Hi, probably some of these questions are going to sound pretty stupid to you all, but I'm asking them in earnest due to my lack of studio experience. - My band is very tight, and wants to track live. We can run through our set pretty much perfectly in less than an hour. However, everyone with experience in the studio says that the recording process will take much longer. Where does the time go?- Are effects better off being done during recording (w/pedals) or in post-production? - Does the transfer from analog-to-digital happen in real time? Is there a point to recording in analog if you're going to end up transferring to digital eventually?- Is there a point to recording at Electrical if Steve doesn't mix it? How much time does it take to mix a track?Thanks for any help!

thanks for the detailed response! much appreciated.

Let me try and answer those questions.-A tight band is going to take far less time to get the takes required. The time goes on setting up drum kits, amps, mics, cables, gobos, aligning tape heads, troubleshooting problems you never saw coming et cetera. The process can take longer than you think, but being a tight band will make your part of the process easy. -Record them to a separate track if you can, if not, only record them via pedals if they are a part of your guitar, or bands sound. If your guitar part doesn't sound how YOU want it to without a pedal, then don't record it that way. A lot of time in the studio goes on getting you to sound just how you want to, pedals and effects are possibly part of you and your bands sound.-Analogue to digital does occur in real time, playing back tape through converters in to an audio interface on your digital audio workstation. If you are recording analogue with someone who knows what they are doing, analogue is always my preference. You get a much more musical sound. Transferring that to digital for further processing such as mastering isn't a huge problem. My advice here would be try and do as little analogue to digital and digital to analogue movements as you can. Keep the entire project analogue up until mastering if possible. The better mastering houses will master from an analogue source, then convert to digital and dither it down to be CD compatible, using their very high quality analogue to digital conversion. This would give you the most fidelity and most musical recording, in my opinion.-Steve is of course a well known engineer with a lot of great projects under his belt, but this does not necessarily mean you HAVE to have him mix the project. I hear Greg is also a very competent engineer from reading other threads since arriving on these forums myself. As for how long it takes to mix, there is correlation for me here. The more time you spend recording to get it to sound how you want it to, the less time it will take to mix. USUALLY. Of course problems and unforeseen things come up, but USUALLY this is a pretty golden rule. How long it takes depends on many factors and so I cant really help to give an exact time period. Anywhere from 30 minutes to a few days. It really depends on too many things to say more precisely.

steve wrote:or for people with whom I've worked a lot and whose tastes and expectations I understandi guess the album Turn by the Ex is an example of that. i remember being quite disappointed when this record came out even though it had nothing to do with the mixing or the sound of the record. though i was still curious back then about my impression on the album if it had been done by Steve from start to finish?At the time i was catching every Ex concert that i could in france for almost two years before the album came out. At some point after one concert, Josh from the band told me that the freshly recorded stuff needed some fixing and that they were finishing the record in Amsterdam.i'm certain today that this record would have always been a bit disappointing to me even if recorded, engineered, produced, mixed, or whatever by anyone. i was already a bit familiar with some of the songs that ended up on the record but most importantly, i was so much blown away by this band live that the record is quite ridicule next to the band. seriously, some of the concerts that i saw during this time where so fucking good. after the first couple of gigs that i saw of the Ex, i remember enjoying watching the faces of the people in the crowd during the the first song (usually 'Listen to the painters'). i think very few bands, are capable of catching the attention of a crowd like the Ex can do. i remember times with apocalyptic wall of sounds and before you know it, there is this very quiet passage and the whole room is DEAD quiet you could hear mosquitos fly and this even in the noisiest bar/venue of Paris.enormous.when i listen to the album today it reminds me of the great enjoyment i've had watching this band live 15+ times during almost two years. it actually sounds quite ok

For what it's worth, I prefer to work on records start-to-finish. If I'm not going to mix it, I generally prefer not to record it, because I don't know how to make allowances for what will happen later, or what the next engineer will expect. In emergency scenarios I've done it that way, or for people with whom I've worked a lot and whose tastes and expectations I understand, but I prefer not to do it that way in any case.