6 Ways To Streamline Your Revisions Process (So You Don’t Piss Off Your Clients Or Ruin Your Life)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one Oh seven

you're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode. So

to the six figure home studio podcast, I am your host Brian David Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing gray sweatshirt for I cohost Chris Graham. He doesn't have his purple shirt on a day. Y'all. I'm so mad. How you doing today, man? That's underneath the hoodie. Let me know. Okay. It's like, it's like Superman. You're like partying your sweatshirt, pulling it down, exposing your Superman, my underneath straight chest hair. That's not curly on any level whatsoever. Yeah, I've, I've seen you wear the shirt off evolution, Brian. It's an I've adapted to our modern society by growing straight chest hair. Yeah. Uh, I don't care what you're saying right now. I need to, I need to insert my story into this conversation right now. First of all, wait, wait, no, no. Let, let me, let me do this. Okay. Hey Brian, how are you today? See. I wasn't even gonna wait for that.

You, you were fast enough. Here's the deal. I am not a gear sled. We've talked about this in the podcast. We haven't even had a gear slot alert, which will, I'll probably get in this conversation we're having right now, but my coffee roaster died last week. It was my birthday last Saturday. I'm now 33 years young and I wanted to treat myself for my birthday since I had a dead coffee roaster and so I did some math. I said, how much coffee roaster do I want to buy? And being the absolute nerd that I am, I came up with some statistics for you guys just so you could have an idea of how my brain works and, and before we hop into those I think we should catch any of our new listeners up. When Brian and I first launched this podcast, an enormous piece of our friendship revolved around coffee.

Yes. And coffee roasting. I had started roasting coffee. I came down to hang out with Brian to meet him face to face with the first time and I made you your first, the best cup of coffee I'd ever had in my life up to that point. I've made way better sense, but up to that point, you take that back, you take that back. No, I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have. But yeah, it was like I roasted coffee, brought it down, made you a cup of arrow, pressed coffee and then I remember watching you take a sip of it and watching your life change, Brian. It's true. Okay, so I ordered a fresh roast sr 500 that's the gear sled alert you heard right there. That's a piece of coffee gear. That's the one you use. That's the one you recommended it. I ordered it March 30th, 2018 it died November 11th I'm sorry, November 14th, 2019 the lifespan was 594 days.

The price was $179 I roasted 71 pounds of coffee, which I found out is like over 300 batches of coffee on that thing. That's in 594 days. Estimated amount per pound roasted is I saved $11 per pound roasted compared to what I would pay for high quality coffee at the coffee shop next to my house. So total estimated savings, $782 minus the cost of this. $179 coffee roaster, net profit, $602 how much did I spend on my coffee roaster, Chris? $601 $600 to the penny. And so now I'm the, I'm the happy owner of the genie cafe. C, B R one Oh one it can roast two to three times the amount of coffee per batch. It is a drum roaster and seven air roaster. It spins and roast the coffee evenly. Stop it. You're hurting me. Yeah, I know. You can set it up to 485 degrees.

You can set the time with a D. it's just in every single way possible. It's better than the fresh roast and I am a proud owner now. I did my first, just so you know, I drove to my first batch yesterday when it came in amazing cup of coffee this morning. I can't even tell you. I'm so jealous. So happy. My fresh roast, the buttons are starting to not work every time so that I might be going to new roaster soon. I might go for the fresh roast 800 but why are we talking about this on a business podcast? Well one, we love it and we get to talk about stuff we love sometimes. And too, we've talked about this on earlier episodes of the podcast when you're talking to somebody that you want to be friends with or you want to work with, it's not hard to make someone the best cup of coffee they've ever had because newsflash, coffee in America sucks.

It's so, it's very bad, very bad. Store-bought almost without doubt is trash. And so you give someone the best cup of coffee they've ever had and they're your best friend for life and they're going to invite you to coast their podcasts, not just that. That's correct. You're now my cohost on the podcast cause you swooned me over with a great cup of coffee. But not only that, I can now make my friends and potential customers or potential partners in business stuff in the future. I can make them a nice almost about a half pound cup of coffee or a bag of coffee to take away. So I'm going to, I'm going to get little coffee bags and I'm going to get little like stick on brands and I'm going to just going to make my own coffee and give it away. It's going to be like Billy Decker. He was a guest back on episode 13 he is a huge country mixing guy here in Nashville.

Friend of mine got like 20 number ones. Yeah, he makes, yeah he's mixed over 20 number ones or something. Some ridiculous number number ones. He makes cutting boards for like his clients and label people and other people in his social circle. So that's kind of his like gift he gives out. I'm going to be giving out half pound bags of coffee to my friends and peers and all that. I do the same thing, but with back massages like if people, you know, potential customers. I'm just kidding. I don't, that would never do that ever. I want your back. Massage it Nam dude. So let's move on. That's enough about coffee. We've got to move on. How have you been my friend? I have been good. A couple of fun stories. I've had two fun experiences. Many of you know that Apple recently released

the air pod pros. Is that a your slit alert for that? I think it would be consumer pro in it. It's going a specific piece. It's a specific piece of gear. It's going to get the gear, so okay, I'll accept it, but here's the thing. They're actually good. They're not bad headphones. They sound good ish. I want to love them. I can't ever get a headphone that is going to have a four hour battery life though. Fuck that. I need at least two hours a day on battery life. I believe that no one should have just one pair of headphones. There's a specific pair of headphones for every scenario. Whether that's mixing, that's mastering, whether that's working out, everything. I do everything in my Apple earbuds, these little cheap headphones that I use for everything. Even mixing work. I still lie. I'm just joking. I use my actual monitors for that.

