Welcome to Episode 16 of the Bandhive Podcast.

Well, well, well. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. As always, I am one of your co host, James, and I'm here with Matt Hose from a live in Barcelona.

How are you today, Matt? I'm doing pretty awesome, James. How's your day going so far? Ah, things were great here. And you know what I have to say? I think we should probably stop talking about how far in the past we have recorded these episodes. But today is a special day because it is Christmas Eve. So this is the last time I'm gonna bring it up. This episode comes out in March, but today is Christmas Eve and we're having a pretty awesome day. We're both stuck to spend some time with their families.

But first, because what we believe we're doing is so important for D I Y. Artists out there. We're going to spend about an hour with you and knock out this podcast episode to help you save thousands. When you record your next album in the studio, it's probably not going to be what you think. We're not going to tell you to go to the cheap studio down the road or go to somebody who does free work, which free work can be okay, but you're probably not going to get the best quality if you get an entire album for free.

Maybe a song or two here and there with an engineer trying toe, you know, schmooze his way into your life. But not a whole album. That's just not gonna happen. Any engineer worth their salt is going to charge you thousands for an album. But if you want to keep it to small thousands versus large thousands, you gotta listen to this episode and follow the steps that we're going to talk about. So without further ado, Matt, do you want to drop the bomb here on what we're actually talking about to save thousands in the studio?

Absolutely. So now here's a question for all of our listeners on. That is what is the most important part of your business. Now I'll give you a minute to think about it. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Okay, for all of those that answered song writing, you are correct. If you answered anything else, you're wrong. Because you are a musician. You write music. Your product is music. Your way in the door is music. Your way to a record label is music. Your way to a booking agency is music.

He I mean, even your way to a sound engineer is music. Um, some sound engineers will literally just not even work with you if your music just doesn't sound professional enough now. Ah, lot of bands write music in totally different ways, and there's no one right or, you know, there's no right or wrong way to write music. But there are some very basic rules that you should keep in mind when you're writing your music, and it all starts with determining where you want your music to be heard.

So the very first step in the entire process when you sit down to write a song, you might think, Oh, it's the lyrics or oh, it's the it's the music, but really, what it is is determining who is going to hear it and where they're going to hear it. The reason I want to talk about why this is so important is because if you have dreams of playing your music for hundreds of thousands of people, or you have dreams of your music being on your childhood radio stations that you grew up listening thio.

These are things that can only happen by taking the correct steps. So the first thing I'll tell you what not to dio is if you are trying to get your music on the radio, you can't have a four or five minutes song. Do you know why? I guess not. My guess is that you think, well, my music rocks, and if it flows well enough, then it shouldn't matter. But the bottom line is, is radio stations make their money from ad revenue. The radio stations make no money while they're playing your music.

And so the shorter your songs are, the less songs they have to play in between there commercial breaks. Now the commercial breaks is what makes the radio station money and so for you is a songwriter. If you're trying to get your music on the radio, you need to determine how long your song is going to be. You're writing a four minute song. It's never going on the radio ever, unless you're you know, and I'm not gonna say ever because we do have some older music that, you know, has been grandfathered into the radio stations.

But even huge bands like Machine Had Machine Head has songs that are like 20 minutes long, and I've never heard of Machine Head song on the radio That goes for all different types of dance. I mean, even Freebird when you hear it on the radio. A lot of radio stations cut off the final solo are The End of Hotel California is another one where as soon as that beautiful guitar solo kicks in, that goes on for another minute and a half of the end of the song. It gets radio edit it out, and the reason is is because people still wanna play these popular songs.

But these guys wrote songs and when they were popular, and so there was a high demand for their music for you, there's not. There are tons of fish in the sea, and as long as Max Martin is writing 2. 5 minutes songs for pop artists, your music is never going to compete. So the very first thing that you as an artist have to do is limit yourself, and that's really, really hard, especially when it comes to being creative. Once you start writing, you really want to keep going. You wanna follow every single creative impulse that you have in order to make the best product, which is awesome.

