rob aylestone
Moderator
I got asked to produce a backing track for a singer in a local band - a Carpenters song. I smiled. In the year before I'd done a whole Carpenters set for a tribute band and was very, very familiar with the music. The singer wanted the 'Carpenters Sound'. I smiled again. I'd worked with this singer before and knew that payment would probably be pitifully tiny for the work involved and once before she figured a box of chocolates fair compensation for a days work. I was just finishing one well paying job, so said fine - we can use the version I have recorded, and just replace the singers harmony tracks with your voice. All you need to do is duplicate each one. We can listen to each one, then you sing it and we replace each one, one by one. I knew, and she didn't, that there would be hundreds to do - oooooh, girls in town, oooooooo with these lyrics sung in perhaps 6 different lines, but each one double tracked. To be honest, I wondered how well it would actually work. The tribute band singer had a carpenters style voice and it worked rather well. The show singer's voice was not remotely carpenters. It took two days to do "close to you" to a usable standard, and from the outset I knew the tiny amount of money she had available - certainly not worth two days work, but I did it. Commercially that two days must have been worth what, best part of five hundred maybe? She had a budget of a quarter of that, and I knew in her head this would be 7 or 8 songs. Bands are even worse - they rarely have ANY money, want the earth and complain non-stop. My real work is on projects, but in my downtime, these other things cheer me up. I can spend days on rare and totally awful 19th century 'niche' composers with music that makes your hair go grey, so a bit of pop music can be a kind of happy interlude, even if it sucks at income generation.
The worst clients are those that demand the earth, pay peanuts and expect miracles!
The worst clients are those that demand the earth, pay peanuts and expect miracles!