Here's the beauty of the air pod pros one the case is so satisfying. Oh that's not a pain in the ass to get them out. Anyways. Chris, what is your story here gets you guys, you get to your point here, little TMI for you. They have noise, active noise cancellation and they're splashproof which means you boys been taking showers with headphones in and it's been the best ever. It's been so great. It's two of my favorite things, taking showers and listening to music on headphones and it's just been like where I do my thinking in the shower with my headphones on. Like do you have that notepad that I have for writing notes in the shower and then catch people up on this note pad? It is, yeah. First of all, almost everybody has like the best shower thoughts ever. Like you, you, you like have all these like profound ideas and in the second you step out of the shower you forget about it all.

It's like this crazy phenomenon. So Chris, I introduced you to these things called shower love notes. What are they in there? Is that what you're using or you all, Oh that's the one I have is called in. It's incredible. Gives you, sent me the link. Yeah, it's a stick on waterproof pad of paper that you put in your shower. I take notes in the shower all the time and man, I had a particularly inspiring shower and so I was like taking notes and then ripping the page off and then slapping it on the shower and it would stick. And it's been amazing. Like that's been one of the better purchases I've made in the last year is that like $7 pad of paper. I have planned out many an email automation with those things in the shower and it's great. It's fabulous. My water bill went up about 20 bucks a month.

Those links in the show notes to that particular thing. Now this is a long banter. Are we ready to move into the actual no, no. We have one more. I'll just skip. Just skip ahead like four more minutes. If you're not the kind of person that's into banter here, go ahead. But you're going to like this. It's a recommendation. Well, it's a dream. I want to get us sponsored like a one or two episode sponsorship from you. You're going to hate this so much. There are these companies that make robot and massage chairs. I'm looking it up right now. I like it. Like gives you a foot massage while it gives you a back massage while it gives you a leg massage while it like heats up your lower back and like nuzzles you like a spring full. Oh my God. These are 10 these are like nine grand. Yeah,

they're very expensive. So here's why I want to get us a sponsorship for these. I can definitely not justify spending money on a massage chair, but if you run a recording studio that has a lot of artists coming in and out, every single artist would love to sit in your robot and massage chair and that's why I'm going to do some research. I'm going to figure out who makes the best massage chairs. I'm going to try to get them to sponsor us so that I can get a massage chair and that you can get a massage chair. This is also supported by my wife, Alison Graham. She is way into this idea. Okay, so I'm all into getting a sponsor like that. I will say this though, there is a, an argument for a business expense there and totally being client happiness, which is kind of what the topic of this episode is.

Good segue there. So like if you're in a situation where like the singer's driving you nuts and you need to do some copy and you can be like, Hey, tell you what, they'll get a 20 minute massage in my robot chair. I'm going to comp these vocals and you can get out of my hair. It's going to be great for you and great for me and uh, you'll have a blast. And if you sit in one of these things, it's incredible. Like I've had plenty of professional massage therapy sessions with the trying to work on like my back and shoulder issues and this is in the ballpark of how awesome a professional good massage is. Fabulous. Well maybe something for black Friday will pop up with that. Speaking of which, that's a good segue here. There we go. Let's talk about black Friday deals cause it is black Friday week.

You're probably already, I got emails as late as early as last week for black Friday. Totally. If you're getting black Friday deals right now, it is an insane time for any audio engineer because our inboxes are getting bombarded with so many crazy deals. Before we get into the topic today, we wanted to give a little, a little words of advice for black Friday shoppers here. So many impulse, stupid purchases are made by audio professionals every single year to buy. It's usually plugins and most of the time, and Chris, you can attest to this, most of the time, those insanely good deals you got from black Friday, never get used. Yeah, they're rarely utilized to their fullest extent. Chris, what is your tip for somebody who is looking at a black Friday purchase right now and they're on the fence of whether they should get something? Well, let me address that in a couple of different ways.

One, I used to fall in the trap of like, well it's December or I need the tax deduction. Or November, it's like, Oh it's towards the end of the year. I need the touch [inaudible] save money by buying this. Don't do that. That is so dangerous. Do not spend money for the tax deduction. Spend money because you think it will help you make money. Yup. Okay. So here's what I would do. You get the email, you know it's from, I don't, I'm not gonna say any names cause I don't say anything. Don't, don't give them the benefit. I'm not. So you get the email and you're like, Oh yeah, I probably need this. Ask yourself why you need it three

times.

Okay, so Chris, I got a new, uh, there's a deal for a better sounding 1176 compressor. Oh my gosh. Still the century. Why do you need that brand 80% off? Now I'm asking you, why do you need that, Chris? I think if you ask why three times, what you're going to get back to is imposter syndrome. So an example would be like, I need this plugin because it will make my snare sound better. Why? Well, I knew the snare to sound better because, so I'll get more respect in the forums, right? No, it'll be, you'll tell yourself it's because I need more clients. No, it's actually because you want to feel better about the fact that your snare doesn't sound the same as, you know, engineer X, Y, and Z. And so you think this snare plug in is going to fix that when all reality, you're not even going to use it because it's not going to really affect things at the end of the day. And so it's a waste of money.