You don't want to stunt your creativity. You don't really want to limit yourself creatively. But you do want to say, you know what this song is 3. 5 minutes. Maybe that bridge needs to be cut in half. Or maybe that second verse really shouldn't be too full. Stanzas is always going to be determined by your style of music, you know. Metal generally has a lot longer songs. Pop generally has a lot shorter songs, and that's why pop songs on the radio. And that's why metal songs are on Lee on specific radio stations that always kind of have the same feel When you listen to him where it's like the old metal rock on, we're never going to die, you know, the very almost, like a C D C Metallica vibe of metal.

The first thing that you need to do is an artist is determine how long your songs you're gonna be. And you do that by determining who your audience is gonna be. Metal heads are always gonna be down to listen to a five minute song. And if you don't care about being on the radio right, a five minute song, your fans will let you know if it's good or not. But if your goal is to really make money and really get onto platforms where you can, you know radio is a massive, massive marketing platform, and it's really useful for tours.

And so if you can figure out a way to develop a product, the caters to people on that platform, depending on your style of music, and that really sets you are a cut above the rest, and something I want to add to this because you're absolutely right about keeping your songs short for radio is that the same thing applies to Spotify for a very different reason. Spotify will pay out a royalty for any stream that was a minimum of 30 seconds above that 30 seconds. Artists do not get paid anything extra.

So if people listen to your music for 10 minutes on Spotify and you have 33 minute songs, you get three payouts. But if you have 25 minute songs, you only get to pay outs from that. So if you want to make more money from Spotify, which is one of the biggest streaming sources worldwide, the more songs you can fit into 10 minutes, 15 minutes, the more money you're gonna make. Because if somebody let's say they're listening to you on their commute to work and they put on Spotify and they put on your album and your between the buried and me with a 17 minute song and their commute is 15 minutes.

Guess what? You're going to get one payout, but if you have three minute songs in that 15 minutes, you're going to get five streams, which means five payouts. And obviously you know, Spotify does not pay much at all, but it does add up five times 50. 89 or whatever it is is much better than one time 10. 89 That's just a fact, and one person doesn't make that huge of a difference. But if every single person who listens to your music streams five songs instead of one in the same amount of time that it would take to stream some other band's song one time, you're gonna be making more money in that same amount of time. Absolutely.

Another interesting little tidbit about Spotify is, uh, for those of you who don't know Post Malone come out of Under the Rock Your Living and look at his Spotify numbers. He made $27 million from Spotify last year. Now that is a massive chunk of change, and all of his songs are nice and short. There also played on a majority of different radio stations because he has a very broad audience for him. He just went with a chill motif. He wanted toe basically have this vibe of I wanna play music that's good to have his background noise or good to actively listen to, but it's always about this relaxed, chilled vibe.

Wherever I'm hanging out with my friends, and so and that was really popular, really trendy, So a lot of people jumped on it. All of the songs are between 2. 5 and 3. 5 minutes, nothing longer than that. And I mean, some of them are even shorter than that. Some of his songs literally go verse, chorus, verse, chorus and then a final course. And he's done. And that's actually a similar layout that quite a few top to your artists have used, including Justin Bieber at Urine, Taylor Swift Drake, you know, and these air all artists, you know, like I get if you're not a pop fan.

But the bottom line is these were some of the highest selling artists within the last, like 5 to 10 years. And so it's just bad practice to not look at what they're doing and apply it. You don't have to be playing the same type of music, but how they do things is essentially having a little view into their marketing. And their marketing is everything. After Spotify came out, Taylor Swift was the first person to get a platinum album, and the streaming industry really killed album sales. And so all of these artists who would platinum on their first week, it was unheard off.

And then Taylor Swift, who isn't huge antagonistic when it comes to Spotify, she is out spoken about how much she hates Spotify and streaming platforms. She didn't release her music on Spotify at first, and she was the first album of the year that went platinum. And since then, other artists have actually followed suit and followed her business model of I'm Going to Wait to Release My Music on All streaming platforms. I'm going to police this super super hard, and she has the money to do that. I believe for the first few months you couldn't even I mean her songs were everywhere on the radio, but you couldn't find them even on YouTube except for covers covered.

