Medidas de mitigación pre – operativas

Project management is the one element that usually slips beneath the radar of most budding producers, but it can easily break you if you don’t pay attention to it. Project management consists of the planning, organizing, and managing of the resources necessary to the completion of the project, be it just one song, a cue or jingle, or a full ten-song album.

Most projects, even those of superstar acts, have a timeline that must be followed, since the days of open-ended recording are pretty much over. This means that all the time elements of your project have to be planned out well in advance, with a little leeway built in as needed.

MANAGING TIME

Managing both project time and people time is one of the more difficult jobs of a producer, since it involves a lot of educated guessing. You never really know exactly how much time any one segment will take, but you do have a general idea if you’ve done your production homework. So how do you figure out how much time you’ll need? Just like any project in any company, you make a timeline that includes specific milestones, while leaving a little leeway in case the unforeseen happens.

▶ Take stock of the situation. Let’s say that the record label wants to have the project on October 1, and you’re coming in on the project on May 15. There’s no way that you can determine just how long each project segment will take until you evaluate the songs, listen to the demos, listen to any previous recordings, hear the artist or band live or in rehearsal, and generally get a good feel for what’s possible and how much will need to be fixed or tweaked. This evaluation period might take a week or two, but it could be compressed into as little as a day if necessary, depending on your experience in these situations and the quality of the songs and players.

▶ Approximate how long each project segment will take. After you evaluate the artist’s or band’s songs and get a feel for the arrangements and how well the artists play them, you can determine how much preproduction time it will take to get everything into shape. You might determine that you’ll need a month of preproduction because the arrangements are weak, or maybe just a few days for some song tweaks. If you don’t have that kind of time or the artist is resistant to more rehearsal, then you’ll have to allot more time for basic tracking—maybe an extra day for each song—instead of the one-to-three songs per day that you might expect if everything is finely tuned.

During preproduction, you’ll also get a feel for what kind of overdubs you’ll be doing and what kind of time for experimentation you’ll need. Unless most of what you’re recording during tracking is a keeper, you should plan on spending at least a day for each instrument to do all the overdubs. This means that you’ll record all bass fixes for all the songs one day, one day for guitars, one for lead vocals, and so on. If you have more time and your budget permits, you would stretch that out to a day to record the lead vocal for each song (ten songs in ten days), a day of guitar fixes from the basic tracks, a day for guitar overdubs, a day for guitar solos, a day for background vocals for each song, a day for percussion for all songs, and so on. Ultimately, overdub time will be determined by the number of overdubs that you have in mind, their difficulty, and the skill sets of the players and singers. Having better players means being able to do faster overdubs.

▶ Develop your milestones. First, work backward from your delivery or completion date. You now plug in the time allotted for mastering, mixing, doing overdubs, tracking, and having preproduction. From there you can put in your milestones for completion. The following schedule gives an example of how to do this:

Notice the extra days in between preproduction and tracking, tracking and fixes, lead vocals and background vocals, background vocals and percussion, plus the extra days built into the schedule. This is to make sure that there’s plenty of leeway should something take longer than anticipated or unforeseen circumstances arise.

MANAGING RENTALS

A fairly large project usually requires numerous rentals of both long and short term. The trickiest long-term rental is always the studio, since if you don’t complete what’s needed on time, then you’ll have to move somewhere else if the studio has another client booked after your booking has run out. This can be a royal pain, since it means tearing everything down and setting up again, and losing time and momentum (which will undoubtedly alter your sound) in the process.

Studio time is broken into five categories:

▶ Preproduction. This stage is the place to work out material before hitting the high-priced studio (or any , studio for that matter). Preproduction can take place in a garage, a bedroom, or a rehearsal room and can last from as little as a day to a couple of months (see chapter 7 for more on preproduction). Having a long preproduction schedule usually occurs when working with artists or bands that write their own songs and are fairly early on in their careers, since their songs and arrangements may require a fair amount of tweaking. Artists and bands that are further along in their careers usually have a greater sense of arrangement and have become sophisticated enough musically so that the preproduction phase is kept to a minimum. There is no preproduction for commercial, movie, or television scores because the composer/arranger has things pretty well worked out, and the musicians are skilled enough to learn or read the music on the spot.

▶ Tracking. Sometimes called “basic tracks,” tracking usually consists of recording just the rhythm tracks, although in certain situations it can mean the entire band. The rhythm tracks can consist of only the drums, only bass and drums, or only drums, bass, guitar and/or keyboards, and can last anywhere from a single day to months, if there’s no preproduction (see chapter 9 for more on tracking).

▶ Overdubs. Overdubs consist of recording at least the lead vocals and/or any kind of solos and lead lines that the song requires, but it can also mean overdubbing layers of guitars, keyboards, horns, strings, percussion, and background vocals. The overdub phase can last anywhere from a day (in very rare cases) to months or even years (again, in extremely rare cases). Overdubs may take place in the same studio as the tracking does, but in these days of smaller budgets, it’s now common to go to a smaller, cheaper facility (or a free one owned by the producer, engineer, or band member). Overdubbing is also the most difficult portion of the project for which to gauge the time, since it can vary widely (see chapter 10 for more on overdubs).

▶ Mixing. It used to be pretty easy to determine how much time was required for mixing in the schedule. Allotting a day to a day and a half per song was pretty standard, especially if you used an A-list mixing engineer. Now, however, with recall and automation on mixing consoles, and being able to mix “in-the-box” in your DAW, it’s easy to bring back a mix exactly from where you left it. While that seems as though it should lead to faster fixes, more time is spent mixing than ever—a result of trying to make every last tweak possible. It’s still best to figure a couple of days per mix if you’re mixing in a studio with an analog-style console (see chapter 12 for more on mixing).

▶ Mastering. The mastering phase is the easiest to gauge, because it usually takes only a half to a full single day to complete an entire album, regardless of the number of songs. In rare cases (and with big budgets), mastering can turn into a multiple-day affair or even involve using a couple of different mastering houses, but that isn’t the norm.

Short-term rentals can include everything from reverbs and outboard gear to keyboards, guitar amps, and microphones. just about anything you can think of can be rented these days. Rentals usually go by a daily, weekly, or monthly rate. The weekly rate is based on a four- or five-day week, depending upon whom you rent from. This means that if the rental is $100 per day, you pay only $400 for the full week (if based on a four-day week). The monthly rate is usually based on a three-week month, which means that if your rate were based on a $400-per-week rental, it would cost $1,200 for the month instead of $1,600 (see Table 3.1).

MANAGING PEOPLE

A producer has to manage not only project time but also the time of the people he’s working with. For instance, if the engineer that the producer prefers to use can’t be available for the tracking dates, he has to either reschedule to accommodate the engineer or find a replacement for him. If the lead singer is unavailable for several of the planned lead-vocal overdub days, the producer has to reschedule them and put something else in their place to stay on schedule. If studio musicians are to be hired, he has to find out when the best people for the project are available, and work around their schedule.

This adds yet another layer of complexity to scheduling and project management, but it comes with the territory of being a producer.

Project Management