As musicians ourselves we know how frustrating it is trying to compares prices for studios, as many of them don’t display their prices on their sites so you end up emailing or calling, waiting to hear back, juggling dates, and generally losing enthusiasm for the whole process. So: here’s our story.

We charge a daily rate for the studio of €280, including VAT. That includes the cost of the engineer and the use of all the equipment and instruments available.

A day for us usually starts at 10.30am and we go until around 7.00pm. Of course we are flexible on this, so if you want to start later[or earlier] and go later[or earlier] that’s no problem, but we do feel that once you start to go beyond the 8 hour mark the quality of everything deteriorates: the playing gets bad, the ears get tired, mistakes are made and the finished product suffers as a result.

We know that for many clients, weekend days suit them better so we try to accommodate this if we can – unless we have been flat out the week before and need some downtime!

We also strongly encourage people to book in chunks: that sounds like money-makin’ talk, but the truth is when you immerse yourself in the recording world for days on end, you focus better on your work and get much more exciting results than through booking days here and there. It’s also much more fun

When it comes to mixing we charge by the hour, €35/hour inc VAT.

So how long will it all take? Honestly, it varies from client to client. A full band album (say drums, bass, 2 guitars,vocals) should be recordable in 10 days, if everyone has everything worked out beforehand. More often though we see bands taking 12-15 days. Some come in and knock out 10 tunes in just over a week.
Mixing takes around 3 or 4 hours per song. Songs with lots of electronics, multiple guitar parts, layers of vocals and tons of editing can take longer, but 3 or 4 is a good ballpark. That usually gets split into a 2 hour initial mix, then a 1 hour improvement, then a couple of “tweaks”.

Payment:

We usually expect to get paid in full within one or two weeks of finishing a recording/mixing job; in the meantime we supply mp3 versions of the tunes, and release the finished full quality mix WAVs once full payment is made. We also strongly encourage clients to bring their own drives and take backups of the session files once recording is completed.

Bookings/Cancellations:
Right now we are happy to make bookings up to 5 days duration without a deposit; beyond that we look for a 20% deposit.
Clients rarely cancel bookings, but if they do we look for a 20% deposit on future bookings for that project just to cover our asses and to keep the relationship between us and the clients happy. We understand that stuff comes up, but we don’t like to see the studio sitting idle