I'd like to share my experience in writing and recording an album. I'll try to be as short as possible. It's not easy to share your experience because many people don't care at all about the process and they judge the final product after listening to it partially or approximatively.

Premise: I am a biologist and I can barely strum the guitar, that's it, so I am not a musician. Oasis are my favourite non metal band, so I can manage to play them and to write similar stuff.

During the last 20 something years I've been writing songs for fun, for myself, in my bedroom. Just acoustic guitar and voice. I can't sing, I am terrible so a friend joined me and we teamed up for a long while. Unluckily he lost the motivation during the years, while I went on as usual.
2-3 years ago I met a guy where I live now (Prague) and since it was something with no commitment he decided to help me finishing the songs. So we got a terrible singer and a bass guitarist and we rehearsed for few months... It didn't work, the guy didn't study the new songs and the singer was quite bad. We were still stuck at 4 songs.
We disbanded the band and my friend (who is from Croatia) involved his brother and his friend so we went to play with them for 2 days without singer. 3 months after we found the singer and we went there again to rehearse with her, two more days. Finally after 2 more months we went (again in Croatia since everyone lived there except me) to record 10 songs plus an instrumental that they improvised on a base I made time ago. Obviously they came to the studio in the evening, after work, when they could.
Well few months after we got the album and I can say I am proud of it, even though many things could have done better.

The point is: lots of effort, lots of money (I paid everything), lots of stress... is it like this for everyone?? Is it always like this? I have new songs but I really don't know if I wanna go through it again... We didn't promote the album, just few posts on FB, I work, I have no time to take care of all that. So we have just few streams per day on all platforms, which is frustrating.

As consolation I was able to text my favourite Italian singer and he liked the album and agreed to sing one song that we released as a single. At least I lived a dream.

Any comment to this will be appreciated. In case you want to listen to what we have made you can search for "Southern Waves - Songs Through The Looking Glass"

Written by Zenzero on 10.05.2023 at 11:40

The point is: lots of effort, lots of money (I paid everything), lots of stress... is it like this for everyone?? Is it always like this? I have new songs but I really don't know if I wanna go through it again... We didn't promote the album, just few posts on FB, I work, I have no time to take care of all that. So we have just few streams per day on all platforms, which is frustrating.

I have been part of recording processes a few times since 2016, some good, some bad... In your case, living in different countries certainly adds an extra factor to deal with - how about recording remotely next time? It will be trickier in other ways, but there are some examples of very good albums (Moonsorrow - Tulimyrsky comes to mind) that were recordered this way, with every member recording the parts on their own.

Recording music in a studio is always stressful and takes a lot of effort since you have very little time to try to put your very best performance on tape and when it's done, it's done, and that's the performance everybody will be hearing. There's the cost factor which means you want to spend as little time as possible in the studio, which adds even more pressure to perform optimally.

For me, recording with my first band Elaine Minor took 4-5 days to record a demo of five songs, where every member had basically one day each to record their parts. Then, I was a studio keyboardist on Nekrokraft - Servants, with much the same pressure: one day or even just one evening to record the very best you're able to perform. Then, for Chaliced - City Of God we hired a studio and producer here in town, Gardenia (responsible for a few Ghost releases among others), where we had 5 days to record an entire album of 8 songs. That tkme, I lucked out, because we were playing live along with our drummer when recording the drums, and most of my takes ended up being good enough to use on the album, so there wasn't much left to do when it was "my day". Finally, I was in a black metal band and the recording process took so long and was so full of problems that we ended up throwing it all away and disbanding

Promoting your music is an entire science on its own. There are a few tricks for extending your reach such as crossposting the same posts on every social media out there, using @ and # and the like to create links to other pages where you might appear, and posting in a lot of groups that are about your kind of music and might contain new fans, but it takes a lot of time and effort only to learn and get accustomed to these tricks, not to mention the fact that you need to update continuously to keep people's interest.

Thanks for your answer!!!

The recording itself was satisfying, of course difficult and of course it could have been done better, but I don't complain too much. We're not professionals and we don't have the money to record in different studios.
I am just disappointed that many people don't feel the songs, they really don't see the effort and the feelings behind them. I think that until 2000s was different... Internet fucked up the system IMO. A pity, we just have to accep it I guees.

Written by Zenzero on 10.05.2023 at 11:40

The point is: lots of effort, lots of money (I paid everything), lots of stress... is it like this for everyone?? Is it always like this?

Yeah, it's like that or even worse for me too I was also struggling with composing since I never had a chance to have academic education in music, so I had to learn everything myself, and also my ideas usually don't appeal to others, so it's extremely hard to find anyone interested to team up with. Over the past few years I managed to release one song only using guest paid guitarists (everything else is programmed, but the guitars should be recorded in a studio). Now I'm struggling with promotion, and I don't even get several streamings per day, mostly zero But I guess the key is to persevere if you really need this, you'll come out stronger and wiser

These days people are moving away from studios and are attempting to record, and edit new albums from their homes.

I am one of these people, over the pandemic I did all production and editing for my band (Bayrolles) from my home studio, it was a pretty painstaking process, I only have 2 other experiences in production both of them I consider to be casual screw ups but they taught me two things. 1. Clicks and scratch tracks are absolutely mandatory, and 2. producing good recordings is 50% room treatment.

The only reason this was possible for me was years of thrifty spending in pawn shops, some computer knowledge, endless research, and home made sound treatment using leftover construction materials.

I recorded the entirety of my bands ep in my garage and edited it using reaper, I then paid roughly 600 dollars to send off the stems to a locally known sound engineer which specializes in death metal (not my bands specific genre) and he did all the reamping, mixing, and mastering for me as delving into the knowledge for this part of the process was something I was not keen on spending another year researching the nuances of.

All this for roughly 12 monthly listens on spotify. You really have to love what you do to live with this amount of adversity.