Analog upkeep

I say let them record at home, and let them live with the result. They'll hear the poorer quality outcome, and come back around to you. This has happened to me countless times over the years; I never lose sleep over it. Instead, I focus on ways to make my clients' experience with me better, so they never confuse the convenience and lower cost of home recording with the vastly superior outcome of working with professionals in professional spaces. Shortly put: we are not in competition with home recording, unless we allow ourselves to be. 

As for gear repairs, it's a cost of doing business. At any given time, I have one or two pieces of outboard half-working or not working at all (ahem looking at you guys, dead Crane Song Ibis, and also you, Chandler TG1 with the noisy output...), but I have a quality local tech who can usually fix this stuff for $100-200. He doesn't overcharge or take advantage because:

a) I give him a lot of work (that whole "analog shit has a tendency to break" thing 😂) and the long term benefit of treating me fairly outweighs the short term benefit of overcharging for a repair, and 
b) if I found out he was ripping me off I'd beat him senseless with his own severed arm

YMMV!

Meant to also say: if the client DOESNT come back to you after home recording, well, do you really even WANT a client who tries to trade lunch for billable hours? I mean, fuck that kinda guy, right?

Well… with a little imagination and picking the right place to eat, I could imagine trading a full course for a vocal track 😉 doing this 7 days a week would though turn it into a very expensive album for the client 🤣.

Seriously, I get u. Streamlining and selling gear that aren’t an absolute necessity for bringing the clients in might in these days be the most profitable path. But I guess it’s about where you draw the line of perfecting your vision vs. just keeping the clients happy and coming back. Many do run successful mixing studios very much in the box, and it’s for sure cheaper with less service costs and funds bound to gear. A lot is about profiling your business and clientele. For a tracking studio it’s harder though to cut the corners without eventually sitting there with a c414 telling the client all I can do better is pointing it more accurate than yourself.

As a counter point (half for-serious and half just as devil's advocate): 

Buying physical equipment is a WAY better investment. I can sell off my studio and come pretty damn close to breaking even, and if you factor the money it has helped me earn the past couple decades, I'm like WAY ahead financially. That is, until I start looking at how many unrecoupable thousands of dollars I've spent on plugins and other software 😭

I'd also add that chipping away at the ol' yearly tax burden one plugin write-off at a time is a helluva lot less awesome than plunking down like half your income every year to build the mic collection and add some interesting new compressors to the racks. If I'm looking for deductions come April, I'll have an easier time if I've been buying hardware.

This is a little bit off topic, but I'm totally over buying used gear, particularly off places like eBay and Reverb where I don't know the seller.

Approximately 30 to 40% of the used gear I buy has some broken function that wasn't disclosed by the seller.

And, I'll spend hours and hours troubleshooting the gear within the 7-day time window I have to return it. And then with those 30 to 40% of returns I spend hours repacking it and sending it out and waiting weeks for the money back.

I've been through several BSS DPR 402s, not a single one actually worked as described, went through several DBX 118, BSS DPR 901ii, and literally dozens of other gears. So many hours lost chasing that pipe dream of a reasonable-cost, decades-old piece of gear in great condition. I even purchased a TT EQ that arrived with a non-functioning band, returned it, the seller had it repaired, I bought it again, it was still broken even though the invoice showed the repair. So I returned it again.

I'm done with that.

Of course, with new gears I've also had things that arrived dead, or had need for repairs right away. But at least if it's new I've got a warranty or somebody to contact.

Tbone who is doing your Rhodes Rehab? I've done a miracle mod, some tolex and tines and I don't want to do anymore, and it needs more! I also have a lovely Hohner D6 Clav that needs some work/mods.

This is why I try to stay with thru hole and single layer PCB designs. Very simple to guess what broke and I have a great track record. And EASY to replace pots or I/o jacks.

You just reminded me a good reason to sell some nice surface mount items before it’s too late. My track record with surface mount/multi layer PCB is lots of wasted hours and lots of failure to fix

Bill, do you have an opinion on what use preserves the gear better and the opposite?

We are not in competition with home recording unless we allow ourselves to be... I love that.

And absolutely the whole thing about making the experience better..? That's why some people have 20-30 + year careers and some? Well those clueless zorches hang out a shingle, maybe rent an old storefront and are gone in 2-3 years. Seen 'em come & buy their gear when they go! 

But guys like you & me are kind of approaching the whole deal from a way different angle then anyone at home... recording themselves, or what we might call the hobbyist crowd? And that's not a knock, some of those cats are killer players & do great stuff... but, there is a fairly defined, intrinsic line between full timers/shops for hire and someone who's really only working on their own material, and not relying on the investment/income. 

Kinda like a racecar driver vs just a regular person who happens to buy a racecar. If your a pro driver you know your gonna tear shit up & burn piles of money... tires, blow a motor... maybe even wreck the whole thing. Cost of doing business. 

Most of the people (certainly not all!) but an awful lot of "regular" people who buy a $250k car barely drive it. They'll get a Porsche track monster and with insurance & repairs being what they are its insured for about 3000 miles a year and rarely leaves the garage. When was the last time you saw a daily driver McLaren? Right. 