You know, you could listen to somebody covering her music because that was their rights and not Taylor Smith's. And so there's tons of ways that you can look at what kind of Spotify and music writing and really isolate, like how you're going to do things like to be honest, a za Long is your songs for two minutes like there's no such thing as this song that's too short with Spotify. If you're cranking out a bunch of shorter songs 2. 5 3 minutes long, I think some 40 ones album. Half Hour of Power was one of the greatest album names ever because it's 10 songs, they're all three minutes long and it's literally 30 minutes of awesome punk rock.

It's great because if you have a 30 minute commute on Spotify, you could literally listen to 10 songs in a row. And the streaming royalty is dirt. And so you need to collect as much dirt as possible in order to build your mountain. Yeah, and this is not something that's new. Obviously Streaming is new, but one of the biggest hits of the nineties song to was two minutes and two seconds. I don't think Blur was thinking about streaming back then. They couldn't have envisioned that, but I'm sure they were thinking about the radio.

Guess what that became. Their biggest hit stations play it all the time because it's a short song that, you know, you have a little extra time between the previous song and when you got to go toe to an ad break. Drop in song, too. Now that we've talked about the first big question, you should ask yourself when writing a song, should we break down the basics of song writing and maybe see where people should start the actual writing process once they've determined what their target audience is?

Absolutely. So now that you know who you're trying to appeal, Thio, there are many different places you can start. You know, we all know the main parts of a song you have, you know your vocals, which is a combination of lyrics and melody. And then you have your instrumentation, which is the combination of all the instruments that you have playing in your group. Now, if you have one primary songwriter in your group, ah, lot of the time they will have a method that they try to follow again.

There's still no set rule. I've written songs where I started with the music. I've written songs where I've started with the lyrics and I've written songs where there was just one catchy little riff that I found that I enjoyed and that evolved and turned into something awesome. Some bands, they write music by jamming. Ah, lot of really prominent bands from the eighties and nineties did that as well. They would all come together, jam for a little while, and they would end up writing more songs than you would know what to do with.

And then they would pick and choose those you know they would, slicing through and figure out which ones they like the best and based on their record label on their management and their producer and themselves, they would come to a conclusion about what songs they would release. For me, this was the best piece of advice that I ever got when it came to song writing. And so I want to pass that on to you. And that was, If you're a songwriter, start by writing your songs acoustically.

Now maybe you don't play a guitar. Maybe you don't play piano. But with today's production technology, there's no reason that you can't sit down and fiddle with something simply or if you don't necessarily have the recording technology. I'm sure there's lots of places around you that might be able to allow you the time to go in and and got your thoughts down. A big problem that I've run into when I was starting out was that I would have a great idea and I would go to write it in short of you playing it 5000 times.

You know you're not gonna remember it unless you have some sort of production software that you can record it on t o. So when I write my music, I do everything very simply onto GarageBand with stock sounds, super basic stuff. But I generally start with I read on Piano. A majority of our music doesn't even have piano in it, but the instrument is so diverse that I can have certain melody lines, go to guitar or certain melody lines, go to vocals and so on and so forth.

I generally start by writing the music. Every key has its own feel going from there. I I generally write lyrics afterwards, but that's not to say that I haven't written a story and then added music to that story because sometimes a story has to have a specific field, and it's really hard to put a story to music after the fact. So it just depends on if you want to write a story. Or if you want to write music now, both of them are going to end up being music in the final.

You know your final product, but it's going to be whatever works best for you. All parts are equally important, and you can't have one without the other. Unless, of course, you're playing just instrumental music, in which case you obviously don't need lyrics, starting with one of those key points, breaking it really down all the way to its fundamental doing something on like a piano. You can use so many different ranges or different octaves on your keyboard, just toe kind of isolate and accentuate certain parts. I write all of my guitar chords on piano, and then I write all of my lyric melody two octaves higher.

And so that way, as soon as I hear it, I can have a faint idea of how things will sound together, even though I'm using a very basic for lack of a better term, a pretty crappy plug in. So it's gonna be on you to determine what you want to use for your plug ins. You know, if using GarageBand samples isn't, you know if that doesn't bug you. I recommend it because Robin's really, really great for writing. You can literally plug something into the USB port and start writing, and that's one thing that's really cool on a lot of other platforms don't have now.

