Help! My Clients All Want To Do Their Own DIY Recordings

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, Episode 50

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

You're listening to The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio.

Brian Hood (0:19)

Welcome back to another episode of The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast. I am Brian Hood. I'm here with my co-host, Chris Graham. Hey, Chris, buddy.

Chris Graham (0:26)

Hey.

Brian Hood (0:26)

How are you doing today?

Chris Graham (0:27)

I'm great. We're on Facebook Live right now, and this is exciting and requires me to multitask.

Brian Hood (0:32)

You're not allowed to actually pay attention to Facebook Live.

Chris Graham (0:34)

Yeah.

Brian Hood (0:35)

People that are watching live know this. People that are listening later don't know this. I just said you have to ignore your phone for the rest of this podcast recording so that you're not pulled out of the episode like, oh, a squirrel, oh, a comment, oh, a compliment, because that's how our brains work.

Chris Graham (0:48)

It's true.

Brian Hood (0:48)

We both are ADD. But yeah, this episode, we're recording it live. If you missed it, it was on our Facebook community, which you can get to by just searching for the Six Figure Home Studio community and Facebook. We like to try to do stuff like this sometimes. We may not make this a thing we do every time. As a matter of fact, I know we're probably not going to do this for every episode, but for episode 50, it's a special episode. It's a good round number. We're definitely going to do that for this episode. So this is what we're doing.

So today's topic is something that we formulated with the community. We had a few ideas we were pitching to each other. We were working within the comments. We were getting some ideas and feedback, and we came up with the idea of today's episode. And the topic of today's episode is what to do when an artist wants to record themselves instead of working with you or mix themselves or master themselves, whatever service you offer.

If they want to do it themselves instead of working with you, what do you do? I know this is a problem that a lot of people have struggled with. This is a problem that many of my students have expressed frustration and angst and anger with because so many more people are starting to record their own work now. The barrier to entry to recording and mixing and mastering is so low now compared to what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago that a lot of people are doing it themselves. And so what do you do in this scenario where you are talking to an artist, they're a great fit for you, you know they would be good at your studio, that it would be a good quality product, but they want to do it themselves and they don't want to work with you. What do you do? So I think we got a lot of good stuff to talk about today, Chris.

Chris Graham (2:02)

Yeah, for sure. First and foremost, just to point out, when it's you and someone else are the only two recording studios in town or the only two that do a certain style of music, and someone's trying to decide, should I record with you or should I record with the other studio?

That's a specific type of challenge to figure out how to differentiate yourself from other studios.

Brian Hood (2:21)

Which we talked about in episode number 49 of the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, which you can check last week's episode for that.

Chris Graham (2:27)

So it's a little different when you have a client and they're saying, well, you know, you are fill in the blank, let's say $1,500 to do this project with.

I could record with you or I could buy my own gear and record myself.

This is very different. And initially, our instinct as engineers is to be like, don't do that, that's a terrible idea. And I think it's healthy to initially resist that. Hear me out, guys. Here's why. People having the freedom to create their own art on their own terms is freaking awesome. That's incredible.

And it's happening, man. To pull up phrase from Graham Cochran's book, there is a recording revolution happening right now. And that recording revolution has a lot to do with self-recording. That's cool. So to immediately respond to an artist and say, oh man, you're so dumb, oh, it's gonna be terrible. That's not a healthy way to respond.

Brian Hood (3:22)

Or to just go into a Facebook community and say, God, I'm so sick of all these bands recording themselves and getting this amateur recording. Just bitching about it is not helping the situation either. That's not a healthy response to this situation.