In this interview, Brian Hood tells the story of how he went from recording local bands in his parents basement to creating a six figure home studio with very little investment into gear or facilities.
Well, hey, man, I am really excited to hear your story and to hear more about, you know, how Brian Hood, how you became, you know, The Six Figure Home Studio guy, and, you know, what that journey looked like. What's your studio story, where does it start as far as you getting into audio?
Brian: Yeah, so my story is…basically starts in high school, my 11th-grade year when I thought, what am I gonna do for the rest of my life?' What is it that I'm gonna do in the future? I had no direction, no purpose that I was going towards, and then I was thinking, I like music, okay, cool, awesome. What I'm gonna do? Studio sound cool. I think I would like to run a studio one day. So I kind of had a vision for it early on in my life in high school of all places, and it was to the point where I wasn't even going to college, I didn't apply for college. I didn't get good grades in high school. I think I had a 2.8, 2.9 GPA. For those of you who are familiar with the ACT, I got a 19 out of 36 on my ACT. So just below average in everything.
And instead of that, I started touring, so that was where I kind of developed my ear for music. And from there it was a lot of learning the basics of running a business and a band. A lot of people they start bands, they wonder why they can't get traction and then they don't realize that it's actually a business, very much like a studio. It's very much a business so if your band just wants to do the creative fun parts of being a band, you're not gonna make it period. And I've seen people complaining about this recently, about how they couldn't get a leg up.
I think this, if you're gonna be in a band that's successful you need at least one person in that band that can run it like a business. I was that person in my band so I learned a lot about turning a creative act, something that was a hobby at once and turn it into a profitable endeavor.
So the band was never that profitable, we did make money and I was able to save up some money in that band. But then I rolled that money into you know from years and years of tour, putting out we even got signed, we toured, you know, 44 states in eight countries, and I managed to save $6,000 at the end of the band to start my studio. And that's how I kind of rolled all of that into stepping up into a new world of audio.
Chris: Well, one of the things I like about you, man, is you are a passionate self-educator. And you've mentioned this before. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that band, how you went from just a dude to suddenly a musician to suddenly in a band.
Brian: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. I get obsessive about things. So like if I find what I consider like my calling in life or at least at that season of my life, I get obsessive about learning as much as I can about that. We talk about that in early episodes, so I'm gonna dwell on that too much. But when it came to drums, I actually wasn't a drummer when I bought my drum set. I was playing bass in a band I didn't have any bass gear. And on my 16th birthday, instead of buying a car like every one of my friends, I said, “No, I'm gonna get a drum set.”
And so, I bought a drum set off eBay from the drummer of a band called Fireflight, which I think they're doing pretty well now. They're like a Christian rock band and maybe they've crossed over to the mainstream. But the drummer from Firefight his name was Fee, that was his nickname at least. He's not drumming for them anymore. Bought it on eBay for like $600, $700, it was a Mapex Pro M Series. Drove, met him halfway between, he's in Florida, I was in Alabama, we met in Georgia, picked it up and that was my car. I didn't own a car for another year after that, and I just obsessed over learning everything I could about that even though I wasn't a drummer. I don't know why I did that, I think my band was probably really mad at me, but that led to me starting my band. And the amount of time I put into that, I was drumming in a band within six months. Within 12 months of playing the drums, I was touring.
And so, it was a rapid progression for me. So I kinda find a hobby that I like, I roll that into something that's a little bit more than a hobby, and then I find a way to monetize that. That's kind of how I've gone.
Chris: Well, I guess tell us a little bit more about, you know, the band is done touring, you've got six grand in the bank, you're rolling it into a studio business. Walk us through, you know, that thought process. What happened?
Brian: Yes. So the wrapping things up with my band actually didn't really end on a great note. Ever when I told that story I probably won't, but. I ended things with that and I had six grand in the bank and I thought, “Well, now is the time I guess. I mean what's next in my life?” So it was like January 2009, bought a bunch of stuff on Sweetwater, which was actually a blog article on thesixfigurehomestudio.com that details this. This is the very first article I posted. I posted every piece of gear that I bought back then but it came out to about $5,500, around five grand, actually, I think. And that gear got me through probably the first three to four years of recording. I bought little plugins here and there, I may have bought, you know, one or two extra microphones, I may have added to a few things here and there as far as instruments. But overall I don't think in the first five years of my career I spent more than 20 grand on anything regarding gear or software or instruments or my studio itself.
And so, I always had a place that I rented and lived in, starting in my parents' basement and then moving into my first commercial building. I just started small and worked my way up. And so, it was super easy to get started with that little bit of my own money, it wasn't a huge investment for me and I was able to turn that into my first paid project very quickly. I've told the story a little bit on the blog, but the first day I got my gear in the studio, January, I'm gonna say mid-January 2009, I stayed up for 44 hours straight. 44 hours straight just playing with shit, figuring out what I was doing, hooking it all up. To the point where like my parents thought I was insane. They thought I was on drugs. I was like, you know, they had gone to bed for the night, woken up the next morning, I'm still up, they left for work the next day, I'm still up, they get home from work, I'm still up, they go to bed that night, I'm still up, they wake up the next morning, I'm still up, they go to work that morning, I'm still up. Finally, I crash. Like that was how I was, it was another thing where I'd found something that I was obsessive about. It's part of my personality. If I was find something that I obsess about, I just keep going down the rabbit hole of learning as much as I can.
So I was googling stupid shit like how to change tempo in Pro Tools, that's one search I specifically remember. I got to a point where I was just recording my own music, didn't have to change the tempo in Pro Tools, I was just learning from scratch. Plenty of YouTube videos about it, plenty of free guides to get me started and I just recorded my own free demos of my own music. I posted a couple videos of me playing drums to stuff, and I got my first paid gig and it was my friend's band. And I didn't do it for free, which a lot of people might and I charged them 50 bucks a song and that was amazing. I was like oh my God, I'm getting paid to record music, this is sick.
Chris: Yeah, it's an intense thing when you, you know, book that first paid project and have that fire under your butt to, “Hey, you need to figure out how to use this.” And, you know, give them something that they won't ask for, you know, their money back on, you know, having someone's money and having to deliver it is a great teacher, you know. So I guess tell us a little more about that first project. You know, what was that like?
Brian: Yeah. So I did five songs, 50 bucks a song, $250 dollars, we spent I think it was like 40 hours total on the project. And so, if you do the math on that it's something like 6 bucks an hour and there's probably actually a little less than that at the end of the day. I made less than minimum wage on that first project, and that's completely fine.
I liked learning as I went, I did a flat rate per song because I knew I'd be googling a lot of shit as I went. And probably the first six months of my career, every single project was a flat rate per song because I knew I was still learning as I went. So after that, I switched to a day rate because I got to the point where I didn't need to constantly look up things, so it wasn't on me I wasn't the delay, I wasn't the slowest person in the studio. It was switched to now the bands of the slow things that we were waiting on the band to get their parts together, the bands to set up their gear, the bands to…you know.
