I have seen this time and time again. Bands will start to recording process on a very tight budget. There is nothing necessarily wrong with recording on a budget. Some of the best records I've recorded have been done extremely quickly. I've recorded records that I really didn't like that have taken hundreds of hours to record. Either way, I see a lot of bands who go way too fast when tracking, don't get the performances they are looking for, and then pay me to work hours and hours to fix mistakes that could have been fixed by doing just another take when the whole band was setup. Often when I'm ?fixing? their tracks it never sounds as natural as the real thing.

You Can Only Polish A Turd So Much

From an audio engineering perspective, if the tracks really have to be dicked with THAT much to sound great, there is a big problem. Generally the tone of the tracks are there from the start (or there won't be any tone at all). You can only polish a turd so much...as the saying goes.

The same applies to your band's recordings. If you are happy with the tracks that were initially laid down and you are on a tight budget, keep them. However, you need to listen hard and listen close on playback because odds are strong that you will get pickier down the road and then you are going to ask for all these crazy edits later and in the end you will spend A LOT more money!!!

Does Mixing Require A Lot Of Time?

It really depends on the song, the band, and the genre of music. Some music takes an enormous amount of time to mix. I'm thinking of techno, industrial, and other types of music that typically have lots of different sounds that all change and do all kinds of weird crap. Of course, with this form of music, which is often dominated by midi, the mixing and the tracking are sort of one in the same.

I mixed a song the other day in 10 minutes. I'm happy with it. I'm not sure if the band is. Now granted, I usually spend hours on each song. Some songs I've taken 20 hours to get right. That song that I mixed in 10 minutes required a very simple sound. It was real organic. I didn't really even add much space (reverb / delay / etc). I wanted it to be dry. So mixing was just an issue of automating a few levels. Done!

Mixing Is Much Easier, Cheaper, and Quicker With Great Tracks

If the tracks were played great and sound great from a sound quality / audio engineering perspective mixing is much easier. I've had people ask me about specific guitar sounds that I've gotten. They said, ?What did you do in mixing??. I told them that I moved the volume knob up and down until it was the right level. They then asked, ?No, what EQ settings did you use??. I replied, ?I didn't use any EQ. Did you think it needed EQ??.

Obviously in this one particular situation, all of the sound came from the source and the mics used. Because of this, mixing was very very quickly for the guitars on this particular record. If vocals, bass, and drums would have been tracked as well, mixing this record would have been fairly straight forward.

Conclusion

If your band can play well together live (most can not) and your happy with the way that you instruments sound, it should be pretty straight forward for you to record a great record on a budget. Spend your time on doing the extra takes until you get something you are happy with. If you are obsessed with the modern (often sterile), perfectionist style of recording you'll need to kiss your budget goodbye.

In the end, people only care about the singer and the songs anyway.