours a day over the next few days afterward.

Some friends of mine did it for us for free. For anyone else they would do it for fairly cheap. Keep in mine, we were only in search of a good demo for shows so it's unmastered.

Musicians friend has a disc duplication service called diskfaktory that's pretty much the company standard. You provide them with the tracks and the art, they do the duplication and case them.

All and all I ended up being pretty cheap.

I know one of the two person team that did it has since moved though.

Our first album we recorded back in high school over the course of eleventy billion hours, individual tracking, at a studio called Knee Deep. I don't know if it's still around. I do not recommend going this rout. Knee Deep is fine, but individual tracks are a drag. The energy, for us, was totally lost.
Also, we spent all our damn money at the studio, so for replication, we just burned them ourselves and went to Kinko's for the art. This is not a good idea either.

Our second CD, we recorded up at the College of Santa Fe for a friend's senior engineering project. Just a couple of weekends. Did everything together. Except for the singer, me, which they placed in the hall. Which was lame. Though I hear you have to do that.

Our last CD we recorded with Santa Fe Center Studios with Doug, who I really like. Most of our tracks were done live and together over the course of probably 20 hours? Less? Then our guitarist mixed it. Then Rolling R productions printed it. And we were very happy. Rolling R is local and has a super fast turnaround. Also, they can do a whole bunch of quantities, so you don't have to get 1,000 if you don't want to.

Next time we're going with our new guitarist's home studio, mix ourselves, and print and put in cardboard, because who really uses those jewel cases anymore?

Make as many as you think you can sell. It's better to sell out then to let them age on you. By the time you sell them all, they won't be representative of your style or skill anymore anyway and you'd probably just want a new recording.

I like recording live. You just do scratch vocals and overdub the real vocals and redo whatever instruments you need after, sure, but if you record the whole thing track by track it's so easy to get that overproduced boring sound. If it doesn't have any of that "band" spark inspired live shit to it it always sounds dead to me.

Ya Ya: you want the jewel case for radio stations and other places that file them by the spine. Anything in a sleeve ends up in a box in the corner, never to be seen or heard again.
We recorded at Knee Deep too, in...'98? We got trashed... The guitar was all sloppy and they tried to fix it with reverb and it sounded like we were in a locker room-in a bad way. Really, really bad. I don't know what the hell any of us were thinking. Anyway, we never put it out or even listened to it ever again.

I "interned" at Knee Deep in late summer '01 and had the pleasure of getting to track Los Brown Spots once. As I remember, they recorded most of the tracks live in the big room and overdubbed solos over it. I don't remember for sure, but we must have done 5-6 songs in like an 8 hour period. Jazz is a bit different though. Simfonik Plague likes to record ourselves, at least for the time being. I have some gear, and I know a bit about sound, so I like to think I can achieve something that's at least listenable. I'm not so arrogant to presume I could even attempt mastering, so I don't. We'll pay for mastering. We're in the process of recording a 10 song "EP." We're doing everything at my house, track by track, mostly because of scheduling. I recorded the drum tracks myself, by myself, which was an experience. I was literally hitting record and then running out to the living room, where the kit was set up. I did 12 songs in this fashion, solo, over about 30 hours broken into 5 days. We did take 2 days to set up and get sounds, which was a good thing because now that we're recording guitar and bass tracks, I don't have to worry about the drums sounding like shit. I'm a big DIY advocate, if only because of the money. If we had more, we'd take it to someone who knows what they're doing. I figure we can spend a bit more on packaging an promo if we can record ourselves. Plus you have the added plus of a lack of time constraints in the studio. So back to the original question, it's taken us forever like 9 months to get tracks laid, but we did get a new bass player right after my tracks were done.