When I realized that they were the bottleneck now, I figured, okay, I have some bands that are very, very prepared, they come in, they have other songs written, they have other lyrics and they have other parts down and I'm not gonna charge them the same amount per song as an artist who comes in and spends twice the amount of time because they weren't prepared. It's not fair for either band specific the band that came prepared.
So I started doing a day rate, and I started out at one $100 a day. Not a lot, but it was enough to pay the bill because I was still, at this time, remember, I'm in my parents' basement at this point. The first full year of my career I was in my parents' basement. And bands were staying there, they were sleeping on the floor. I would just refer to my parents as my roommates. I think I got that from a movie somewhere. And so I'd go like, “Hey, these are my roommates.”
But anyway I wasn't like hiding anything. But I had some like…kudos to my parents. Kudos to my parents for like, ”Hey I'm not going to college first of all.” And they said, “That's cool, you can tour in a band.” So hats off to them for that. Second thing that they did was awesome was, “Hey, can I start a studio in your basement? I'm gonna be playing drums down there, I'm gonna be recording loud heavy bands, they're gonna screaming in your laundry room. Is that cool? And oh, and they're gonna sleep down there too, and you've never met any of them, and there's five smelly guys. Is that cool?” “Sure, sure.” My parents were like, “Yeah, it's totally cool.”
And without them, I could not have done this because I had the support of them to do this. And now if you don't have supportive parents or you don't have a place that you can do that, there's always some sort of work around so don't get discouraged. But, man, my parents were super helpful first. And that first year of recording, I was able to take that when I started out at $50 a song, and then moved up to $100 a day then up to probably about to $150 a day towards the end of that year, I had saved another six grand.
So I got all my money back, and I turned that into my first commercial facility. And so, this space that I moved into was about an hour away, it was still in Alabama in the middle of nowhere, it was in Lacey's Spring, Alabama. And I had no rental history and I was like 21 years old. So this landlord is like, “And you wanna put a studio in here, man?” I said, “‘Yes. I want to also cut a hole in your wall so I can have a control room and glass between that and a live room.” Because he had this huge 1,200 square foot live room space with like high ceilings, it was amazing, drum sounded great in there and somehow with the framing there was a double wall between it, so it was like this really thick wall between the control like perfect sound isolation and it was even a studio, it was just some random warehouse building to happen to have bathroom, kitchen, shower, bedrooms, living room. Like it was really cool space.
And I was like, “Okay, well I guess 6 grand, what if I prepay six months of rent?” And he's like, “Sure, cool. I'll do it.” Turned out to be the best landlord I've ever had in my life. It was like super, super… I got lucky with that. But it all started from my parents' basement and the ability to save that money up living on, you know, very little money and spending very little money. I was able to save enough money to then pay six months' rent into a new facility, which I was there for two years after that, which was awesome. So January 2010 I moved into there and that's when I shifted my rates up to 200 a day.
Chris: And bands were coming in from like out of town to work or was it mostly local clients?
Brian: Yes. So at first, it was my friends and then acquaintances and then friends of their friends. And so, I started locally, completely locally. And eventually, I had bands coming from other cities, which was cool to see. So Birmingham, I mean north Alabama, Birmingham is about an hour away, I had bands come down from Nashville, I had bands come up from Louisiana. So it was like a slow, steady like snowball I got rolling, like I had a couple bands that were pretty well known in my local scene and then they had friends in regional bands in the other areas. And then I would record those bands and I would record say one band I recorded in Louisiana and I had like six more bands come from that one band, from that one area. And so, it was like a snowball effect or a chain reaction of some sort or butterfly effect where you know you're doing one band in one area and that's fans out to other areas. And that was what's the same here, it was all word of mouth at the beginning, working with my network, working with bands that referred me to other bands. That was how I got all my work and that sustained me for quite a while doing it that way.
Chris: Well, you know, I think that a really important moment in any small business owner's life. And I know for me the same is true and I'm curious to hear about it from you is tell me about the first stranger who hired you. The first person who wasn't a friend of a friend, and what was that like?
Brian: Yeah, it was a band from Alabama called By Blood and Iron. It was a metalcore band. And they actually had a lot of the same members that the band Era has. And I'll go ahead and admit, I was at a bit of an advantage that a lot of people wouldn't have. It was somebody I had never heard of but it was people that had heard of me because of the band I was in prior. So I was in a band called My Children My Bride, which is like a metalcore band they're surprisingly still around today if you look them up. They don't sound anything like we used to, a completely different band now, there's only one original member, so take it for what it's worth. But we were pretty well known in our small niche at the time. So, you know, at the end of 2009, they had toured with As I Lay Dying, Parkway Drive they had toured with On Earth or I was in the band when we toured with On Earth. So we had some bands at that time that were big and well known, they were basically at the top of their game as far as I can tell in that band's history.
So I was able to leverage that existence or that popularity into bands that maybe I would have otherwise gotten. Now that faded quickly like me leaving the band we never announce anything about me leaving, there was never any big like you know Lamb Goat post about it, which is a gossip news site. But I was able to get my first initial snowball rolling and from there everything that I got was based on my prior work. So it wasn't like I got these got these bands in that were just like in awe of my old band, no it was they knew who I was, differentiated me enough to know that I was trustworthy and I could do good work, my work spoke for itself. And then after that, I was able to establish myself, find my sound and then start growing my business even more from year to year to year.
Chris: That's awesome. You know, I think about you know one of our previous episodes when we were talking about college and you know the sticky situation with an audio degree and what that looks like in the real world. I think it's interesting to hear you say you know every project I book was based on the last project I booked, you know, your work spoke for itself. And I think that that's a common theme, I don't know that I've ever talked to anyone who has said, “You know, I graduated, I got a degree and then a band called up and asked me about that degree and they hired me to work on their project.” I've never ever, ever heard of anyone who said something like that. It's always…
Brian: But because it's never happened.
Chris: I don't think it has ever happened. And yeah, I was on your website, and I saw you have a degree from Fall Sell University. I would like to hire you based on that single piece of information. So yeah, you know, I think it's really cool what you're saying about, you know, you would do a project and then you would get more work based on how that project turned out. Tell me about, you know, when that snowball started to really roll. The first time that you were like, “Whoa I'm doing this, I can call myself a professional audio engineer.'”
Brian: Yeah. So technically, I could call myself a professional year one. I made a full-time income my first year out of my parents' space and I made $29,000 that year. And so, yeah first-year recording that's incredible. Like I look back on that and I can't believe that I pulled that in the first year. When I did my taxes at the end of the year with my CPA, it was like, damn, my first year, this is actually really, really good. Probably about half way by that summer that's when the snowball started taking off, and I was booked up in advance. That was when I was like actually, wall to wall with my projects. The good thing about being in a small niche like heavy music, and there are other niches like that out there, is that people all know each other in that niche.
And so, when I would record one band every single person in my area knew that band. And as far as my competitors went, I sounded better if not at least as good than my competitors. My closest competitor was actually a guy named Joseph McQueen out of Birmingham, and I think for the heavy music sound, I did a better job than him at least for the price that I charged. He may have been a little more expensive than me, had a nicer facility to me, he was more experienced than me, but I ended up getting more of that style of band and he shifted away from that and stayed more in the pop and rock world.
