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. Let's see what industry professionals have to say about the costs of music studios and how much it costs to record a song. 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 the 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. 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.
A small studio space with one or two microphones will likely save you a few hundred dollars compared to a recording and production studio or a much larger recording facility with several rooms, gobos, and a wide variety of recording equipment. 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. Instead of spending a lot of money on a creative space in downtown Los Angeles to record a song or two, you can create a pretty decent home creative studio to record your music. The number of songs, the complexity of the arrangements, the skill level, the knowledge of the material, the scope and scale of the project, the cost of professional services, and the objectives of the project are important factors. 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.
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. And working in a professional recording studio and with a professional audio engineer can seem a little daunting, if not terribly expensive. 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 on the calculator are actually higher than the average price my customers pay. For example, a simple three-member rock band that records a 4-song demo for friends and family can expect to pay less than a 6-member jazz band that records 18 songs to buy on record labels and sell at their product stand.
But producers, directors and publishers alone can cost thousands of dollars a day, and that doesn't include the rental of additional equipment, such as lighting, electrical barriers, additional actors and even permits to use city streets. There is no official average time for recording and mixing, but I will dedicate my time here, which are more or less those of the most experienced engineers, and making songs ready for the radio.
