One of my brothers is a musician who runs a recording studio, and recently he told me that a friend of his recorded an album (is that still the right term?) at a well-known studio in Los Angeles. His friend doesn’t have a record deal or anything — he just rented the studio time to cut the record.
Here’s the interesting part: the guy’s backing band consisted of Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, and a couple of other guys who names I didn’t recognize but who my brother assured me are similarly big time. OK, that’s not really the interesting part: the interesting part is that, according to my brother’s friend, you can currently hire superstar session men like Keltner and Sklar for $500 per day to make your self-financed record. In other words, you can basically get Eric Clapton’s or Jackson Browne’s former backing band to be your backing band on your record for around $2000, total, if you’re willing to do it in a day.
Sounds like a fun DIY version of the Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp thing.
Tangential to the real topic, but:
Of course it is. A photo album is a collection of photos; a record album is a collection of recordings. The medium on which they are recorded is irrelevant to the term.
far be it from me to call bullshit, but $500 a day for sklar or keltner sounds, um, unlikely.
$500 a tune, maybe. $500 a day?
for reference, master scale in nashville is about $400 for 3 hours. is LA that much cheaper than nashville?
for sklar and keltner?
AFM session scale sheet for LA:
http://www.promusic47.org/wage2/scales/SRLA_Scale_Summary_2013.pdf
premium scale is about $590 for a three-hour session. for three hours, you expect to get 15 minutes of recorded music.
if there is actually a $500 dollar amount being bandied about here, I think campos’ brother is paying $500 *per tune* for those guys.
which is, frankly, still short money.
at least, i freaking hope so.
just get in there and bang out a bunch of Chuck Berry tunes. aside from setup time, i’m sure you could get an album for your $500.
“Johnny B Goode in A! 1!2!, 1234!”
two minutes later
“Roll Over Beethoven. 1!2!…”