I’m asking myself two things. How do I charge people I know really well like my brother or cousin or so? The other thing is how to not get people pissed when you put your rates back down? Because they might feel treated wrong because they were the only ones getting it more expensive?

It's no struggle. Simply work out how much you need to earn for a year. Divide that by the number of billable hours and there's your hourly rate...then double it :)

I feel like my work is starting to sound professional, but getting my name out there is a whole other story! I also love helping people too much to really get paid well. Not really sure what the next step is besides doing my very best on every job I get.

When I started my small studio and no one knew if I was any good,I would give people a few hours of tracking free. So they didn’t have to be locked into anything if they didn’t like the results or the workflow. I didn’t have a booth or even a mixing board. Just a 16 Input recording interface, a bunch of rack gear and 15 assorted mics.

@@jjrmusic7 If you like to help people go work for charity. If you want to make money you need to charge for your music. You spend years and years learning your craft for what! So you can give it for free to the people that honestly don't care for you? You need to look at it as an business, not as an charity.

He does talk about it on this video.

My man hahaha

Thanks for watching!

Really appreciate it!

Tomi C Really appreciate that! Honestly means a lot! To be perfectly honest with you I started the channel as a way to just reply to the most common questions I get asked. It was starting to get difficult to have a 20 minute conversation with everyone who messaged me, so it was a way to be able to just reply with a link that contains all of my thoughts on whatever question was being asked. Then I started actually get into the filmmaking side of things. Either way, I enjoy making the videos, and if it helps even just a couple people it is worth it. Appreciate you following along!

Love your videos and I’m slowly applying them on my audio for KZfaq! Hope i can meet you one day

Tom Masters Mixing thanks!! It’s the best way I could figure out how to put it

My man! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Thanks!

Thanks for watching!

Well, to be fair, $75 will certainly not get you an A-list player here either. That’s just a common range of what I pay for my session players. There are session players in town that charge $400 and $500 per song, but at least here in Nashville $75-$300 is A pretty typical price range

One key to understanding rates in Nashville is to look at the union rates for demo and master sessions. All the information of what the A-list get paid for sessions is right there.

I'm pro and charge 15 an hour, it's just music

I'm a producer in New Hampshire just north of Boston. All of my session players charge between 100-150 per song and these guys are all A-list players. My rate for mixing a song is typically 75 - 100 a song depending on the complexity of the mix. My rate drops if I'm mixing the entire album. I can image in Nashville, LA, NY that the rates would be significantly higher. I went to hire Kenny Aronoff for a session where he me quoted 500 per song and 50 for additional edits and percussion which at someone from his caliber is expected.

@@sbanville4761 I guess it depends on what you mean by A-list. Is it A-list locally, or nationally, or globally? Being an A-lister in New Hampshire is quite different from being one in Nashville or LA, where an insanely disproportionate number of top-level musicians live and work. Also, being an A-lister in Portugal is quite different from being one in the US or UK - in terms of demand globally. And how does that factor in remote work? Regardless of whether you're in California or Germany or Zimbabwe, the A-lister you're hiring remotely doesn't really need to account for your local purchase power or the rates of your local A-listers, all of which varies wildly.

Hope it helps! Best of luck!

500 in your currency... as in?? Per hr or per day or what. Does that mean. Thanks

@@chinmeysway I wish it was per hour. That's per production (on average). With equivalence of up to 40hrs. maximum. So I optimize my workflow to accomplish more in fewer hours to get more worth. Of course, there's a variable to it, depending on the type of production. Where it's $260-300 is the minimum wage, to be able to charge $500 is a huge leap. Especially for a really small production setup like mine.

I just took the leap with faith, once time opens up you get better and can take on more gigs. Skills are a must

Man that is a rough one… Admittedly it has happened for less often in recent years you and your work. And that is far more important than putting out a mix where you didn’t like the direction of it. Also usually the The clients that were the ones making terrible mix revisions were not successful artists. So in addition to always making the artist happy, I came to the realization that almost all the time when this happens, your work is going to be heard by maybe 100 people. So it’s just not that big of an impact. And them being happy and telling others about you far outweighs the handful of people that will hear a mix you are not happy with. Hope that helps!

I'm dealing with that currently.

uncredited, nice lol

I know most pay to play and local shows may not pay at all or only $2/ticket. Opening acts for smaller tours seem to get $250-500/show. This is what I see from people I know personally. I have done over a hundred shows at various rates so I can be picky. Theater shows can be anywhere from $40-100 per service. But are often not as great pending the theaters budget. Hence why I left theater work.

Good insight :)

I am looking to hire a violinist for one song. Should I pay per hour or a flat rate? The person who has contacted me is a grad student at the local university. I don't want to rip any one off but I can't afford Nashville a-list prices. What do you think is a fair price?

