Studio w/best drum room in northern NJ, less than $300/day

[Poopants]

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a studio in the Northern NJ area (as close to Morristown as possible) that has a great drum room. It's for harder rock stuff, not exactly basketball-click bassdrum metal but in the metal/hardcore direction.

I'm working on a tight budget and would like to find something for less than $300 a day, $200 if possible. I don't expect anyone to post actual rates but if anyone knows anything in the ballpark I'd be very grateful.

The band I'll be recording is here -> http://www.myspace.com/thatwasthenthisisnow, if you'd like some reference, we did the drums for those songs in a normal room in my house, I'd like to be able to at least top that or I might as well just do it there.

Thanks guys!

[Musiclab]

with a great drum room for 300 a day, your kidding right?

[thethrillfactor]

Originally Posted by Musiclab

with a great drum room for 300 a day, your kidding right?

Maybe a day for him is 2 hours.

[ImJohn]

At first I thought, holy crap, $300 and hour! That's pretty high end! Then I reread and realized the OP was asking for $200 to $300 per day.

Even so, listening to the music, I'd say 6 hours would be a pretty long day for a drummer doing music that intense (sounds great by the way! ) so that's about $35 to $50 per hour. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to find something reasonable for that money.

Another possibility, consider finding a good sounding room in a warehouse, convention hall, factory etc (especially if you can get it for free through a friend/co-worker) and then have an engineer bring in a remote rig to just cut drums there.

Best of luck! (hey, Portobello Fellow reminds me of a cross between Coheed & Cambria and 30 seconds To Mars ;-)

[Jay Kahrs]

Dude,

I live 5 minutes outside of Morristown.

There's NOTHING in this area in that price range.

If that's all ya'll can afford to spend a day for the tracking I'd consider renting a VFW hall for a few days & haul all the gear in or some other alternative method.

Good luck!

[Poopants]

Originally Posted by ImJohn

At first I thought, holy crap, $300 and hour! That's pretty high end! Then I reread and realized the OP was asking for $200 to $300 per day.

Even so, listening to the music, I'd say 6 hours would be a pretty long day for a drummer doing music that intense (sounds great by the way! ) so that's about $35 to $50 per hour. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to find something reasonable for that money.

Another possibility, consider finding a good sounding room in a warehouse, convention hall, factory etc (especially if you can get it for free through a friend/co-worker) and then have an engineer bring in a remote rig to just cut drums there.

Best of luck! (hey, Portobello Fellow reminds me of a cross between Coheed & Cambria and 30 seconds To Mars ;-)

First off, thanks for the compliments on the sound. Second, you're right, I think 6 hours is about all we could handle in a day - maybe even 5. So a room for up to $50/hour should be about right. I should have clarified this in the original question.

So...any suggestions for a room under or around $50 an hour? Again, this doesn't have to be a world class room, I'm just looking for something that will get me at least a better sound than on the tracks we recorded before (see the myspace link).

And another thought just occured to me...if we can only put in 5-6 hour days (or less) due to work/class schedules, is a studio going to be willing to leave the drums and mics all setup for a period of 4 or so days? I know it depends case by case, but from experience, how would this situation work? I've never engineered at a real studio besides my own setup so excuse my ignorance, and when I interned at a large studio it was 99% hip hop ...this situation doesn't come up when the extent of the equipment in the live room is 1 mic and a headphone box...



While I'm at it, I might as well bring this up too; my plan to keep costs down was to do all the guitars at my home studio, but record a DI track so that when all is finished I can take the session to a studio with a nice sounding live room and reamp there...it sounds nice in theory but am I misguided? Is this more trouble than it's worth?

Basically I've got a $6000 budget to do 6 songs and I'm trying to maximize that money (and make sure there's enough left over for me to get paid!). I've got a nice little high end setup (ADAMs, mytek, SCA pres, etc) and a semi-treated room for mixing, but no great room for tracking. How would you do this project?

[Jay Kahrs]

Originally Posted by Poopants

So...any suggestions for a room under or around $50 an hour? Again, this doesn't have to be a world class room, I'm just looking for something that will get me at least a better sound than on the tracks we recorded before (see the myspace link).

And another thought just occured to me...if we can only put in 5-6 hour days (or less) due to work/class schedules, is a studio going to be willing to leave the drums and mics all setup for a period of 4 or so days? I know it depends case by case, but from experience, how would this situation work? I've never engineered at a real studio besides my own setup so excuse my ignorance,

There's one place that might drop to $50 an hour & is near Morristown but I honestly can't recommened them. If ya'll can travel a bit and doing a 45-60 minute drive is no problem I can think of two places that might work;

www.retromedia.net
www.mix-o-lydian.com

But the bigger problem 'yer gonna have, as yoiu pointed out is that sure...you can lock out a studio for a day & work five or six hours a day...but if you lock out the day you gotta pay for the whole day.

