This is a continuation from part 2.
So previously, I ruminated on how valuable costing is with planning. As you gain experience in calculating the costs of time, resources, and money, you can be more trustworthy and more productive. Your ability to calculate costs improves your ability to make quick decisions and act on them.
But there is one more benefit from costing, and that benefit is personal growth.
When you are well versed in how long it takes to do something, then you can start thinking how to do it faster. Or you can think about what it would take to do it better. You can start asking questions about why it went so quickly or so slowly, why it cost more than you thought, or why you needed more help than you expected. Thinking about these things can reveal some of the basic assumptions we tend to make or some of the details we forget to think about.
In Shiplosion, we learned that we can record 2 or maybe 3 songs in a session, end to end. But we only expect 2 songs. We are a special case because we record everything (but the vocals) live. Then we finish up the vox. It just takes another session to mix it all down. But we know that we have to be able to play the songs flawlessly, and so that becomes a checkpoint before we can go in and record. But we learned this process by trial and error. When we started, we went in and recorded one track at a time. It took several sessions to get everything recorded for a single song. So, we had that baseline. Then we asked ourselves, how can we improve on this? How can we keep the quality of music that we want, but reduce the amount of time in the studio? So, we were in a lucky situation by being a three-piece. This resulted in a pretty major gain in productivity, and we didn’t have to sacrifice quality. And it’s a great feeling to know exactly how long it takes to record a song, and how much it will cost–without having to think about it.
In my previous post, I brainstormed some questions to ask when thinking about what it will take a learn a song. There are a lot of factors! But armed with this information, I can start asking myself how to be more efficient with song learning. For example, one thing I do is get a recording of the song and then listen to it on repeat everywhere I go. It takes a certain amount of patience, but I subconsciously learn the song while I’m getting other things done. I also work on the specific techniques on a practice pad while watching hulu. But other improvements may not have obvious benefits, and so that’s why it’s good to always be measuring your time and resources. You need to know if there’s a real benefit to a new strategy. For example, I learned that I can learn material faster if I just play each song on repeat one at a time, instead of an entire playlist on repeat.
Paying attention to costing can teach you valuable lessons about time buffers. They’re really important! We get so optimistic about what we can do, that we start to feel invincible. But things can and will go wrong. At one Shiplosion recording session, I already knew how long it would take to drive to Guitar Center, buy some new heads, and then drive to the studio. And I totally nailed that, and even showed up 30 minutes in advance to change out the heads. But what I didn’t plan for was the Guitar Center chaos effect. Sure, they gave me the number of heads I wanted, but then by the time I was ready to take them out of the boxes… I discovered that I was given the wrong heads. So, I had to kill that 30 minutes to race back and get the right heads (which actually, they didn’t have, so I had to settle for a mixed set of heads). Obviously not enough buffer.
In Bucharest Drinking Team, when we recorded our first album, we did a lot of planning and baselining to estimate how much material we could record. Those kinds of estimates are important when you’re recording live, because you have to rehearse the material in advance. And you have to rehearse in a very special way, knowing that you will have an unusual setup (unlike any show), and may not have any visual queues. We came up with a range of songs to record, and were able to get through the bare minimum. But we didn’t record everything we wanted, and we had to leave some things out–because we didn’t account for the Herding Cats Syndrome. When you have 12 people in a room, totally having a blast and amped up with energy, it’s very difficult to stay on schedule. But fortunately we had planned time buffer for the “unknown unknowns”, and we had prioritized the work so that we could just skip the lower priority things.
I’ll end with another brainstorm. Do you know the answers? I’ll actually need to figure some of these out for myself. :)
- How long does it take to break down your equipment? And to set it up?
- How long does it take for the whole band to break down equipment, load it, unload it, and set it up? What if someone is missing?
- How long does it take to record a song? How much does it cost?
- How long does it take to write a song? To learn it? To have it ready to perform? To record it?
- How long does it take to do a line check? Full sound check?
- How long does it take to drive to the next city over?
- What does it cost to play a show? To play a show a city over?
- What’s the monthly cost of being in a band?
- What’s the monthly cost of playing your instrument?
- What could go wrong with any of this?
- How can you improve on all of this?