This is really important to set up your base. And if once you have a full product that's actually sitting in a garage band file, even though it's all terrible samples, you could look at it and go Wow after recording all those parts, that's 4. 5 minutes, and now that I've listened to it 10 times, it feels really long. And it's not as good as I had imagined in my head when I was just playing it and not actually recording anything down. So when you haven't laid anything down on a track, then you need Thio be really, really careful is really easy to go over, you know, like a lot of time you'd be like, Oh, yeah, this is a good length song and then before you know it, you're in.

You're in a metal bands and you're playing five minute songs and you have, ah, 45 minute guitar solo at the end or you don't know how to end a song which I think James actually might. You might have a good story about this if I'm correct. Oh boy, Yes, indeed, I dio Before I get into that, I do have a quick side note. GarageBand is a great tool. You mentioned that Apple also has a free app for their iPhones, and I think ipads as well called music memos, which is basically like a stripped version of Garage Band, which is already stripped down version of logic.

But all it does it Z like the voice memos app. All you do is tap record, but then it can give you a metronome, or it can detect the tempo you're playing and automatically add rough bass and drums. So if you don't have that app, that's something that's really handy if you're just somewhere and you get an idea and you wanna play it, and that's a really handy upto have. But yes, I one time worked with the band who had a song. What a surprise. Fans have songs.

We were in the studio recording, and the guitarist was having a bit of trouble playing the solo for one of the songs, which I'm not going to mention the song name because then it would give away which banned it ISS. But in the end, I realized that the guitarist just couldn't get it in one take. So I said, Hey, you know what? That's OK. We'll stitch it. And I tried to stitch it, and thankfully, I did this while we were still in the studio rather than waiting till after the session and doing and editing.

And at that point I realized that the guitarist was playing a different solo in every single take, and I asked the guitarist what's up and they said, Oh, well, I didn't write it. I'm improvising. So I said, Well, we have two options here. You got to write it and play it the same way and every take so I can put the takes together or you gotta improvise it and nail it in one. Take those. There are two options right now, and after about 45 minutes of attempting to write a solo, I said, You know what?

We're just gonna have to move on. This isn't working, it's getting late and we have other songs to finish. We got to get this done. And originally my goal was to have the other guitarist in the band attempt to play the solo. But unfortunately, that didn't work out. And so I believe the original version of the song with the solo was two minutes, 40 seconds or 45 seconds, with a good chunk of that being the solo or maybe was 2.5. What we had to do in the end was sit down, cut out the whole solo section, which thank you approach tools.

Thank you grid mode. I am so happy that this band had agreed to play on a click, and from now on I will always use a click for reasons like this, because it meant I could just cut it out and slide it over and solo gone and looped the last chorus a bunch of times, I think, eight times or 10 times or something like that and did the classic ending of We don't know how to end this song and faded it out, and it came to about two minutes and 10 seconds, and that's why I had to do the looping.

I could have just gone from the verse to the chorus, but then it would have been like a minute in 45 seconds. It was way too short. So cutting out the solo meant that we have to be creative and essentially choose the least worst option, which was looped the chorus and fade out. So if this artist had written the solo in advance and knew what they were going to play, the song would have been met their vision. And I feel really bad that we couldn't meet the vision that this songwriter had for the song.

But at the same time, we had a deadline to meet and the artist was not prepared. And so song writing will help prepare you for the studio right there. That phrase is is kind of a perfect summation of everything that we have gone over and everything that we will continue to go over in this episode, and that its preparation is key. And really, what we're giving you is different ways to make sure that you're prepared. It's really easy to focus, like really hard on the song writing and let other little things fall through the cracks or focus on a solo and let other things fall through the cracks.

Well, you know, and a lot of people, especially songwriters, you might do a lot in the in the band by yourself. And so it's important to not set those, uh, studio the studio date. So your studio time not book that until you have a final product and even if that means you have to wait a little bit longer, that's okay, because the more time that you have to hear your own music, the more you start to go. Oh, man, I actually think I should have done this in this part.

Oh, man, I really think it would have been cool for the melody line did this. And these are all forms of preparation that will literally save you thousands of dollars if you get into the studio and you work with a sound engineer and your drummer goes in and one takes every single song on the album, the sound engineer wants to work with you. You know, when you make their job easy, then they want to make your product better. It's it's It's a mutual professionalism that you can have, and those things come by being practiced being prepared, having parts written, knowing your melody lines.

