Money woes for the independent artist...

One of the major issues when recording my album was (you guessed it) money. Money for instruments, money for strings, money for software, money for hardware, money money money!

If you are a budding indie artist, people may tell you that nowadays you just need Reaper or maybe Cubase and a keyboard and that's it! Instant success... well, sorry to rain on your parade, but that's a blatant lie. I've lost count of how many times I've read or heard things like "buy this one thing and that's all you'll need to record an album", and my friends, it's unreal how far real life really is from that kind of argument.

First of all, you need QUALITY. Nobody will listen to your music if it sounds recorded on your mom's basement. You need good instruments, you need good mic's, pre-amps, you need good monitoring, a sound listening environment, you need to learn to mix (if you're doing it all yourself), you need to adopt professional recording techniques, taking care of your instruments, tuning up, warming up, spending that money on things that look like nothing, but amount to large sums of money.

And most of all, you must educate yourself. You may think your 5" woofer audiophile speakers are the best in the world, and that your Soundblaster is enough, but try listening to a pair of 1000€ speakers trough an Aurora, and learn why those sound different.

So, once you understand how to get a good sound, you must start saving up for it. I'm not blessed with a rich family, so every cent I spent on music came from my daytime job, and I know how much of me is in the recording gear I own.

And last but not least, NEVER go for the advertising hype. Read, read and read, sign up to recording forums, get books, read Bob Katz's site from top to bottom, read until you distinguish bullshit and misinformation and people who think they know everything from professional opinions, founded in practice and critical judgement.

And then, spend your money.

Hope it helps!

PS: My next post will be about LEARNING to play... all the gear in the world won't help if you're a lousy performer right?