The first Fear Zero CD I made on money I had saved up teaching music for 4 years.  Throw in a credit line with a lot of favors and some lucky breaks as well as studio time late at night and voila, you have the first Fear Zero CD!

That CD cost around $17,000 to record, including paying session players, studio time, and mixing engineer fees.  That does not include the cost of me having to drive to the nether regions of Vancouver every few days to get to work on it for a year.  Pressing the CDs and artwork cost another $2,500  so it was basically $20,000 all told and that was cheap!

Of course, no band recoups on their first CD (unless your band is named Boston) so when it came time to do the 2nd CD “Concentrated”, I was broke basically and I managed to get an EP done for about $5,000 plus with CDs and artwork printed, close to $7,000.   I recorded and engineered and edited all of that one at my little dirtbag studio here in North Vancouver and while I am proud of it,  there are some things that would have made that one better if I had the budget to do so.  That being said, it still stands up against any independent CD out there.

Some bands spend nothing on recording and basically use their recordings to get live gigs.  It really depends on the type of music you are doing.  I read somewhere that a local independent band from Vancouver signed to a smallish label in the US made their last CD for under $10,000.  That is great if you are writing oddball music that is not geared toward the mainstream but for Fear Zero, we are going for a big, produced sound that can get us on the radio and that costs a lot of money these days,  if you want to do it right that is.

 Getting down to brass tax, here are some numbers I crunched:

Drum tracks recorded at pro studio and edited and layered with samples $2885
Guitar and vocals 4 days at a friends local studio $1000 
Pay for engineer for 4 days $800
Editing tracks $320
Mixing 4 tunes in the box (meaning on a computer as opposed to in a studio) $4000
Mastering $600

Total $9605 for 4 damn tunes!  And that is the cheap version!

Here is the expensive version:

Drum tracks recorded at pro studio and edited and layered with samples $2885
Guitar and vocals 4 days at a friends local studio $1000 
Pay for engineer for 4 days $800
Editing tracks $320
Studio mixing time in “A” room at local studio for 3 days $1,950
GST 5% on studio mixing time $97.50
Mix engineering fees for 4 songs $3,000
Mastering $600

Total $14,652.50.   Whew, 4 tunes is damn expensive these days!

 So there you go,  hopefully this shows you how much it really costs to record something of quality, sound-wise.

Try to remember this before you download an artists song for free, especially an independent artist’s song!