So he made his name in that world, he is doing it out in LA doing some stuff there now. But I kind of stayed in the heavy music niche and dominated that in my area. I didn't have a whole lot of competition then. There's a lot more competition now, and there's ways you can get around that. It all comes down to just being the best in your area period but it wasn't as hard back then. So I definitely established myself as the go-to guy for having music pretty early on. And I'd say by the summertime that snowball was rolling pretty well and by the end of that year, when I was ready to move out of my own, that's when that snowball had grown to the point where I was like, “I can commit to at least a year of this in this commercial facility, and see where it goes from there.”
Chris: Well, it sounds like I'm impressed. The $29,000 in your first year having just bought Pro Tools is probably not too many people can make that claim, so kudos on that. But I just, you know, tell us about the setbacks. What was it, what were your biggest struggles as a new studio owner? What was the stuff that didn't measure up to your expectations about this dream you had of recording bands for a living?
Brian: Oh yeah, that's 2011, man. So I'll go to 2010 was a good year too year like I had earned maybe up to $36,000 or $42,000 something like that like just around $40,000 my second year. And I was like, “Hey, this is going really really well. 2010 was a good year. I had settled into my commercial facility, it was nothing incredible but I had, you know, I made it nice, I built a vocal booth in there, I had a big live room, I had lodging for bands, bunk beds. It was actually a really cool set up and if it were anywhere but that city I would have probably stayed in it but then 2011 came. 2011 was the year things really started to take off for me. That's when I started getting more label projects, that's when I started getting more well-established bands and that's when I started working more 80 to 100-hour weeks because I did not know how to pace myself. I didn't know how to say no yet that's when you…okay this is the danger a lot of people run into. They hit the point of they're getting a lot of work, they don't know how to actually schedule it properly don't know to actually say no to things or at least say no temporarily to things.
So, you know, a band would come to me and it's like, “Hey, man we wanna come to you next month. Here's our budget” I'm like, “Oh shit. Okay, yeah, I'd love to do that, that's a lot of money. Sure, I'll fit you in.” And so, I would try to squeeze them between two projects that I had no business squeezing them between. And in reality, if I would have just said no I cannot do it, guys I don't have any openings until two months from now they were probably been patient enough to wait because they wanted to work with me. But instead, I sacrificed my own sanity in order to fit in this unrealistic gap and this went on for the entire year. I will say the peak of it was right after finishing an album that I did for a band called A Plea for Purging, I was mixing an album and I got it last minute and I took it on because I was the only mixing engineer capable of mixing it that was also available last minute to mix it.
So there are a lot of guys up for it, and it was an album called ”The Marriage between heaven and hell.” So the caveat of me getting this record was I had to start it next week like it was Wednesday I had to start on Monday, and it had to be done that Friday and a master shift end. And so, yeah I got…it was 10 songs and so two of the guys from the band came into the studio and were there while I was mixing it after I'd set it up. And so, I spent Monday through probably Wednesday I was really slow back then, so Monday through Wednesday was my set up and so I spent the first couple days two or three days setting things up for the mix getting it prepared and then the band came in basically Wednesday through Friday to actually sit in on the mix, to give me their feedback. There's only a couple of the band members because some of them are out of the country or out of town or something on vacation. And just a side note here, if you're a label do not set a release date for the record until you have the masters in your hand. This is the reason they got into this situation. Now it came to my benefit because I got this record that I would have otherwise not gotten which is cool.
Chris: So I gotta underline that. That's such wisdom that's just like the cardinal sin of an amateur manager or an amateur label or an amateur band is setting your release date before you have product in hand.
Brian: Yep. But you know what? I was up to the task. So I said I'd take it on and I would do it. And this is what basically started my shitty year. So this is actually probably summertime, I can't remember exactly when I did this, but this is beginning of like this is like one of the last few 100 hour weeks I did. And so, this band, I'm doing like 15 hour 16 hour days, I'm literally not even going to my room to sleep even though I live in the same building that I work out of. I wasn't even going to my room. I was literally working from wake up to going to sleep and I would sleep on the sofa in my control room and I would wake up and I would work the whole day.
And then the band came in, we're doing everything. We're even adding some extra effects and stuff that's not even part of mixing work just because I like the band a lot we wanted to add some cool things. We added a motorcycle revving up to one part as like a swell in. We have my motorcycle in the big live room and we're just revving it up, recording it we added to a part. We had a fart somewhere in one of the songs and you can audibly hear it, but no one ever notices it which is awesome. But we ended up doing a 24-hour shift. So from Thursday at 3:00 pm to Friday at 3:00 pm, we did not stop working. I had a one hour break at 7:00 am when we went to breakfast at Hardee's because this is Alabama remember, and we got the record done. We shipped it out at 3:00 pm, we overnighted it the final day and got it done on time. Kudos to me, kudos to the band for doing it, we didn't even have revisions, it was literally they signed off on it in the studio, we shipped it out and that was the final mix. And then it ended up pretty good, I was pretty happy about it.
Not long after that project which was a huge, huge soul suck off my life, as much as fun as it kinda was it was also a huge soul suck, I had a band come in to do a record. It was of 10 songs, we took three, four weeks to do it, I think three weeks and we couldn't get vocals done. And this was the downhill slide of my depressive year. The band left, they didn't have the vocals done because a vocalist's voice went out. She was a really good singer but her voice was just screwed up for some reason. They left for a few weeks for her vocals to recover and hen they came back the entire album was lost. And a lesson I will never forget I learned that Pro Tools' disc allocation does not always save the files in the actual folder for the band. If you import any tracks as part of a template or from another session or if you move folders or if anything happens to where you're importing tracks from anything else, a lot of times, those tracks will be recording to the old folder.
Chris: Yeah been there.
Brian: And so, yeah so back then, I was a cheapskate and this is before I learned the lesson the hard way. I would delete files to save hard drive space really stupid and I laugh at it now that I think about it but really that was like, “I don't know if this makes sense, I'm not using this. I'm done with this band, we've signed off on this two years ago I'll delete this.” Well turns out one of the folders I had recorded to that I deleted was this band. And it was another band that I deleted their stuff, but this band's files were actually recorded. So I open the session and every single file was missing, it was nowhere to be found and when I looked at the disk allocation it was had in a folder that I just deleted like a week prior.
Chris: Oh boy
Chris: And so, I had to make the phone call to this band. You know that album we spent three weeks recording, it's gone. And so you have two options at this point, unfortunately, I'm not joking. We have two options. One I can refund all of your money and you can go rerecord it somewhere else or two I will be happy to re-record and I say happy in air quotes here. ”But I'll be happy to re-record it all for free plus a couple of additional songs for free.” And they went with an option. They weren't stocked about it but we re-recorded it all. They were actually really happy with how the new recordings turned out. We did all the vocals which her voice was recovered by then and it turned out great. But my soul was gone working for three and a half weeks, four weeks maybe with no pay at the end of an already brutal year this is like October, September, October something like that 2011, it was awful.