You wanna feel like a real engineer. So do all of us. Yup. That's imposter syndrome.

So I really encourage you with all the black Friday deals you look at right now, consider whether they are actually going to help you reach your goals. At the end of the day, whatever those goals are, and I think everyone is going to be different and we just ask you to be critical about what you see because a lot of times you're going to make an impulse purchase that is not smart at all. Worst segue ever to a pitch here and that is the black Friday deal for file pass.com we've talked about file pass. This is an app that Trevor and I have. It is file sharing and collaboration built for recording studios and I encourage you to use that same method, be critical. Ask why three times before you take advantage of this deal. But here's the deal we have for file pass.com if you join the week of black Friday, we will give you six months free. That is absolutely insane. That's six months free. If you sign up, go to [inaudible] dot com slash black Friday for six months free this black Friday week only. But ask yourself why three times first.

Yeah, so I gotta be honest here, Brian, I told you I was going to be honest here. I think six and this isn't like a shtick guys. I genuinely have slight issues with Brian's business choice here. I think six months is too much. I think it's way too much. I think three months is too much, but that's a decision you've made and I'm not gonna try to change your mind. And the impact of that is guys to go get it.

It's crazy. We want it to be an absolute no brainer. Like yeah, we are essentially leaving out of early access into full launch with the best potential, like the best possible offer we can do. So six months free file pass.com/black Friday. Let's move on to the episode topic today. And that is Chris, we are talking about what do you hang on. Can you leave that in please? You know, you know the banter of the intro is way too damn long. Whenever you forget the topic. The episode. Yeah. It's like basically like when you're in a movie and they have like 30 minutes of previews and by the time you're done with the previous you're like, what the fuck am I even here to see? Oh I'm here to see, Oh I forgot about this movie. You know Giardia galaxy. Yeah. I'm not sure exactly what title of this episode is going to be cause I never know til like last second but the topic today is streamlining your revisions process so that you finished the project with the happiest customer possible because if you've been on my mailing list, if you're on mailing list right now, which you should be, if you're a podcast listener, you should be one of the thirty thousand thirty five thousand people on my mailing list right now.

You have gotten a bunch of emails from me over the last week about client happiness and lifetime value and the overarching theme for the last week or so has been lifetime value. This is the core reason why customer happiness is so important. You're happy your customers are, the more they're going to come back to you, thus increasing their lifetime value to you. And also the more they're going to refer other people to you. Thus, creating new customers for you and revisions specifically are such a huge part of this because it's the last interaction you have with your clients. It's the last thing. And if you execute on this poorly, they're going to leave with a terrible taste in their mouth, no matter, no matter how good the rest of the project went, they're finishing with a bad taste in their mouth. So this episode is going to walk through several ways to streamline the revisions process so you don't ruin your client relationships. So the whole revisions process doesn't ruin your life.

Totally. And I think there's an 80 20 in play here and psychologists, economists like science, people have long known and long proved that your last interaction with somebody has a disproportionate impact on that relationship, much more so than the middle of the interaction with that person. So a good example here is let's say you worked with a client for a week solid, you were a 10 out of 10 in their mind they're like, Oh, that's person's awesome, and then you get to revisions and then they're like, Hmm, five out of 10 maybe 5.5 out of 10 this person's not have not loved my revision interaction. They're not going to rate you in 9.9 at a 10 and that ran the relationship. They're going to rate you like a seven just because that last interaction didn't go well and it's the easiest for them to remember when they think back to working with you. They're going to think back and the last thing chronologically to happen is going to have an outsized impact on their opinion of you.

I'll give you a good example. I went to a wedding recently and that wedding planner did such a poor job with everything to do with the wedding. All the planning up ahead of time. The communication with the bride and groom and the parents involved. All of it was an absolute train wreck, but the wedding day went off perfectly and the bride and groom were so happy and because of that they finished the entire relationship off strong so that there's not going to be a repeat customer. You don't really have, hopefully you don't have repeat customers in the wedding business but you will definitely, she and the groom will definitely be referring other people to that wedding planner. And so I think finishing off the project strong is a really important part of getting someone to come back to you and to get people to refer other people to you.

So we've got a list of six ways to streamline revisions. So this part of the process doesn't ruin your relationships with your clients by pissing them off. And also so this entire revisions process doesn't drain you. I don't know about you Chris, but revision hell we've talked about in the podcast revision hell is a deep, dark place to be. It is. And some of the things we're laying out today are going to help you avoid revision. Hell altogether. Yeah. Revision hell is deep and dark because it's really easy to start asking toxic questions about who you are as a person and about what your value is to society and to the client and it's really, really, really easy to get this in this toxic zone where you're like, am I any good at this? Oh, people don't like me. Oh gosh. Oh. Like every revision requests that they have is actually an assault on my respectability as a human being.

Like it's really easy to get in this awful, awful, awful place and if you are going to go to business or if you're going to quit, if you're going to throw in the towel in an ungracious ungraceful way, it's going to probably be related to revision. Hell yep. It's dangerous. Yup. I agree. So let's move into this. The first thing you should consider when it comes to streamlining the revisions process is a signing appointment or 0.1. Honestly, this is the thing that ties all of this together. No matter what your revisions process is, if you assign one person to the project to be in charge of it, it makes this process infinitely easier. And so here's what I mean. I work with a lot of bands and bands have multiple members. If you're working with singer songwriters, it's a little bit different, probably a little less moving parts here.

