Are you staying busy these days recording? Seems that recording studios are suffering from the software/home computer revolution. I know a few people who do electronic recording for local bands.
We are mostly work-a-day musicians who also vape. I never saw myself as a full time musician anyway, and certainly not a recording engineer. I was happy throughout the years to play a couple of gigs a week and practice one night just to learn new music to keep the set lists current. I worked a full time job as a tech rep for a large company and spent 40-45 hours a week making money to support my other interests. Now, after retirement I'm happy just to be playing in a Christian contemporary group to keep my fingers agile.
There's probably a good income in recording demos for local bands if you have the time and the desire to do that sort of thing.
I'm doing nothing in the way of recording.
I moved back to Phoenix, Arizona a few years ago and the music scene sucks here. I'm trying to relocate, TBH. I really miss being in a band.
Writing and/or recording is time consuming, expensive, and a lot of work, there's no way around it. I'm an artist though, not a "player". If the only thing I could do with my instruments is play covers, I'd toss them all in the trash.
I got bored with recording a few years back. I went through a phase where I bought a Tascam 8 track home studio recorder, sold it, and bought a Korg D3200 hoping to entice my friends to gather and lay down some tracks. They were excited at first, but lost interest, as did I with solo creations.
The Korg D3200 is a really nice and versatile machine for what I paid for it. It's now under a dust cover with a minimum of hours on it. I've thought about selling it. I might be able to get 1/3 to a half of the $1400 I paid for it 10 years ago. They are selling on Ebay for $500 to $800.
Shortly after I bought it the home recording world switched to computer based recording with Cakewalk, Pro Tools, and other software based recording tools.
Yeah, unfortunately the software end of recording made a lot of that hardware stuff paperweights pretty quickly. Honestly, in most contemporary forms of music the question is,
"Are you going to record drums or not?". If the answer is no, you can do a lot of damage with a good 2-channel interface, a decent computer, a good vocal mic + preamp, and a DI box. Get out your wallet if you want to do drums. You need way more channels, way more mics, pres, etc. With my last band, I just got some roughs of the shells down to disc, and really tried to capture the overheads as best as possible. Tap-to-transient the the shells, trash the audio, and sample replace. Purists whine about it, but on a limited budget, you can get FAR better results that way than a half-assed capture of the kit. It's awesome what kind of results you can get at home these days if you know what your doing. A lot of it is skill, granted, but it's skills that can be learned.