And so, I was like okay I gotta do something to change this up. I gotta stop doing this. And so, there's two things I decided, the first was I need to get the fuck outta here. I was 30 to 45 minutes from my nearest friends which I never saw any more, I lost touch with all my friends because no one wanted to drive out where I was because I'm in the middle of nowhere. At the end of the workday, I was too tired to drive out to any of my friends so I lost touch with all of those people, I had no social life. I threw a housewarming party with where one person showed up. Like that was where I was in this like studio world, it was like no one there. And so like it was a really low point that year and I was ready for a change. So I decided earlier that year I'd visit my sister in Nashville. And I was like, okay, I wanna look for a new place, I wanna move to Nashville. None of the bands I recorded really were from there, maybe one or two, so it wasn't like I was going up there for the massive music scene, it was more for the actual mental stability of my future. It was to change up my life.
So when you're in a point of like deep dark depression and you feel like you have no control over anything, which is a huge part of depression where you just feel like you've lost control of things one of the things I started doing in September of that year was working out. That was one of the things I started to do to get out of that. I was trying to take control of certain things like my weight, my strength, health. I started
Chris: This is 2011?
Brian: 2011, end of 2011. I started taking care of myself. Lost 30, 40 pounds. I started lifting weights you know, I got my squat from, you know, failing at 85 pounds up to where I could do at least 225 at that point I think. Deadlift, it was around the same needed a little more. And, you know, that was within a few just a few months of working out. And so, that helps build the confidence in those ways. And then I was like, okay, I really need to shift things up because my social life is dead. I'm 20, maybe 22, 23 years old at the time and my social life is non-existent. What can I do about it? Instead of just sulking around being depressed all the time, what can I do to take it into my own hands?
So what do I do? Nashville was fun I had a lot of fun in Nashville. I'm gonna look on Craigslist and see if I can find studios. So for I wanna say, September, October, November, every single day I looked online on Craigslist and other places for a space that I could have a studio and I could live out of because this is what I always do. I always want to live at the place that I work because it cuts costs down, I can still write off in taxes a certain percentage of the square footage of the house for business purposes, and I'm able to consolidate my expenses. Because the cheapest you could ever hope for in Nashville for a recording space is maybe $1,000, $1,200 something like that. The cheapest you could ever hope for, for rent, in Nashville if you're living alone or even with a roommate is around $500 to $800 a month with a roommate, maybe $1,000, $1,200 or so if you're gonna live by yourself. So you put those two numbers together you're at least two grand a month for two separate spaces. There's a lot you can get in Nashville for two grand a month if you really know how to look and especially back in 2011 when I was looking, this was like at the peak of the depression in 2008, 2009 when the real estate collapse happened. It really didn't hit rock bottom till around 2011.
And so, when I'm looking there's actually a lot of good options and some pretty good prices. I was gonna buy, I can tell I was gonna buy or rent, but I knew I'd know it when I saw it. And so, one day, it was like November, I see this place on Craig's List, no photos, only description. And, by the way, I was really crafty on my keywords on Craigslist. I was looking up recording studio, I was looking up recording space, music space. Eventually, I came up with music studios and I said what would somebody call a studio that didn't know what it was. So I typed in music studio and this place popped up. And the only description was, they had an address, which I looked up it was a cool place downtown Nashville. The description was three large rooms, two bathrooms, one shower and a kitchen, and it said something about studio glass between two other rooms. And so, I was like, okay, that sounds awesome. It was just like three small rooms and one large room that's what it was.
And so, I was like this sounds awesome, so I'm gonna check this out. I called the guy within 15 minutes of him posting this because that's how often I was checking this. I was obsessive about finding a new place to get the fuck out of Alabama. And scheduled a time to check it out the next day so I was ready to jump on this. Came up to Nashville and check this place out. I'm dead center downtown, it's in the Sopro neighborhood if you know Nashville. Right behind Creamer, the coffee shop.
And it's incredible. You walk in, look at this long hallway, the whole place is 2,200 square feet, I've got a big ass room for my bedroom, which is the biggest bedroom I'd ever had at the time. That's the first door on you're right. The second door on your right is the control room. With the glass that overlooks the live room. The live room is pretty small. So I was kind of like that was the negative, it was pretty small maybe, you know, 12 by 14 or 14 by 14 feet, but it had high ceilings, it had like 15-foot ceilings, which I was like okay that's a good positive here.
But the living room, man, the living room was this huge space, six huge windows three of them overlook the gulch, three of them had an amazing view of the Nailleshv skyline and I'm like hooked on this place. How much is it a month? $1,250 per month. Hell yes. I signed the lease that night and I moved in there three days later. So from him posting it on Craigslist to me moving in three days total, four days total. So I was ready to bounce.
And so, I finally moved to Nashville and complete shift. I can't even begin to explain how much my life shifted just by moving from Nashville. Like people talk about Nashville being so oversaturated. Bullshit, it is saturated with some of the most talented people you will ever meet and those people will help you out. So everyone is so helpful here. I mean there are of course bad apples no matter what circles you run in, but I met early on I met some of the most amazing people that are still in my life to this day, this is 2011 when I moved here. And I've met so many people that have moved in so many different directions, I can't even begin to start explaining how much better my life is moving to a city like Nashville than if I would've stayed in Alabama. I don't know where I would be or what I'd be doing if I was still in Alabama, but God, I don't wanna think about it.
Chris: When you were in Alabama, did you get you know you'd be at a restaurant or a coffee shop and you'd meet someone and they'd say what do you do for a living? And you try to explain that you record music. Would you get in Alabama, was it the reaction of, “Oh cool,” or was it, “Oh right. Sure you do.”
Brian: Well, first of all, we don't have coffee shops in Alabama, at least not at that time.
Chris: When you would go to a moonshine, a liquor store, a liquor store. I mean I guess what.
Brian: People's reaction was this, I mean there were still people who were supportive of music but I was like ”oh yeah man I have to get my cousin to hit you up.” Like it was people you didn't wanna record. That was basically it. And obviously, that's gonna be no matter where you are you're gonna get those types of people even in Nashville. But do Nashville, man, people get it here, people understand where you come from, like what your mindset is like they understand being creative, they understand the entrepreneurial spirit, they understand like it's just completely different than what I would call…
Chris: A supportive community.
Brian: Yeah. A supportive community. And there's something called the Alabama mindset that I have had several friends talk about not just me, I didn't just come up with this. But the Alabama mindset is like I'm gonna stay close to home. I'm going to keep doing the same shit I've been doing my whole life. I'm never going to put myself out there because if I don't put myself out there, I don't have the chance of failing, so there's nothing scary about that. So I'm gonna stay in this bubble and I'm just going to do the bare minimum, I'm just gonna coast.
