This will make the cost of recording a song much lower and, as long as the sound engineer in the smaller studio is talented, the final product will be better, since you'll have more hours to work on your song with the same budget. Artists almost always want to record too many songs for too little money, forcing the engineer to take shortcuts on each song, resulting in a poor quality product. Soundbetter, which is an online mixing service, has a calculator that apparently calculates the cost of producing and mixing a song, but since the site works with fixed prices, it seems to me that the prices in the calculator are actually higher than the average price my customers pay. For example, an inexperienced engineer could record a live band and do a quick live mix of one hour on the spot on an old console.
The good thing about modern recording is that not everything has to be done at once, so often people come to the studio and come back later to take the song to a higher level by adding other services such as vocal tuning, production or mastering or simply spending more time mixing if you had to hurry due to budgetary restrictions. There are no official average times for recording and mixing, but I'll give my times here, which are more or less in line with more experienced engineers and making songs ready for radio. More and more artists are starting to realize that recording an entire EP or album at a time isn't as effective as recording a song or two. If you go to a studio with the requirement of making 5 songs in a day or you record and mix an entire band in just 3 hours, you're likely to be very disappointed with the result. Consider making fewer songs or even just one song and leaving enough time to do it at a high level of quality, so that you have something that's more marketable instead of making too many songs and not doing any of them properly.
A simple phone call and you can calculate how many hours you might need and get an idea of the price range and the cost of recording a song for yourself or your band. Regardless of the genre and type of recording, the talent of the artist and the musicians also plays an important role in capturing the perfect shot. You can see how that would take longer than recording a live band without editing everything and without doing a quick mix instantly.