Everything breaks eventually. Digital gear is great when it works, but when it doesn't oh boy that can be maddening... usually because its some kind of mission critical piece that spits out a cryptic code. Most "analog" problems can be patched around in 30 seconds... 

And yeah like everyone else on the planet at any given point in time I have "projects" and a pile of junk that doesn't work, or doesn't work well. Mic amps that are dead... bad tube in something else... always at least one guitar in pieces. Probably two. 

The "problem" more, lets say more involved humans have... is that when you have a pro studio of a given size you end up with a pretty vast collection of junk! Enough to fill a building... so there's just more of everything. And so way more chances for shit to break. Because there's simply more shit!! 

As for the analog hassle vs ITB..? Whoo.

At this exact moment in time I'd be lying if I said I haven't been having thoughts of taking just about every single piece of outboard & whatever else, calling the vintage queen or whoever and trading it all in for a pair of 8 channel apollos and a wicked car. 

To put some perspective on that, having just moved the business & everything else about 600 odd miles from northern NJ/NYC to the outskirts of Johnson City TN..? Holy crap, the studio & the house filled 3/4 of a full size semi. About 19,000 pounds (mostly packing paper, don't get me going on the movers) with an estimated 3000 pounds of "production gear" 

There's one ATA case that no joke, has probably about 200 pounds of cable in it. All the snakes, like the 24 pair mogami / redco's for all the outboard... another trunk filled with just mic XLR & patching... Hell the iMac is still in its box in front of me (i'm on the laptop!) 

Two drum kits with all the fixings, 15 plus guitars, however many amps & handful of cabs... At some point something's gonna need repair and its all packed in boxes. 

And so I sit here, in a new town literally surrounded by everything in pieces and yeah, sure as fuck it'd be awesome to trade nearly everything and get some studio in a box happy meal kinda setup. Plug & play. Boy that'd be swell... 

But then I'd be, we're going right back to your point in that now I'm just the dude with the Apollos & some cool mics. Just like every other home studio... and while that's fine, and you can (and I have, many times!) totally make a good, no-excuses record on one of those... its not very cool or interesting enough to base a business around. 

So we surround ourselves with the tools of the trade and yes, all the rad toys and killer "tools" that make our lives easier & make for better, as in more interesting sounding records. Not that I believe anyone needs a lot of gear to make a record, but if you don't have a lot of stuff everything you have needs to be seriously good. 

Grumble as I might over the next, however many hundreds of hours it'll take to knock not only all the gear, with the baby SSL desk and roughly 250 point patchbay back together... all the tech junk... BUT... also make the spot a nice, inviting clubhouse? So that the process of recording is a comfortable experience? 

Totally worth it. 

I've always viewed the equipment, especially the analog gear as an investment... certain pieces, especially major ones typically don't lose value. Don't go up, but the cash investment is usually safe & can be (mostly) recovered.  

About 20 odd years ago (2001?) I bought a pair of Daking 52270 pre/eq from a guy who was selling a bunch to pay for a pro tools upgrade... Paid around $2k for those and holy guacamole I could easily get that back & then some. I've used 'em on countless projects and they've needed, knock wood maybe 2 or 3 fairly simple repairs? Had a relay go bad a couple 3 years ago... 

I've also owned a handful of large format consoles & tape machines, and by sheer need did & still do all the daily driver kinda maintenance myself. Kinda have to because right, the tech nerd is like $100-150 an hour and the studio is charging $500 a day? $800? That's bad math. 

If & when I come across some kinda bad apple piece that keeps going back to the shop, just can't stay working? Or if I have repeated problems with a certain company..? Their build / QC / engagement sucks? Punt that sucker. Life's too short. 

For "client work" I'm now fully ITB.

Yes, it's probably a reflection of the type of customers I choose these days (25 years ago I was doing work for companies and funded artists when there was an actual functioning industry)

ITB is good enough, people don't want to pay extra for a glossy 3D analog mix and I'm not convinced they or their "fans" can hear the difference anyway!

I save my racks of high end tube and solid state outboard for my personal music and productions of music I've written where the sound matters to me - I appreciate the difference analog gear makes.

Moving to this approach has cut down on running expenses like tubes, power bills and frequency of repairs enormously.

I've built a separate writing/composing room that's fully ITB based around a nice 2.1 monitor system and a digital mixer and I leave my studio rig switched off to save my ATC's and high end converters etc and my power bill.

I think you've hit on an important subject here - and running costs do concern me as I gt older and don't want to do as much payed work.

Example - I love my Retro STA Level (a plugin doesn't get within a country mile of it's magic) but at £200 for a set of tubes it gets saved for a hightenor vocal only!!!!




 

I’m really surprised to hear this because lately when I list gear, it sells FAST to someone in Europe, and with minimal haggle on price. Granted, I make an effort to favor buying US-made gear, but I’ve been finding that European buyers are eager to get their hands on used American equipment that hasn’t gone thru the series of middlemen distributors they’d have to pay for had they bought the gear new. 

im trying to remember my last high ticket sale via reverb that wasn’t to a foreign buyer, and I have to go back YEARS.

Vintage 47s are north of 20k. The only people buying those anymore are trust fund kids and rich lawyers who dabble in “pro” recording. 

gear for the real world is all I can afford, and so things work a bit different😂