But I work with bands with multiple members and if you don't do this, here's what happens. I sent an omics to an artist. There's five people in the band. What I get is messages or emails or texts or whatever from every single member with conflicting revisions. And so when I make those conflicting revisions and I send it back to the band now all the revisions that the drummer wanted, the vocalist hates all their visions of the vocalist wanted, the guitarist, hates all the revisions that the guitar is Tate, the drummer hates and everyone hates the basis revisions cause all bassists are trash. And so if you assign a point man or point woman to be in charge of the revisions before they ever reach you before they ever hit your inbox, if it goes through one person, it forces them to argue and Duke it out amongst each other and decide what is truly important before it ever reaches you.

And that saves you so much headache. It saves people from coming behind someone's back and trying to get you to do revisions. Because if you say, okay, vocalist is the one in charge this, they're in charge of the revisions. All revisions go through your vocalist and if any of you try to come individually to me, I'm going to say to go through your vocalists, they're the one in charge of gathering all the revisions. And so you sit down with your vocalist, you listen to the songs, you talk about what you want done, and then you send me the of revisions that you want done. Anyone that messages me outside of that, I'm going to say, Nope, send it through your vocalist. You can't go behind your vocals back, send it to that person. And usually if I know the band, I know which person is should the one that should be in charge of it.

But typically this isn't always the case, but typically whoever the person is that's arranging the project is the person that's going to be the point man or point woman. The person that's actually contacting you, setting up the dates, the made the payment. Yup. Made the payment. That's the person that's kind of the business person in the band. And sometimes also, by the way, there's other people outside of the band that's involved with the project. Maybe it's A&R, maybe it's management. And in these situations you want to make sure that there is a central communicator involved that is in charge of the entire revision filtering process or else you're, like I said, you're going to get conflicting revisions that's going to make this infinitely harder for you. So this is the first on our list and this is arguably the most important because if you don't do this, it's gonna make everything else on this list today. Infinitely harder.

Totally, man. Yeah. Amen to all this. It is so challenging when you've got multiple people coming to you with revisions. And I think the important thing here is I know that many of you that work with one client at a time now based on the chapter of life that you're in the chapter of your business life that you're in, it's easy when you're working with one band to be loosey goosey with this. But what happens, I think to most audio engineers, most producers, most mix engineers is then their business starts to grow and because they're still doing the thing that was easy with one customer, it's damn near impossible when you have five at the same time, it gets really ugly really fast. So this is one of those things you want to jump out in front of before you have like a little mini mental breakdown where like you're trying to play mediator instead of mix engineer. Love that.

All right, so let's move on to number two. Centralizing communications. This should come as no surprise to you if you've listen to this podcast for any amount of time, but this gets a lot easier if you've done the first step, a signing appointment because now you only have one person to communicate and that one person communicate. You just instruct them. Everything comes through email. Don't message me through Facebook. Don't message me through Instagram. Don't send me a text message. Usually don't call me, although we'll get to exceptions for that later on. Keep everything in one centralized place and for most of you that's going to be email. So centralizing communication. This keeps things from subbing through the cracks. Although email's not perfect. It definitely is better than getting things through multiple channels and if you are working with every member of the band at the same time collecting revisions, this gets so much more difficult because of what I talked about. You're going to have one person messenger you through Facebook, one person through Instagram messenger, one person, and they're going to show up in your message requests inbox. By the way, they're not going to show up in your actual normal inbox. You're going to get the text message, the emails, you're going to get all these different areas, these different forms of communication from different channels and so centralizing communication to one central area makes this whole revisions process so much easier. Chris, you have anything to add to that?

100 I know

some of you are listening to this and are like, I don't know. That seems kind of aggressive with the client. I it's not that much of an inconvenience right now. If you grow, you have a moment. I guarantee it. If you grow the number of people you're working with, I guarantee you will look back on this moment right now and be like, Oh yeah, they were right about that. This is an advice buffet that's like a, you know, a tenant of our podcast here, but centralizing communication. I really don't think that there are many scenarios when it's not a good idea, especially in the long run. All right, tip number three for streamlining your revisits process is coached them on how to listen. Actually, she's coached them in general because the average artists, they don't understand how to listen. They don't understand how to gather things. A lot of bands, especially if they're new, they don't understand how this process works and if you can coach them through it, it makes this entire process so much easier because they know what to expect, they know how to listen and they know what to do when it comes to actually fostering a good listening environment and gathering the revisions in a way that makes sense for you. So I think there's some, some sub points in this. I got to tell a story here. Yeah, tell a story or Chris.

So there is a pretty good friend of mine who hired me to master a record for him years and years and years ago. And he had, it was a weird project because he had a friend in the band and the friend that was in the band with him was a pretty toxic guy. He ended up completely blowing up his life and just like destroying every friendship he had is safe to say he doesn't listen to this podcast. Yeah, there's no way. Yeah, he doesn't listen to any podcast, but it was an intense thing because I was mastering their record and there was a really kind of experimental style of music, which is my favorite style to work on if I can't identify the genre. That's typically when I'm having the most fun personally as a mastering engineer and I'm working with them and there's a lot of distortion all over the record.