@@edwardmorris3453 $100/commitment. They have to prepare, travel, setup, perform, break down, and travel back home.

A full week is a long time. As long as the tracks are recorded well you should be able to get a good static mix, EQ and compress, then tweak some automation. Take a break and come back to it later in the day and just listen to a rendered version, take some notes on what needs to be changed, go and fix the issues and you should be done at that point. Its ok to sit on a mix to listen with fresh ears but if you are mixing non stop for a week straight then something tells me the tracks aren't that great and you have to do lots of fixing before you can get to mixing.

Unfortunately you cannot do anything about your age, as you already said. Just Get the best results you possibly can, and let your work speaks for itself. In terms of how long it should take you to finish a mix, there’s no right or wrong answer here. It would regularly take me 12 or 15 hours to complete a mix in the first handful of years I was working on music. Now, I can pretty consistently get a mix knocked out in three or four hours, even for a complicated one. But every once in a while I still get hit with a song that takes eight or 10 hours to mix. This is also somewhat genre dependent. If you’re mixing film score stuff that has 300+ tracks, that’s going to take a while. If you’re mixing pop stuff that has 160+ tracks that’s going to take a while. If the session, or the productions aren’t very clearly laid out in a way that is intuitive to mix, that’s going to take a while. What I can suggest is spend time refining your workflow. Figure out what won’t let you work faster. I spend a lot of time, effort, and honestly money setting myself up to work at a higher rate of speed. Acoustic treatment is super important, good monitoring is super important, a lot of people rely heavily on templates within their DAW. Just experiment with lots of different things and anytime you can shave 15 minutes off of a mix, do that. Hope that helps!

Colt Capperrune I just recently started experimenting with templates so maybe once I have that sorted out It’ll really speed up my work flow. As for acoustic treatment and monitoring, I’m currently stuck in a 10x10 room which is less than ideal. I have 3 fairly large bass traps and some 3 inch acoustic foam strategically placed around the room, but physics seems to be against me haha. I’m also using Adam Audio T7V’s as my main monitors. Thanks for the advice!

Doctor McFarland Studios To an extent, yea, the tracks I’m often working with are less then stellar so you do have a point there. I’ve really been working on getting better source recordings but I’m mainly limited by the acoustics of the rooms I’m in until I can invest in more and better acoustic treatment. Also I’m just a perfectionist so I’ll spend hours tweaking the smallest details to get it perfect.

Money is an objective/quantifiable representation of value, if you want to get good with money you have to start thinking in terms of value. If you spend 40 hours on a mix someone else would spend 4 hours on, well are your providing 10x the amount lf value to client? Are their album sales going to be 10x higher for example, because you spent 10x the number of hours on the mix? If not then you're likely wasting everyones time. At the end of the day the client doesn't care how the sausage is made. If it took you 1 hour or 10 to deliver great results, the value to the client hasn't changed, and neither should your compensation.

Being a “track guy“ within a co-write is certainly a common angle for a producer to get work or be involved in the song. And I think there’s nothing wrong with that approach. Personally I’m never involved in the writing process, and that has not held me back in anyway. The Nashville songwriter/artist scene absolutely does run on cowrites. But it’s definitely not a necessity as a producer to be involved in those cowrites.

The market is literally the buyers and sellers.....so you're just as involved.

$500 for an ALBUM?!?!? I do single songs for $200 fairly regularly..

😳 thats low !!!

Are these just personal/hobbyist projects or are these songs ending up on released albums with sales?

@@garrettpatten6312 they vary in nature but if they are released to streaming etc then I ask for a percentage of the sales. Most digital distribution services offer a Splits option so it makes it easy to share royalties across collaborators.

I record a cello player that charges $75 an hour. On the other hand I record a singer for demos and I give her $50 a song. The cellist is more in demand and she knows what she wants for her time. You get paid what you are worth. I am worth $50 an hour for my time and nothing less. If you can't afford it then I will go play with my kids till you save up the money or find someone else.

Time ≠ money. Time is a limited resource not even the richest man on earth can get more of. Money is prinited out of thin air, and the purchasing power of said money is changing all the time. So instead of asking for hard figures that no one could honestly provide, maybe give more thought to the value being created for both parties. If you mix an album for $1000.00 that goes on to do $1,000,000.00 in sales then you got screwed. If you need to create X amount of value to provide for you and your family but an artists album sales wont create that X amount of value to pay you, thats their problem and maybe you two just aren't the right fit. X is a variable, and it's a good thing. It requires more math and thought on the front end but it can also create the most win/win situations. Maybe you normally wouldn't mix for less than $300.00 a song but a bad storm came and wrecked the roof on your house, well your time/value equation might have to change until your roof gets fixed. And maybe that's some starving artists big break thanks to mother nature lol I mean just think about inflation, if you're priced aren't going up 5-7% a year your wages are going down.