And I'm not gonna say that for all my friends cause there's some really cool people that have come out of Alabama. Like in my high school alone we had the Alabama Shakes, we had Philip Rivers which is an NFL quarterback, we had, well his real name is Jonathan Anderson, but he goes by Anderson East, who's doing pretty well as far as music. I actually heard one of his songs on a like a Toyota commercial the other day, which was cool. But we've had some cool people come out of Alabama, but there's still so many stories of people just living that like mediocre life of no change, no challenge, nothing to stretch or grow you. And I can't tell you I didn't know it at the time that I was one of those people, but until I got away from that and around people that are actually doing big things and stretching themselves and not accepting mediocrity until I got around that, I can't even explain how much that shifted my mindset on how things should be in the world or my outlook on how things should be.
Chris: I would bet that a lot of people that listen, you know, to the podcast can probably relate to that loneliness that sort of like non-entrepreneurial community, you know, no one taking you seriously. I know for me like I'm from Columbus Ohio, I still live in Columbus Ohio and it's different now, but you know, when I first started out there was very much that like, ” Well, you record music, why didn't you get a job at the local bank? I'm gonna go talk to someone else at this party now. You're not interesting.” So yeah, I mean I think that's the tough part about you know music, about recording, you know, for a living is that it's in some parts of the country, you know, “Can't get no respect.” Yeah. Well, yeah I guess, tell us about, you know, Nashville. What was it like picking your business up and moving it to a brand new city? How did you get clients? Was there a slowdown in work? What was that like?
Brian: Yeah. So I moved at a bad time because I'm a man of my word, and I still had two months left on my lease in Alabama. So it was a very expensive move. I had to pay my last two months of rent at my old studio which was $800 a month and that $1,600 bucks. Then I had to pay my first and last month's rent at my new studio which was $2,500 total.
And so, you know, that's what $3,500, 4 grand, something like that, that I had to come up with at that time and you know I was doing okay, but I wasn't like I wasn't good at finances back then. So just to keep the trail going to the Six Figure Home Studio storyline here, the third year which was 2011, I ended up making about, oh man I don't have this hard number, I have the numbers right down somewhere, but it was somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000, I may have been like 51 tops or maybe in mid to high 40's but t was around $50,000 that year. But again, where did that money go? Who knows man? That was before I knew what personal finance was just before I did any sort of budgeting, had any sort of record keeping. Of course, I gave it all my C.P.A. and she'd give me some stuff back that I would sign and I would be like, “Okay, good. Taxes are done.” But I didn't really know where it all went.
And so at the time, it was a huge, huge chunk of money to me to give up and actually I took a loan out which I would never recommend. Took a loan out to move to Nashville just a $2,000 signature loan just so I had some cushion there because I didn't know what was gonna happen. Was there a slow down? No, I still had and this is the reason I moved when I moved I had a one week gap before my next little project. So I either moved November 1st or actually Halloween October 31st that's when I actually moved to Nashville. I either moved October 31st or it was gonna be like December or January before I could move and I was like financially it makes more sense to wait but there's just no way in hell I can physically or mentally get through two more months in Alabama in my current set up.
So I just carry all my projects over to Nashville. And I had my stuff booked up for the rest of the year and I was able to keep my schedule going because I didn't I mean God I recorded bands in Nashville for five years after moving there I didn't record a single Nashville band. Everything was regional, out of state, out of country, by then and so it was a complete shift in, it didn't really matter where I lived. I was in the middle of nowhere Alabama doing it full time, so the location wasn't the issue it was just the mental sanity of being around human beings.
They were my friends like that was the big thing for Nashville was moving in Nashville my number one rule for myself when I moved here was, say yes to everything, say yes to everything. And so any sort of interaction, any sort of event invite, any sort of request to meet up or anything I said yes to it. And that sort of mindset led to me saying yes to some random kid hitting me up on Facebook wanting to come check out my studio like a month after moving to Nashville. I don't know who this kid was, didn't know anything about him. I would have probably said no in my old life but since I had a yes to everything kind of mentality, he came out, I showed him around, we chatted for like two hours to this day he is my best friend. Trevor Hinsley, shout out to you, buddy. And I've met so many of my friends in Nashville through him.
And so without that one interaction, that one person, I would be in a wildly different place than I even am now. So putting myself around awesome people that are doing awesome things, like Trevor co-owns like a five or $10 million company right now. Like being around that type of person, like when I met him he was still in college and so being around those types of people with kind of drive and growing together as entrepreneurs like that stuff is invaluable, you cannot get that in some small put on town like Lacey's Spring, Alabama. That's what Nashville brought to me was being around people who were doing this, doing it at a high level and so willing and open to helping people out and it's just a complete change.
Chris: That's awesome, man. Well, I guess, you know, I think one of the things I doubt many people that had the gall to listen to a podcast called The Six Figure Home Studio would be concerned about this, but, you know, definitely people in our industry there's this kind of tug, this push and pull between this stupid phrase selling out and having a sustainable business. Was there attention there as far as, you know, balancing projects and, you know, meeting other people that were entrepreneurially-minded and starting to sort of learn about business? You know, like what was that like this sort of entrepreneurial, you know, wake up of suddenly you're starting to pay attention to your finances, you're starting to get to the point where you're saying no? You know, walk us through that transition of where you're healthy, you're in Nashville, your business is working, you're still working a lot. What happened that sort of took it to that next level where, you know, you had the gall to write a blog called The Six Figure Home Studio?
Brian: Yeah, I guess I'll skip. My first year in Nashville was awesome is where I met all my friends, I established some good habits of going to the gym. I was going to gym five times a week with a very fit individual. And 2013, so 2012 was a good year, but 2013 was a year where I really started to ramp things up and take it seriously. That was the year where I had a round of golf with some random entrepreneur. They like lit that entrepreneurial flame in me. So up to this point, I actually wasn't that serious of a businessman.
I had like basic business instincts. I knew how to manage basic things, I knew how to charge what I was worth, I knew a lot of the important basics, the fundamentals, but I did not know how to ramp that up maximizing things. So this conversation with this individual, he had started a restaurant with $30,000 which sounds like a lot, but in the world of business, it's not. It's called Chubby's Chicken in Tallahassee, Florida I think. $30,000 startup and he had built it out and systemized it to the point where he was not even working at it anymore, period. He was completely removed from the business, he had people managing it, he had systems built where the employees just followed the instructions, and he was bringing in $30,000 per week. 30 to 50 grand per week from that restaurant, from that one location.
And so, we spent three hours playing golf and talking about his business and all the things he had done. And that one thing like lit a fire under my ass as far as like actually sparking that entrepreneur spirit or the entrepreneur flame inside of me. And so, that is the point, that was like the catalyst that pushed me to seek out the knowledge of, you know, all of the things that I need to actually do to get my business to the next level. Started listening to business podcasts, started reading books, found The Four Hour Work Week which you talked about in your interview. After that year, after starting to study this stuff, starting to read all of these business resources, reading The Four Hour Work Week, 2013 started wrapping up on a good point I think I made $75,000 that year in 2013, but 2014 that was the year that I had ramped that shit up.
