Prepping for Your First Studio Session

First Time? That's Okay! :)

So, it's your first time in a recording studio for anything, vocal recording, guitars, drums, whatever this is your first time ever seeing a professional microphone in front of your face ready to capture every nuance of your performance. Every detail to be brought to the forefront in front of everyone in painstaking, loud and clear unlike that which you've never heard before. Every blunder, every crack in your voice, every squeak from your guitar string, the ring of your snare, all captured front and center. Scared yet? Don't be. It's okay, there's nothing to be afraid of. With some simple preparations before entering the building you'll fly through the session with absolute success. You'll have your best performance captured on record waiting for the rest of the world to hear it.

Don't stress it...

...The Producer or engineer sitting in front of the computer or the console ready to capture your performance is there to help guide you and help bring out the best performance you can possibly muster. And if you're not at the top of your game that day, that's perfectly okay, just do your best. The person helping you in the studio, the person you hired to capture your performance, if they're worth their salt they'll do whatever is needed to help make sure you're comfortable and help keep you calm and focused throughout the session. So have faith and patience in not only the engineer behind the board so to speak, but also faith and patience with yourself that you're not going to come in and nail it on the very first take, almost nobody does, not even the best vocalist or musician you could ever think of. They mess up too.

Couple things to think about....

Before going into the studio if you don't already, have the song you wrote well rehearsed or at least mostly written to be fleshed out more completely in the studio. The Producer or Engineer can sometimes assist in helping you finish that masterpiece you're having trouble just getting that last phrase right, to help figure out that last word to help pull the song together, but the more fleshed out the song is and the more practice you have performing the piece the better the final product will be in the end. So have as much written and ready to go before you step in the booth.

You can sometimes bring one or two close, trusted friends to the studio with you if you're nervous to go it alone and maybe if you need some outside input you can have them help you as well as the producer or engineer running the session. Don't be afraid to ask for advice and opinions on your performance and how you can do it better or if any changes should or could be made to bring out the greatness of what you're trying to convey in the song, what message, what emotion, whatever the story, don't afraid to collaborate with everyone in the room. You never know what magic can be made from collaboration.

Couple things about Vocals...

In my studio I get vocalists looking to record their next rap hit, a lot of times I get people who are well prepared and ready to hop behind the microphone and just knock out the song without a second thought and it's the best thing they've ever done. I've also had quite a few people who are less than prepared who also get stellar performances. The gamut is wide at the kinds of artists that exist out there, egos bigger than the sun, others humble as pie, people that perform bangers in an hour and others that take 6 hours to do one song. In my studio we work until the song is right. I've had guys that come and do the entire song in 10 takes, I've had one guy do one song in 975 takes. I literally hit that record button almost 1,000 times that day. Took like 3 hours to get the song captured, but I'll be damned if I say it was a bad song, on the contrary it was quite good. Was it the best song in the world? No, but it was still a good song.

Generally speaking, like with most things, the more prepared you are going into it the better the end product. If you know your song inside and out, back to front, top to bottom, left to right, east to west, north to south, the quicker the song can come out and the more solid of a performance you'll get. Now that's not to say be so rigid about the song, if a lyric in the song needs to change mid session, that's perfectly okay, change it and rerecord it. The cool thing about the tech we have today in music is there's no limit to the amount of revisions possible of an audio file.

So yeah, if this is your first time in the studio don't overthink it. Just relax, drink water before and during the session, avoid alcohol if possible and also try to minimize smoking in general, if you need a little bit of a pre-game to loosen up a bit, that's perfectly fine, but just keep it in check and make sure you can drive home. Because inebriation can turn music to shit real quick, being super drunk or super high does nothing to benefit your work as an artist, plain and simple. Slight tipsy is fine, but don't let substances dictate your performances, that almost never turns out well, and personally I'm not a fan of dealing with people stupid high or drunk in general, I know the studio is supposed to be fun and chill, but when it comes my personal home studio, I like to make sure people can come and leave in a legally sober state. I've had a couple people show up smelling like a brewery and it only made the session difficult if it was even able to finish or even start in the first place.