You know if you have downtime in the studio, which you always have downtime in the studio because you're always waiting for one of your bandmates to finish their parts, especially for vocalists, because you have to wait till the very end with all these things. If you're not sitting in the studio and practicing, then you are not as prepared as you could be. If your vocal cords aren't warm. If your fingers aren't warm, you're not ready to play that guitar solo. It appears on professional. Yeah, and for people listening.

They couldn't see the huge smile on my face when you said that about people one taking their takes. But that actually gives me another good example because some of the best songs have ever recorded. I worked with the band and we went into the studio, and they were so prepared that we did two songs from start to finish, literally scratch tracks, drums, bass, guitars and vocals. In one day. That was a long day. It was like 14 hours or something, but we only had one day to songs.

Two songs in one day. That's insane. And those were some of the best songs I have ever worked on. And I have other bands that I spent five or six days in the studio and the songs not nearly as good because they were not prepared. And I have to say I'm very thankful and I'm fortunate that most of the artists I work with are prepared. But I also hear lots of horror stories about people writing lyrics in the studio and stuff like that. And so first of all, shout out to all the bands who do come prepared to the studio because I was just Florida.

I thought we'd get through one, but we had the studio time. So we said, Hey, you know what? If we could do a second one, let's go for it and we laid down the drums for it. And as the day went on, we realized, Hey, you know what if we put in just like an extra two hours? Yeah, we're gonna be here really late, but we will have to finished songs. We probably could have done more vocal harmonies and a bit more layering, But the main chunks of the songs were done in one day, and that is nearly impossible to dio if you don't have finished versions of the song with some pretty production done.

And that was the thing this band had done pre production, and that's what made it happen. So some of the benefits of writing and doing solid preproduction actually means you're gonna have better songs like what you were talking about, Matt. People are going to have put more thought into it. They will realize you know what this song is too long, or this song isn't really a strong as we thought it was, but also it lets you have a definitive final version of the song. This way you don't release a song and think two years down the road.

Yeah, man, you know what? I wish I had done that a little differently, and it's possible that that still will happen. But it's not nearly as likely because you didn't record the first version of the song. You recorded the 20th version of the song after you and anyone else collaborating with you made tweaks to it to make it the best thing that it can possibly be. It also means that you know this song well enough to do one take and get it done. Now for me is an engineer.

I always do a minimum of three takes, even if they're amazing takes just because I personally like to have a backup, because what if, in that one take the performance was great, But all of a sudden there was some weird random burst of noise and then recording or something because, unfortunately, even in 2019 or 2020 when this episode airs, that kind of stuff does happen. And it's rare. But I always want to have something there so I can swap out of section real quick if I need Thio, because it's so much easier if you have somebody who's doing amazing takes and doing one take straight through.

And it's great taking three minutes or nine minutes to record the song. That section of the song. It's not a huge difference in the end, but coming in sending everything else up again. All that stuff that will take you at least half a day. So spending an extra six minutes to get two extra takes is 100% worth it in my mind, that goes especially for drums and base, with guitars and all the layers. I typically just do as many takes as I feel necessary, because guitar parts tend to be more easy to replicate.

But drums and bass like you're probably not gonna be able to do those again easily. All of these things will add up to a better end product, which means that the fans will have a better experience. And last but not least, it means that you'll spend potentially much less time in the studio, which could save you thousands of dollars over the time that you're recording your album. If you are working with a studio who charges by the hour or by the day, even if you're getting a flat rate price for the studio, which is very helpful In some cases, engineers do sometimes charge over Ridge, so they'll say it's a flat rate, you know, up to 30 hours of studio time, and after that you pay hourly.

So when an engineer does that, typically they say, Okay, well, you know what? Most projects for doing this many songs. I get it done in this time, so I'm going to give them a flat rate quote, including that much time plus probably a little buffer to. But then, if it takes way longer, they're going to say, You know what? I hate to do this, but we have to start charging you now because otherwise we're losing money. So one thing that I wanted to just touch on because we mentioned it a couple times but didn't really explain what we meant was the term preproduction.