So funny story is, I launched The Six Figure Home Studio April 2014, I had actually not had a six-figure calendar year at that point. Now I don't feel bad about that because the 12 months up to that point from April 2013 to April 2014, I had gross six figures so I felt good about that, I felt qualified to do that. But 2014 was the first year I grossed six figures and I made $124,000 that year. And it was by implementing a lot of the systemization things that I learned in all the business resources.
So it was hiring an assistant because now when I have an assistant, I can take on more work, I can take on mixing jobs. I was able to systemize parts of my process. So remember when I talked about that mixing job I did that I had to do in five days? Well, it took three of those five days just to set the session up. Well, it doesn't take me three days to do that anymore. I can set up a session by myself in six hours tops, six hours tops to start mixing like a full length. And even now I haven't an assistant that does all that for me, so that's even a step up higher than I was before. But learning these basics of systemization, automation in some areas I implemented what's called a CRM which is a Customer Relationship Management software that I still use to this day to track so many different factors of what's important on your key metrics as far as what are my conversion rates for every quote I send out, what is turned into a paid project. There's all sorts of those areas and that's when I started to ramp things up, was 2014.
Chris: Well, tell me more about this chicken guy. You know, like many people listening right now, I'm kind of hungry and I want some chicken. But I would love to hear a little bit more about what that was like when you, you know, you say he sparked an entrepreneurial fire in you.
Brian: Yes. So I'm pretty sure up to that point, I had never met a real entrepreneur or at least not talked in-depth with a real entrepreneur. When my family's dabbled a business you know in their lives but never had a lot of success with that. But not casting a shade on them like they set me up for my mindset of how to be an entrepreneur and to not follow the traditional path of college and stuff.
But he was probably as far as I can remember the first in-depth conversation I had with a real entrepreneur that had success in business. But I just think it was being able to pick the brain and ask questions about how he did certain things because I've always been curious and I've always obsessed over certain things, but I think seeing the power of building out systems and processes in your business, and leveraging other people to do things for you was such a powerful concept to me that I think that you know, I maybe didn't grasp and understand every bit of it, but it allowed me to see what it was that I was actually lacking and forced me to go look up a lot of these things he spoke about and that's actually started podcast. So this is one of the reasons I'm excited to start a podcast was that was the year I subscribed to like 10 different business podcasts, and I even pulled my friend Trevor, who, you know, wasn't really a businessman up to that point into that world. We had tried starting several things together after that, but that was kind of what started his journey as well was this conversation with that one man.
Chris: I think it's really interesting, you know, that you mentioned about meeting an entrepreneur for the first time and begin to pick his brain. I think, you know, one of the things that's a probably a good take-home that I wanna underline for people from your story is the same in my story. You know, I was an unsuccessful business person until I met an entrepreneur. Met somebody that, you know, had like 180 employees and they were this family the Fixaries[SP] Mark and Shane. And they're dentists, they're some the most successful dentists in my part of the country.
And sitting down and talking to them about my small business, I think there's an important take-home there for people if you're listening to a podcast called The Six Figure Home Studio and you want to be successful and do art for a living, you probably should meet some other people if you haven't already that are successful at running a small business. To become a successful entrepreneur in a vacuum where you've never met another successful entrepreneur or you've never had a long conversation with another entrepreneur, I cannot conceive of how you could possibly be successful without other people that think the way a successful small business owner does.
And, man, that was huge for me and I don't think I give that enough credit to just the community that I had when I first started to actually become successful of other people that were successful and that could be like, “Chris why are you doing that, that's really stupid. You should read this book about that particular thing, marketing or email or website.” Like how do you present what you do on the internet? You know, it was so valuable to have other people beyond just, you know, a podcast or books is to have a real community of other entrepreneurs.
Brian: That is a huge point. Like you make so many good points there. We should probably have an episode in the future about actually how to connect yourself with some of these people.
Chris: Community.
Brian: Yeah with plug yourself in the community. Yeah, it's a good idea, we need to write that down.
Chris: I'll use my construction paper and carpenters pencil and I'll write community episode. There we go.
Brian: It's beautiful.
Chris: Yeah, maybe that's somewhere we should continue to dig in. So you met this guy he's the chicken baron of Tallahassee, Florida, he's the, what's the guy's name in ”Breaking Bad?”
Brian: Gus.
Chris: Gus the Hermanos de Pollos, is that what he was?
Brian: I don't remember the restaurant name but I know what you're talking about.
Chris: Anyways, yeah so you met a guy that actually knew about business and he started talking to you. Were there any particular books or podcasts or follow-up resources that he recommended or, you know, you just that fire was lit and you started going out and Googling?
Brian: Yeah, I'm a googler, man. I mean that was first time I ever heard the book ”The E-Myth Revisited” which you're a fan of yourself? That was the first time I ever heard of it.
Chris: The first entrepreneurs I met that was the first thing they said was, you need to read “The E-Myth Revisited.”
Brian: And so, naturally I read that book about two years later. But it didn't seem relevant to me at the point I don't know why. ”The 4 Hour Work Week” was such a good indoctrination into business that it's like for millennials, 30-somethings, late 20's like if you know any successful entrepreneur our age like that is their bible when it comes to business. There's way better business books than that, but that's such a good and approachable way to like get an insight into how that works, a lot of online business or just business fundamentals.
But I was just googling a lot of things. I was somehow I'd heard a lot about podcast up to that point, but I had not actually listened to any. So I was like, you know, what I know there's from what I heard somewhere podcasts have a lot of different categories and you can just pick the category that you wanna listen to. I didn't know how to do it so, I just Google a little bit, I found that I could download some podcast app. And then I signed up for a few business podcasts, which I don't know if I would recommend the same ones now, but there was one called ”Mixer G,” there was one called ”Starting From Nothing,” there was one called, ”Smart Passive Income”.
I still listen to that one til today or still today. But basically, I just found a good handful to start at, and everything one of those podcasts led to interview guests that had other podcasts or to other guests that had books or to recommendations for books. There was always something to lead to another source of information, and it was just a web of going out into these different areas until I was very broad in everything I listened to and eventually a few things caught on that I wanted to pursue and I would go very narrow with my research into that one specific area and go deeper and deeper and deeper into it and then I'd back, back out and find out what else am I lacking. Maybe it's email marketing, maybe it's content marketing, maybe it's hiring, maybe it's building up processes that are very repeatable no matter who's doing them. There's all sorts of resources about whatever you're struggling with and that was the kind of the approach I took was just one thing at a time, don't get overwhelmed, take it slowly, pace yourself and keep it exciting.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I would bet for a lot of people listening I'm saying that phrase that over and over and over again. But I would guess that a lot of us are highly motivated by wanting to make art. You know, what draws people to a recording studio and wanting to do that for a living is this insatiable desire to create beauty. And man, I just think that's the coolest thing in the world but I think that the tension there is you wanna be just sold out to I wanna make art, I wanna make beautiful stuff, I wanna make awesome things.
