As an audio professional you need to buy both hardware and software to equip your studio. But how do you choose the right things to buy. Here’s three tests you should apply before spending your money.

Will It Save You Time?

We work with ever decreasing budgets and tighter deadlines, so it’s essential to find efficient ways to get the job done. We need to deliver our projects without compromising quality, so anything that helps us do that is welcome in our book.

Bottom line, if you are a professional then time is money. With that said, there’s a problem when trying to find new things for the studio - we often don’t even have the time to try new things, or in fact learn them. One of the biggest reasons most professionals don’t change DAW is because they simply don’t have the time to learn a new one - it’s a case of better the devil you know. This puts professionals in a tough spot, with the potential of there being hardware and software to save you time, but not having the time to find out if that’s the case! Catch 22!

So what’s the best thing to do? Keep a list of things you want to try that you think will save you time. When you have downtime, yes we can hear some of you spitting your coffee, use that to try out said product. Of course it’s easier with software than it is with hardware. However, using our downtime wisely instead of losing an hour to cat videos on YouTube or an argument on social media, may well reward you in the long run… to have more time for cat videos… James Clear puts it like this;

"One of the simplest ways to win is to always connect the small things you do to the larger thing you hope to accomplish.

Five minutes can be spent working on something trivial or working on something life-changing. A brief session of work oriented toward a great cause is always time well spent.

Most daily actions evaporate. Some accumulate."

It’s amazing what can save you time, and it’s not always directly an audio product. It may be something like Soundflow, or the Andrew Scheps Bounce Factory. It may be something like Calendly, the scheduling app, or Sanebox, the AI based software to save you drowning in emails.

Whatever it is, stuff that saves you time is often worth the price of admission and sometimes its weight in gold.

Will It Bring More Clients?

We’ve talked about saving time, the flip of this is stuff that makes you money.

How can gear make you money? Well, it might be that there’s not a Atmos equipped studio in town, or that a client is willing to offer you a lot of work if you have a room where they can record drums. Sometimes we invest to attract new work, Atmos being a case in point for some of our community.

However, it’s worth asking a couple of pertinent questions before making major investments to attract new clients, can I do this without spending a lot of money, losing all the cash in the bank, or having to borrow money?

The simple answer is yes. If the client offering you the work only needs these facilities for a small amount of time, a better option may be to rent the space, or rent the gear. Alternatively, it may also be better to sub the work out. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, new gear not only requires investment, it also requires the time to learn how to use it, competently. You are going to need to have to set time aside for that, there’s no way around it, and that needs factoring in to any spending decision. You need to cost in the studio downtime and the cost of training. Secondly, there may be a facility that’s way better than anything you can afford to build, but you can use at a fraction of the cost, mark it up in billing and get a much better solution.

It’s worth considering all the aspects of a potential investment before parting with the money. There may be a smarter way to acheive the same result at a fraction of the cost.

Will It Make Me Sound Better?

Sound is what we do, so it would be remiss to talk about this subject without talking about the most important thing, will it make me sound better?

This kind of question can speak to a number of investment decisions, with everything from the room acoustics, the microphones, right through to the speakers.

There’s a lot of gear we use in the recording chain that does nothing to make us sound better. For example, the DAW you use is simply down to features and how well you know how to use it. Some swear blind that DAWs sound different, it’s a myth in 2022. Sure, there’s probably some YouTube video showing you a ton of mixes from different DAWs and how they have minor variances, this can be for a number of reasons, however it’s unlikely to sound that different to your clients. The same can be said for most plugins, if I never have to see an 1176 variant again, I’ll be happy. By the time it’s buried in the mix I’d defy anyone to spot the difference in a blind test.

The things that can make the most difference are the transducers; the microphones and the monitor speakers. This is where I suggest considering spending money. In my article My Ultimate Test Of Studio Monitor Speakers, I wrote how speakers had done exactly what I hoped. They have reduced the need to remixes, given me happy customers and saved me time.

What If You’re Not A Professional?

The site is aimed at professionals making money from music or post production, but there are plenty of readers who have not yet made this transition. For those reading this, a simple piece of advice, invest in gear that will last. In other words, don’t buy something that will need replacing in six months or a year. Stretch the budget, whilst trying to avoid long term debt, to buy the gear that will grow with you needs and hopefully be the gear you take into a career.

There is of course another way to look at it, sometimes we buy stuff that brings us joy. This is OK, for me it’s trainers (or sneakers for our US readers.) Perhaps I’m an old fart, but in many cases the joy of wanting something I don’t own is far better than actually having it. Sometimes all we are left with is the hangover of debt.

In Closing

Which leads me to my last point. If you are reading this in 2022, then like most of us you’re living in the middle of a cost of living crisis. It’s for this reason that we spend money wisely and invest in gear that really helps to keep us making money.