It was like, you know, kind of avant garde, uh, electronic music, a lot of distortion and I send back the masters and I got a request back from then it was like, Oh, there's some, there's too much distortion. The masters, I'm like, I didn't, it's pretty gentle. I'm not like slamming anything in a way that's going to cause weird distortion issues. I'm like, okay, well back off in the compression a little bit, send it back. And they're like, no, you know, it's still got a lot of distortion and I hadn't coached them on, I had never run into this issue before. I've never want to do it since. But finally like, well, let me back up. The guy wrote me an email that was intense. He crossed a lot of lines and made it personal in this revision process. And I called him up and finally asked the right question, which was did you listen to the actual files you sent me to master and is the distortion you're hearing present in them and what do you think he said?

No, I have not listened to the actual mixes by themselves. I listened to them streaming from the mics engineer's house to my studio, but I hadn't bothered to listen to the actual mixes. Oh. Lo and behold, the distortion was in the mixes and not in the masters, but because it's often guard, it was like, well, sounded intentional to me. I liked it. And so is this kind of weird thing of I hadn't coached him on what I thought was just totally obviously like listen to the mixes before sending them to mastering. And it was this kind of weird thing of, it was a coaching moment, but I had made this assumption incorrectly and that to me is like there's a lot of stuff to be taken home about how you can improve the revision process of just not assuming that your clients are professional audio engineers and are going to do stuff. That's common sense to us. That's such a good point. I think.

Yeah, too many of us give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to actually listening to the songs properly and, and I use this example all the time when you send them the files to the client, what are they doing with them? Yes, I've seen, I've seen some crazy shit. I've seen people, they download the files from whatever file sharing platform you're using. Hopefully it's file pass. If it's file pass, you should just disable downloads all together. So they stream the wave file. But anyways, they download the file and then they do some crazy shit with it. They may upload it to SoundCloud, which is awful. Streaming quality, just so they can listen to it on their app. On their phone or they might upload it to their dog in the wrong bit. Rayton sample rate and bit depth and they just trashes the file. They may, they do just seeing some crazy shit out there. And yeah, if you thought of a potential scenario where someone would mess this up, it has happened before. So Chris, you have actually an interesting policy. You coach your people to listen on five set to speakers at high and low volumes before they give you revisions. Is that correct?

Yeah. And the big reason for that is, you know, like, like we said that like when I started my career I was assuming that everybody was listening to them in a way that made some sense. But the more clients I work with, the more I notice like, Oh wow, it's not totally uncommon to get someone to email me back and like the master sound real weird and garbly and I'll like ask a bunch of questions and like, Oh, you ripped these to 64 kilobit per second MP3s and then burned a CD of those MP3s. Yeah, yeah. Like they sound bad. Like that's that's your problem, but you know, I would have these situations where somebody would do something like that and would give me weird feedback. I'm kind of forgetting your question here, but I'm going to keep rambling on.

Talking about listening on five sets of speakers on high and low volume,

that tends to minimize, and this is primarily when I'm working directly with an artist, especially when it's self-produced much different American that makes engineer, it's fabulous to be able to just trust that they're sending good feedback, but even still, occasionally you'll talk to a mix engineer and they will send revisions, but they've only listened on Bluetooth.

Yeah, I honestly don't even know if I have five sets of speakers and I'm an audio person, like I have my soundbar in my living room. I have my studio monitors, I have some Apple EarPods and I have my car and maybe some otherS shitty cheap headphones. Actually I have some studio headphones somewhere. Let me clarify here. I may have five, but I'd say at least at least coach them on like, Hey, listen on at least like two different listening environments. It's different for me as a mastering engineer than it would be. I think for a mix engineer for mixed engineer you are in a lot of ways you're trying to check for portability. Does this mix sound good everywhere for a mastering engineer, if someone has a revision, it might just be that and I find this all the time. Someone gets back to their master and they're like, okay, I'm almost done.

And they got in their car and they turn the volume knob all the way up so fast and so hard that the bar, the volume knob pops off the stereo and then they press play and then they're like, man, there's distortion in here. Like, yeah. Have you ever listened to anything that loud in your life? No. I mean every band I've ever listened to in the car, like with them, like back when I used to record bands in the studio, it was unbearably loud and I'm like, how do you even function at this volume? I can't even, I can't even sit in the car right now each. I mean, honestly, basic coaching, like this is a huge part of like making sure they understand how to listen properly so that you're not getting stupid revisions. That's really the gist of it. Yeah. And so, you know, for some people, you know some car systems automatically compress some stereo systems.

Do that some clip in weird ways. Others don't. Yeah, I've heard my friend Trevor's car at a higher low, not even that high of a volume, but there's, I hear audible clipping in high frequencies and it's not actually on the track cause like I mastered that. I know what that sounds like. There's no clipping there. But in his car you can audibly hear clipping and even like moderately loud volumes. So those are just certain things. That's why multiple speaker systems is important so that you don't start asking for things to be fixed that aren't actually on there. So usually that's a distortion issue as usually what I'm trying to prevent from happening. Yeah. So that they're sure if they hear distortion that it's not coming from the master, it's coming from like a blown speaker or something like that. And just to recap here so far we've got number one, assign a point man, a number to centralize all your communications.