The other problem you're going to have is that if you really haven't worked in a "big studio" before, or just ANY new room...you're going to be a little "lost" when you get there.

Even when I bring my monitors with me it takes at least a few hours, if not a whole day to really get used to what I'm hearing, what the room is doing to the sounds & be able to really trust what's going on.

Plus you'll have to scope out a whole new set of tools. A new console, compressors, recording room, maybe microphones...

It's ALL gonna be new & uncharted territory...

And you've got like 4 hours to get it done in...that leaves maybe an hour or two for setup...which is NOT a lot of time when you're shooting for "KILLER!"

You could try producing those sessions & leave the engineering to the house engineer, but I'd only do that if I knew the house AE was "A-fukkin'-MAZING"!

You might be better off just tracking at your own place where you can take your time & not be under the gun to get results. What if the drummer chokes when it comes time to play and at the end of five hours 'ya got nuttin & blown the day? If that's the time limitation you're dealing with because of the band then I'd setup shop at the home base; a rehearsal room or some kind of controlled environment, rent some mics & pres & work for as long as it takes to get it 'right'.

Given the choice of more time vs. better gear...I'll opt for more time.

While I'm at it, I might as well bring this up too; my plan to keep costs down was to do all the guitars at my home studio, but record a DI track so that when all is finished I can take the session to a studio with a nice sounding live room and reamp there...it sounds nice in theory but am I misguided? Is this more trouble than it's worth??

It can work...

But I'm a HUGE fan of the 'commit' club.

Get a fukkin' "good" guitar sound (whatever that may be...) coming from the floor during tracking and commit it...build the production around a set of sounds & let the record develop it's own life & tone.

Don't put everything off till later, if you want to have the vocals sound like they were recorded with a megaphone going through a bunch of stompboxes...then DO THAT!!!

Taking the DI route...to ME...means that nobody was really sure of what they either wanted or were doing...maybe both! LOL

As a mixer...sometimes it's saved the day. I mixed one record a few years ago that a band had tracked themselves & had horrible guitar sounds & they kinda knew it. They wanted "beefy" and "BIG" guitars so they stuck the treble & presence knobs on like 1 or 2...but they were referencing all this uber-slick poprock stuff like Garbage & No Doubt which was waaaaaaaaaaaaayy brighter & thinner then anything this band had recorded.

In that case, the DI tracks saved the record.

That's about the only time I've ever found that trick to be useful...I'm sure there's other slick applications I don't really know about...but I guess it comes from being a member of the 'commit' club!

Basically I've got a $6000 budget to do 6 songs and I'm trying to maximize that money (and make sure there's enough left over for me to get paid!). I've got a nice little high end setup (ADAMs, mytek, SCA pres, etc) and a semi-treated room for mixing, but no great room for tracking. How would you do this project?

See above!

$6000 for six songs is good size...I've done entire records for that so you should be able to turn out something slick if ya'll take your time.

Peace,

[Mike Caffrey]

I can do 6 songs for half that, at more than triple the day rate budgeted, and still have time for meal breaks (assuming the band is mediocre or better and not still woriting while they're recording).

I've found that "cheap" studios often cost much more than when you go to a place that charges a rate three times as high - rate and cost are two different things.


I predict that the drums will cost far more than $300 if you find a $300/day room.

You're going to spend time fixing some flaw - even if it's just bad file managment on a part or an engineer who doesn't know a whole lot (which he clearly doesnt' if he's got an acceptable room and charging that rate - he's not charging for himself of the gear or something). Then your mix is going to take longer trying to massage the sound into something usable.

Or you'll have something like the (i'll spare them the embarassement of naming ) the Manhattan studio who's channel 2 cuts out a bar or two in and you've got to spend hours rebulind their missing top snare mic track because of some bad wiring that cut out. I've fixed their same problems over the span of two years! I could have double my rate and done the whole thing from scratch for less than the cost of what my cleints had paid them combine with the cost of me fixing it.


It's always cheaper to do it thr right way the first time.


Plus, if you think sound quality matters - which you must if you're tying to improve- do you really want to risk all the other money you're going to spend after the drums (mixing, mastering, duplication, press mailings) by cutting corners on one of the most influential portions of your recording?


You should work at a major label!