Now you'll hear this term a lot as you start to get more and more into the music industry, and your pre production is basically the work that you do to produce your final product beforehand. So when you track a demo, that is step one of pre production and then you get your full demo out. This allows you to see how long your product is the overall structure of your song if it's following a structure that is that is emulated in whatever industry you're in, you know, if you're writing a five minute song, you wanna get awesome guitar solo.

This is what's really going to help you snap everything to grid and really help you figure out if your product is going to stand up compared Thio what the rest of the industry's products are doing. So when you do your pre production, you basically want to sit down as a collective. You all record your parts down. It doesn't have to be the greatest thing in the world. But once you have every part that you think should be in the song, you will very quickly find out what parts are missing, where the air is, where the empty spaces and these are all really important things that you should have done ahead of time.

If you do have recording software, I really recommend using things like ominous Fear or if you're just doing basic preproduction. Stephen Slate drums are wonderful. I think there's another one called What Is It Live drummer or something like that superior drummer. And there's a basic version of that easy drummer, right? And, you know, and there's a whole bunch of these programs out there that basically make it to where you can record something that sounds good into your computer without you having to spend, really. I mean, I think Stephen Slate cost 100 bucks, and then you literally have good sounding drums for every demo that you ever write forever.

So those were things that are really worth the investment, honesty and honesty, or to one of the coolest programs on the planet. Fractal makes their acts effects. And if you have an ax effects, utilize the patches on their There are so many different tones and different settings that you can do on there that really bring your music toe life. Those are the things that create that ethereal sounds in your music that you don't notice that there there until they're not there, you know when you listen toe.

I like to use the example of the song The Pot by Tool and in the very beginning of this song, if you turn the volume up a lot because the vocals air compressed and there's a delay on them, you could actually hear Maynard's vocals come in before they come in. And those air little tiny production quality factors that you miss out on when you don't use pre production when you don't figure out where your base drops are going to be when you don't figure out like hey right here.

Ah whoa! Part are a gang vocal part with sound really good here. Or maybe we should change this. Maybe now that I've taken my song, which I played live and put it on the paper. Now maybe the writing just doesn't. Maybe the guitar parts not technical enough or whatever it is that you decide you want to change the pre production is what is going to help you isolate those problems and solve them. 100% agreed. And as part of that too, I should mention that many artists will record 50 to 100 songs orm or for an album and in that pre production process will cut 80 to 90% of those songs out to get it down to 10 to 12 songs for the full length or, you know, five songs for an E P or What Have You.

I think The Red Hot Chili Peppers record 40 songs per album, and for the most part, they would let down to between 12 and 15, with the exception of Stadium Arcadium, which they had so many songs that both them and Rick Rubin liked that they released a double album. Imagine going to the grocery store and they're being 10 tomatoes and you need 10 tomatoes. It doesn't matter the quality of those tomatoes. You have to use them. But when you go to the grocery store and there's 100 tomatoes and you only need 10, well, then you get the pick of the litter.

You could go along and choose which ones you like the best, maybe the ones that have the strongest emotional attachment to you. Now the analogy about the tomato was weird, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah, it's something that all the big bands dio and that is a huge part of their success. They write more songs than they need Thio and then pick the best tomatoes. And you hope that the songs are good enough that no one throws tomatoes on stage unless you're on you. That does it for this episode of the podcast.

We hope that this gave you a better understanding of just how important it is that you get a quality plan in place for each and every one of your songs. So you know exactly where that guitar solo is gonna be, which notes you are going to play. Everything about your songs should be done when you're going into the studio so that you can save as much time as possible and just sit down, play your parts and get it done. That will save you so much money in the long run.

That being said, thank you again for listening. We really appreciate it. And it would be super awesome if you would go to feedback dot Bandhive dot rocks and leave us your thoughts. If you could take two minutes to do that, it would really help us out. And we would appreciate it a ton, as always. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you have an awesome week and we will be back next Tuesday at 6 a.m. With an episode about stage presence. So you will hear us then.

In the meantime, please. If you have two minutes, go on over to feedback dot band. I've dot rocks toe. Leave us your thoughts, have an awesome week and keep rocking