Number three, coach them on how to listen properly and gather revisions properly. And now we're on number four and that is to set a reasonable revision limit. Now I've heard things all across the board from Iowa do one set of revisions up to, I do as many revisions as the band once. So what, what's the best method here? Well, I'm on the fence here. I think there is pros and cons of both sides, but I do three sets of revisions because in my experience, one is not enough to really isn't enough. Three is the sweet spot. It's just right. It's the Goldilocks zone of revisions for it gets a bit dicey. And for past four they, there's nothing ever valuable done pastor vision for, it's all minuscule stuff. They start asking for revisions that goes completely against what was it originally asked for where they're just literally undoing the work they did on revisions one, two and three and four totally.

And so I don't like to do more than three. However, in the spirit of maximizing customer lifetime value or client lifetime value, which has been my theme this entire week and a half of sending you emails just about every day, I think there is a case to be made, especially with high value clients in VP clients, clients you love or clients you want to come back to you for the rest of your life, clients that you have a great relationship with and clients that you think are honestly giving you decent feedback. Past revisions. Number three, I think there's an exception to be made to give more revisions without charging and to give potentially unlimited revisions without charging because at the end of the day when you start to throw money, make them charge little nickel and dime for extra visions. Past set three, which is what I typically do, it puts a bad taste in the mouth.

It doesn't really matter how great it turns out. It doesn't really matter if you did great on the mix as it really matter if the entire process up to this point was amazing. The fact that you asked them to pay you an extra 50 bucks or extra a hundred bucks after they'd pay you potentially thousands of dollars. It's not worth the compensation you're getting for your time. If it means they're not coming back to you for the next record. And so I think there is a reasonable limit to be set. And I think there is the exceptions to be made when it comes to the right client. Not for everybody, but for the right clients. I think exceptions should be made. And Chris, you had a story about something taking like 90 something revisions. What does this story,

yeah, so legend has it that Michael Jackson sat down with any, gets Bruce Sweden to work on the thriller record and they were mixing Billy Jean and Michael had Bruce dude 98 different versions of the mix. So the story goes, and I'm probably getting this wrong, so nobody crucify me here, but Quincy Jones, the producer walks in and asks what's going on and they explain how we're, you know, we're starting to mixed 99 and Quincy Jones says, pull up mixed number two, they press play this on plays. And Quincy says that's the one and they release it. And so yeah, I think that there's a component here of like a responsibility with the limit where our heart for the artists that we work with is that they put amazing music out into the world. And part of helping them do that some times is helping there be boundaries of what's acceptable and what's not.

There are certain types of musicians that if you give them unlimited mixed revisions over an unlimited period of time, that they will continue to request mixer visions until Jesus comes again in all his glory and it's not going to go well. So there are times when it is better for not just you, but better for the artist, for you to be clear and to even call out, Hey, and you gotta be careful here, but to start to peel the layers of the onion and be like, dude, I think that they're terrified of releasing. And I think that they're taking that fear out on me by continuing to ask for revisions because all they care about what people think of them and this is stopping them on their artistic journey and it's my job to help them. So I love what you said, Brian. There's no one size fits all here.

Nobody should listen to this and are all Brian and crushed out this one. This must be the industry standard. No, you have to make decisions because every piece of art is unique. If it's not, it wasn't art in the first place. So you had to figure out how to navigate this. But I would say two things. You can limit the number of revisions or you can limit the time period that revisions can be requested. I limit time period. I'm unlimited revisions for 30 days. After I sent you the first batch of masters, I have had a very small number of people go past that 30 day period and I charged like a minuscule, I think I have let's say 10 bucks or something ridiculous like that. It's nothing but it's just to create a little bit of friction to hopefully help them be more comfortable with releasing it because the last thing I would want, and you see this all the time on all kinds of art projects, that the art was good and then they over revised it and then it became bad

the way it goes along with the story of getting the mixed 99 and then saying, Oh no, we're going to go with next too. Exactly. I wonder if you worked with Michael Jackson again like, because I feel like if you're willing to go 99 mixes deep with somebody and you go back to mix two, you've got to have some respect for that person that was along for the ride for that long. Yeah, and then put up with 98 thrown away trash mixes.

Well and frankly if you're working on thriller, yes sir. Mr. Jackson.

Yeah, absolutely. That's what I'm saying. Like at that level you're working with the biggest artists in the world at the time or one of the biggest of all time and so you do whatever they say. One of the thing with the revisions conversation is you might be surprised by just talking to the person and reasoning with them how much you can get across to them about their bad revisions. For example, like before I moved to the three limit, the three revision limit with my clients, I had the person that actually pushed me into that world. It was such a horrible process with them that eventually by like mix six or seven or something like that, I had to talk to them like I had to get on Skype cause they were from Australia. I had to talk to them and like actually communicate like, Hey, at this point like here's the revisions you gave me on the last mix.

Here is four mixes ago where you gave me the exact revisions that put it in the place where you needed to change to. For example, in version two you asked me to turn the vocals up by three DB or whatever on this song. Now you're asking me to turn the vocals down on this exact same song but five mixes later. And so you're now just undoing the damage you did before. And so we need to talk about how we can keep this from happening so that we don't just continually keep changing things back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And by having these conversations with them, it really made things so much better for the last revision that I did because they understood how much damage were doing to their own music just by having the conversation. So I think there is definitely something to be said about having a conversation at some point.

Absolutely. Well, I think that that transitions as well to our next point.