And what I find very often you know as a master engineer I know tons and tons and tons of studio owners, interact with a lot of them, you know. But what I find is that the real rub is this tension between going all out and committing to the art seems to run against this idea of like, I should probably run my business well. And this sort of idea that like, “Well I really, you know, I wanna keep doing this for a living, but I don't wanna do any business stuff, I don't wanna learn anything new and I'm just frustrated that I can't just say, “‘Hey I make art” and then clients show up at my door. Or too many do and you have a new little nervous breakdown like you and I did, you know, a couple years ago.
Brian: There's two answers to this, one is you can balance the two. There are things that if you want to do this for a living, you have no option, you have to know certain business fundamentals in order to do this for a living. Now how far you take that is up to you, but the further you dig into business and the more you can apply, the more time you're gonna actually have to spend on the creative part. So one of the things I'm big on is what is it that only I can do that no one else can do but me? What is the one valuable thing that I bring to the table? And how can I either delegate which means pass that work off to other people? How can I delegate those tasks that I'm not the greatest at? Maybe it's drum editing. I am great a drum editing, but there are tons of other guys who are amazing at it too, so why would I spend my time doing that? So I'm gonna hire that off to someone else.
What about vocal pitch correction? I'm not great at that honestly. I can do it but I spend way too much time like over analyzing. So I can send it to somebody who can do it faster and better and cheaper than me because that's all they do. And so I send that off to somebody else. What about setting up my mix sessions when it comes to mixing? It's a lot of bullshit to deal with, with getting to figure out what files go where, what gets put in the session in which way, how is it organized, how is the label, was everything the way I want it. I can do that but that's a huge waste of time because I can just put a series of steps, step one do this, step two do that, step three do that, step four, five ,six, seven, eight, nine, ten and then the session is done. If you can do noncreative tasks like that, and give them to someone else which I give to my mixing assistant, you can do so much more actual art which is the creative parts that only you can do.
Chris: Amen to that. And I think that's what I wanna constantly keep bringing this conversation, this podcast back to, is being good at business as a studio owner equals making more art, it's about making more art.
Brian: Look at it like this like if you're a painter, is painting art? Yeah, I'd say so. Is going to Hobby Lobby or wherever it is you buy a board, an easel and paint and all that shit, is all of that art? I would say no, maybe certain paint selections I would consider part of the art process if there's very specific things you have to look for in paint. But overall the actual process of getting shit to paint on is not art.
What about when it comes to sell that art? Finding a dealer or listing the art online on Etsy or wherever the hell it is that you would sell art depending on how you're positioning yourself, is that art? I would say no. But if you were to pass off those other two tasks to other people that they can do those things and they do them way better than you, that leaves you to just sit there and paint all day long or as much as you want or as little as you want. And that frees your mind up to stop worrying about, well I didn't know it but I'm out of this color paint and now I have to stop this painting and go down to Hobby Lobby and pick that paint up. Or, well I don't have any money so I guess I gotta figure out how to sell this art, or I guess I'll google around until I figure out this, this, this, this and this and then I'll get my Etsy page set up and I'll look at all the art and this, this and that. Like there's people that are better at that than you if you're not talented at that.
I heard this somewhere, I don't know if it's true or not, but there is not a problem in this world that can't be solved by someone else. And I mean with the exception of probably curing cancer or something. But just think about your day to day problems that you encounter, someone out there can solve those problems. The other thing I look at is the more money you make as an entrepreneur, the more ability you have to hire out people to take care of those things that you're either not good at or you don't like to do.
Chris: Yeah. Well, so back to the self-education thing, so I just re-read a book by Derek Sivers called “Anything You Want.” And Derek Sivers is one of these guys I really wanna interview on this show. He's an artist, he's a musician who accidentally started a little tiny company called CD Baby.
Brian: He's got a great story, he's got a great story.
Chris: Yeah. And accidentally sold it for $22 million.
Brian: Which he donated all that money to a charity.
Chris: Yeah, he's amazing. And he talks about, in the book, that business, doing business well takes as much creativity as any of the fine arts. And I think that's what me and Brian have discovered that's been so fun too, is do I like making art? Do I love mastering? Do I love working with audio? Do I love making records for a living? Oh yes, absolutely but I also like working on my business and it's been really fun as I've done that to discover, oh my gosh the artist in me loves the business aspect as much as any other part of my mind.
Brian: There's a certain lot of creativity that comes with business that it's hard to explain until you experience it.
Chris: Exactly yeah. So for me not to like hijack this into my story. You know, it was when I came up with the idea for this like before and after mastering player in my website and started to work on building that out and hiring somebody then I was like, “Wow this is like some of the most fun creativity, activity that I've ever done” and oh my goodness, I'm actually doing business stuff right here. I'm finding a way to present myself to the world to get more clients. So, man, I love that sort of… I guess one of my hopes with this podcast is that there are people that this is their first sort of businessy thing that they're trying to…[crosstalk 00:58:01]
Brian: If I could be the person that lights that entrepreneur spark in someone else, dude, that is that is what I want to see. Like if something that I say here or some story you hear from one of our guests causes you to go crazy about learning what it is you need to do to be successful in your studio whether that is improving your craft or whether that is positioning yourself better, differentiating yourself better, systemizing, organizing all of that stuff if anything we do or anything our guests say does that for you, it lights that spark, awesome, that's what we want.
Chris: Totally. And that spark is what will drive you through to create the systems, to create what you need to do to get consistent work from month to month, to get to that Opus, that amazing project that you're gonna work on someday, that you won't get to if you're not using sound business principles. Because I'll tell you what's gonna happen and “E-Myth Revisited” amazing business book, best selling small business book probably of all time. What kills a small business is a slow month or two. And sound business principles, running your business like a good entrepreneur means building your business in a way that keeps that slow month from ever coming, keeps those projects coming. And what happens to so many artists, I'd say most of them, to most audio engineers is they focused too much on the audio and what happened was they didn't focus enough on the business and poof, they had a slow month, they couldn't pay their bills, they got kicked out of their studio or they had to sell all their gear to pay all their bill.
Brian: The old wife says, ‘”I told you this wouldn't work.” And then you have to go back to your day job. Yep, I've seen that happen. I actually I made a video about this with that guy, that happened with him, he did something very similar, so check our blog for that.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I guess we're wrapping it up, man. What's the best part about doing what you do, Brian?
Brian: Good question.
Chris: What do you like the most?
Brian: I would say that without the studio, I would just be in a different plat…I only wanna take a second to think about what I would be doing in my life if it weren't for this, for audio, for recording, for mixing, for being able to take those skills and step them up into other areas, other business, I do real estate on the side, vacation rentals, I do the Six Figure Studio blog, which is one of my main focuses right now, which is why we're doing this podcast. I would say like the focus over the years has shifted from like what can I do to make more money, which sounds bad, but, you know, when you're first learning out that's a mindset you have. To what can I do to make better records? To what can I do to make these bands happy, happier? To now it's what is the thing that I can do to reach the most people possible in a way that adds the most value to people possible.