I realized like halfway through that story that this is actually the fifth point on our list today and that is handling emotional revisions. So this story actually lines up with this point. So now we're on number five emotional revisions. Chris, talk about this.

Okay, so I would say again, we are an advice buffet. Our hope is that you listen to our podcast and we're going to have a lot of ideas for you. We're going to mention a lot of tactics and methods and you're going to walk away with a couple on each episode. But not all of them. If every single thing that we say could be a good idea you do, you should stop listening like were a problem in your life. So here's the thing. I think there's a temptation, especially amongst audio engineers to want to keep stuff over written communication because it can help with social anxiety, right? If stuff begins to even hint at being emotional, the artists seems even a little bit frustrated. Pick up the ding dang phone man

or Skype or Skype. Skype is better because you actually have the face in it and it is, it just, it eases tensions when you're forced to look someone in the eyes and they're not going to take something like you're not just a faceless voice. Right. Talking to them, you know, through this device it has a lot more personal touch than just a phone.

Yeah. I would say the number one mistake that I see engineers make as far as how much it hurts, how much it's unpleasant for them. It revolves around not having the guts to have a tough conversation and instead it just evolves into a very fast email exchange and it's like, you know, you threw the vocals up. No, you already asked me to do that. Send.

Oh man, I'm so guilty of this and this is why me and my wife from day one, from our very beginning of a relationship over four years ago, we had the role, no arguments through text. Yes. If at any point things get heated, we're either talking in person or we're going to be talking on the phone if we're not together. And that has probably saved our relationship. And I see this time and time again, another relationships, how there'll be just sending these long aggressive texts with everything taken out of context because there's absolutely no tonality in what you're saying. They're just projecting the worst possible tone to whatever it is you're saying. And that is exact same thing in email. When they spill out their heart of all these things, they need change because they're insecure about their music and you just say, no, you already asked me to do that.

I'm not doing it or no, you asked me to do that before and now you're just going back and guess what you said, this is the stupidest idea ever. Full stop. You know, like these things. And that's obviously that's horrible wording, but some of these things you can be gentle with it and it would still be taken out of context and out of tone from the client. Yes. And is why if things get all emotional, go straight to the phone. I probably, that revision health project I talked about from Australia, that Australian band, had I done that on mixed three, we would've probably had a better end product by the end of it if I'd have just jumped on Skype way sooner instead of waiting till mics eight to do that. Well, that's the funny thing, you know, for us that are trying to do music with our lives, we have a lot in common with each other.

It's easy I think to get into a conversation with somebody who's trying to make music and to have a meaningful conversation about where to move forward with that and what is the best thing for them and what's the best thing for their art and there's plenty of opportunity. We've talked about being a guide rather than the hero in their story. There's so much opportunity to be a guide in revision land. So much opportunity to encourage them by, no, we don't need to rerecord all the vocals, man, you killed this. No, we don't need to turn the vocals down. Three DB again. You sound great. We need to let people hear this. We need to put this out and this is in line with building a StoryBrand, the book we recommend on the podcast all the time where you are the guide, helping them reach their destination that they're trying to reach their goals and this is part of it.

This goes back to the point number three, coaching them. If you can properly coach somebody, you are essentially guiding them towards their end goal here and yeah, emotional revisions talking in the phone, whether or not the client's in the studio with you and you need to do things in person. If they're in your city, sit over coffee or whatever, or if you're doing this things remotely and you do it over Skype or do whatever telephone, it's the same situation. Either way, when emotions come into this, things can get heated, things can be taken the wrong way. Relationships can be ruined. And again, this is your last chance to end on a good note. If you fell at this point, all the good things you've done at this point are undone. Irrelevant. Yeah. You just tainted the relationship at the final Mao. Totally. So this isn't just advice on revisions.

This is advice on relationships. Ooh, my mom knows that I don't tolerate emotional written communication, that if she texts me something like frustrated and she's my mom, she's going to be frustrated with me. Everyone's mom gets frustrated with them. My mom doesn't get frustrated with me. Well, you're probably right about that, but my mom, my mom has the most evil temper temper person I've ever met, so she's just a, did you sit in a nominal, even tempered or evil tempered? Yes. Okay. She's passively aggressive. No, I said even temporary, temple tempered, even tempered. I can't talk right now. It's late in the day. It's, this is my nap time. But yeah, I would say like if you're dating somebody, this should be a rule. If you have a family member, this should be a rule. If you have a client, this should be a real, don't have emotional conversations over written text.

It's dangerous. It doesn't go well. I've never ever, ever in my life met anyone with this single example of how they have smoothed things over with someone via texting or email. My mind goes back to all those emails that I just typed up with my like sweat pouring down because I'm so heated cause I'm so mad and like it might be 60 degrees in my house cold, but it doesn't matter. I'm still hot and pissed off as I'm typing something up because I'm so emotional. That had been great time to jump on the phone. Totally. Or at least walk away for a while. Dude.

I did that when I was like 2023 I was teaching audio production at this school called Hocking college and I got frustrated. My wife had just broken up with me. We weren't married yet. She's my girlfriend at the time and this guy, Dwight Heckman, who I'm still friends with to this day, Twight was essentially my boss and he had asked me to do something and I laid into him with a page long email and shortly thereafter lost my job. Like it was bad. But it was all because like I was immature and stupid and should it just be like, Hey Jake, can we talk about this face to face? And it would've been fine, but I would've been totally cool. But my immaturity here, and that's what it is, when you don't have the courage to do it face to face or you don't have the courage and character to delay, like creating some kind of movement or resolution in that relationship that's in maturity period. I don't care how old you are, that's immaturity to wait to solve it later in a way that honors the relationship.

Yeah, I'm 33 now and I still struggle with this, so this is good advice for me as well. All right, let's move on to our final tip for streamlining your revisions process and that is used emailed templates. A man to that. I cannot tell you how many times I see people, I have calls with students all the time and I'll ask them to send me their template for this. Like we'll be talking about a revisions process where we'll be talking about a quote request or we'll be talking about, you know, X, Y or Z, things that are common scenarios where you send the same damn email every single time and they don't have a template prepared ahead of time. This is something that everything we talked about today with the exception of the emotional conversations, that should all be done through phone. Everything else we talked about today can be handled through an email template.

It can be communicated through email template. The email template should say, here's how we do revisions. One person insert person's name here is in charge of gathering all the revisions. Everything filters through them. No other revisions get done. If it doesn't come from this person next to you, say centralized communications, all revisions come through this email inbox. No other revisions will be honored. You can word it way better than that. Then you tell them, you coach them on how to listen. Minimum of three sets of speakers, high and low volumes. Don't just listen in your car at max volume or on your phone speaker. Yeah. Or on your iPhone speaker. Oh my gosh,

I've gotten revisions and be like, well I'll listen on my iPhone and Oh yeah, did you listen to anywhere else?

Yup. And then you tell them you have a three revision limit or whatever your limit is. Anything after that I charge for, unless it's something I messed up, obviously if I messed up the third mix, I accidentally had a vocal muted. I'm not going to charge them to fix that. That's idiotic. But you're setting these expectations in the email template and not only are you setting expectations consistently, that template is going to evolve over time as new things pop up. And instead of rewriting it every single time, which is idiotic, instead of cobbling together different pasted messages from different notes, you just pop up on the template and you send it and it's done. And now you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because it's all communicated to the client.

Well, and here's where it starts to get fun and interesting. And when I talk about working on your business, not for it, I'm talking probably one of the first things to do is to build email templates, especially if you're working with a large number of customers. So when you work on these email templates, it's a really gratifying thing to have something go a little bit wrong with a client and to be like, Ooh, gosh, I need to keep this from happening again. I know I'm going to add a new point to my email template and it is so freaking fun and you should take pleasure in this of like I'm going to fix this issue from now on email template. Boom. Every time I send an email in this part of the client process, this is going to be sent to them from now on.

I'll know that they had that information to start with and it gives us a great place, you know, to go from there. It's so healthy to sit down and to figure out what are your top five emails that you send again and again and again and create a template for that. And I know, I know what you guys are thinking. Oh, but that just seems so automated and it seems so impersonal. Here's how I do that. I always hand write the first sentence of the email could be short sense, could be couple sentences and then I'll, you know, say some blah blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. And then I'll have in bold, here's more information on uploading a new master for our new mix for masters. Or here's more information on getting revisions for your masters. Or here's more information on DDP CD three fill in the blank. Stuff that I get asked all the time in bold text, blah blah blah, blah blah. Semi colon and then a small paragraph. So it's clear that the part that is a template is a template. I'm not trying to convince anyone that I don't use templates, but I'm making it easy for me to access stock information, which mostly is carbon copied from my FAQ on my website to send them right back to them. And man is, it saved so much time. It's so great.

So there you have it. Six tips for streamlining your revisions process and I would be idiotic not to mention the fact that file pass with our six months for free, black Friday offer doesn't help with every single one of these things other than the emotional revisions where you need to talk on the phone. We don't have any phone feature, but file pass is a file sharing and collaboration tool built for recording studios. It helps you centralize all the files. It helps you centralize all of the comments for revisions into one place. So whenever you're actually revisions from the client, here's the deal, you copy a link, you send it through your email template, they open the link on their phone, on their browser, wherever they are, they stream an [inaudible] processed way file or whatever it is that you uploaded. There's no encoding done and they can leave timestamp comments wherever they need revisions in the song and now you have the ability to just open up file pass and check off all the revisions as you have done them instead of all the back and forth of like copying an email, pacing it into an Evernote file.

Trying to keep track of what you did and didn't do. Ender's built in replies and all that inside of there. We built file paths essentially because I had experienced revision hell, I talked about that Australian artist that I dealt with in that process. It was such a tedious headache to try to do all of this through email. Even doing everything I talked about today to streamline the process, it was still not good enough of a process to keep revision hell from happening simply because all the email threads were getting split up so things were getting lost by mixed seven or eight I had lost track of what I hadn't hadn't done and it was just such a headache to try to do this sort of thing and when you multiply that by seven or eight projects that I have going in any given time, there's no way to do this with just email.

There's no way to do this without some sort of tool built specifically for recording studios specifically for sending files and specifically for gathering feedback on your songs. If you want to take advantage for this black Friday offer for file pass, this is the only time you were ever going to see this. Six months for free. Go to file past.com/black Friday and you can get file pass for right now, six months free on any one of our three plans. This is not just for lowest tier, this is not just for our highest year, any of our plans. Six months for free. File pass.com/black Friday. Brian, I think that file pass is amazing and I wish that I had it 15 years ago. Me too, man.