And so, I'd say that my life has shifted and done a very big 180 from where it could have gone being in Alabama without a college education. I mean, there's so many different ways it could've gone than where I am now and I like to think that there's many, many more things ahead of me in my future that are gonna be a lot of fun to think about.
Chris: Well, it's super cool hearing you talk about making better records, adding value but that's, you know, where it ultimately comes back to, that's the driver that makes us wanna keep doing what we're doing and I think that's what this podcast is all about is, you know, how can we keep you doing what you're doing for a really long time, keep you making music and not have that bad month or not have that health breakdown or that mental breakdown. And that's the other thing, a lot of times, you know, you recovered when you lost those files from those clients. A lot of people, man, that drives them out of business and they develop or, you know, that they don't do damage control. Well, first and foremost they were unhealthy so they made bad decisions as a result of working too much and not being healthy and then something bad like that happens and then they develop a reputation that drives them out of business.
All right. We are about ready to wrap up. Here we've got our fav four, famous four, we're not sure what we're gonna call it so we'll replace this with something in the future with echo or something. So Brian, bringing us up to today you're successful, things are great. In the past week or two, what's your happy, crappy? What's the happy thing, what's the crappy thing?
Brian: Yeah. So happy right now is I've got a group of 50 students going through a beta program that's live. Four times a week we meet up online for a lesson, for a Q and A, for group discussions. Everyone can see each other's cameras, everyone can hear each other, it's like this live classroom that's been a whole lot of fun we're in week 5 of 8 right now. A lot of cool early success stories from some of those guys and girl, and that has been a surprisingly huge source of fun for me as far as like I thought it would be way more stressful to actually do, but it's been a lot of fun.
So it's kind of secret project I didn't really announce that anywhere other than a little bit in the Facebook group and then to a small list of people, but that is shaping up to be a really cool program. And the crappy right now is I'm in one of the seasons in life where I just am really bad at managing time. So I've just got too many moving pieces right now going on and so trying to find what areas I should invest my time into to maximize the effect of what I'm doing just not feeling good about the way I've spent the last couple weeks timewise and organizational wise.
Chris: Got you. Well, let's move on to question number two. What is the worst studio purchase you've ever made? And don't say Depends underwear for when you're working 40 hours a day.
Brian: It would be this API Preamp I still own it today. I think it's called an API A2D, was the actual model, it was a two-channel API Preamp. I must've shot that thing out for every single instrument on every single microphone I owned for the life of me even to this day I cannot tell a fucking difference in tones between that and my Digi 003 Preamp. Fuck that thing. I hate it and it was $2,000 and it was a really hard lesson learned that in the hierarchy of things that matter and I'm gonna get shot for this but I just don't think preamps are up there. I think microphone, I think source tone, I think processing, there's just so many other things that matter more than the actual preamp. And to this day I hate that thing.
Chris: Interesting. What is the best $100 or less studio purchase you've ever made?
Brian: Man, I hate to say this. I hate this answer so much, but I bought like, the very first slate drums pack in 2009 when they used to ship it to you from Yellow Matter Entertainment in a manila envelope and it was in a CD. And they had a note in there which was to the standard preacher was fake that just said, “Every single sample is encoded with your unique code, so if you share these with people we'll know that it was you and will sue you,”‘ or something like that you know. And it was BS…
Chris: What great customer service.
Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was like, a brilliant way to keep people from sharing the samples because I couldn't find him anywhere online so I bought 'em. I'm not gonna get into my pirating, thieving, shitty days of my 2009. But I've covered that on the blogger already. But I bought them and it was like 49 bucks I think and to this day people still use those samples in their mix and I call them basic bitch samples. So that one $100 or less purchase will not be good for you but at that time it was like the best drum tones anyone had at the time and it was a good way to sell myself apart from my local competitor. So I would say it started my snowball off in a nice place in the early days.
Chris: Awesome. Well, for this next question, I suspect most of our listeners if they've listened to previous episodes or read your blog at all, will know what you're gonna say. But let's say there's a hypothetical 19-year old named Billy, who wants to start a studio. He's got red curly hair, freckles and armpit stains in his t-shirt and he's considering going to audio school. Should he go to audio school?
Brian: I'd like to think that by the time this podcast episode is out, my video about this will have gone live, which I've already recorded and edited. But no, I'm staunchly against it. I say there's just a way better way you can spend that money for audio engineering. If you wanna go to college for something else do it, for audio engineering, no, get a real-world education.
Chris: Preach.
Brian: Preach.
Chris: Question number five. I think we call this fav four, but we have five questions.
Brian: I was gonna call you out on that, it's the fav five.
Chris: Fav five, it says fav four on my document right here.
Brian: Well, change the document, sir.
Chris: I have to edit that. Gotcha. Fav five, what ask do you have of our listeners?
Brian: Yes, I do have a good ask here. If you've gotten this far in the episode, kudos to you. I have this ask of you. We need feedback. We've talked about it in earlier episodes, we need feedback, we're in an echo chamber right now. Chris and I, we're recording these three episodes before launching so we don't even know if this is something you're gonna like, we're just hoping it is. But based off these first three episodes, email us podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com.
Email us because we want to know what your thoughts are, what sort of guests would you like to see on this show. Do you wanna just tell us that we're doing an awful job, do you just want to tell us that we're doing a great job, do you wanna motivate us, do you wanna knock us down a peg, are we to cocky about things, do we act like we know too much about business, do we act like dicks? I don't know I feel like we've been pretty nice. But whatever it is like craft some sort of email whether it's on your phone right now you're probably doing laundry or you're driving to work. Don't text if you're going to work or emails are not gonna work, but email us podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com, and give us your ideas for shows, for interview guests, for anything. Just give us some sort of feedback, just let us know how we're doing, that's all we want. We just wanna know how we're doing and what we can do to improve. If you hate my voice, I can take vocal lessons if you want me to.
Chris: Could you hear a difference that I upgraded to the electro voice RE 20 for this episode versus my AKG 414 for previously? Please tell me yes because I really…
Brian: Can we ring the gear slut alert right now is. There we go that's the gear slut alert. What you just heard was the gear slut alert. Yes. So basically we just want feedback. That's all you want podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com. That is all.
Chris: Feedback or encouragement. You know if you are thinking you know like I said sorta and like Brian was saying, I think our dream here is that we hear from people that are like, “Boy I was trying to run a studio, it was driving me into the ground, it made me miserable, I started to listen to your podcast, I started learning about business, I'm doing 10 times the projects I did before, I'm twice as sane, I'm actually making money and I can make records for the long haul. Thank you, guys, so much.” That sort of encouragement of that we're sort of your virtual entrepreneurship community is freaking awesome. And that's the juice we need to keep this train rolling.
And that is it for the third episode of The Six Figure Home Studio podcast, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy days to listen to this episode along with the other two, hopefully, you listened the first two of this. Especially thanks to those of you who binge all three episodes in a row. We have right now planned a plan gap, meaning it may be awhile before more episodes come out because we want to gather feedback from you, the listener, to know what kinda topics you wanna hear about, what kind of people you wanna us to interview. Do som