Here’s an interesting Quora thread about what you should know before booking a rock band session. I can’t improve on the excellent post by Bruce Williams, but I have a few things to add.
The challenge of recording is 10% technical and 90% psychological, especially if you’re inexperienced. You may be as cool as a cucumber onstage and then turn into a nervous wreck when the tape rolls. Your band may be great friends until the time pressure of the studio brings out unsuspected conflicts and dysfunction. Fortunately, all of this stuff can be prepared for.
The best way to get ready for the studio is to record everything on your own first. You don’t have to record it well; your laptop mic and Audacity or Garageband are fine. Even in the most casual of circumstances, it feels very different to play while you’re being recorded, and it takes practice like anything else in music does. The best singer I know likes to record everything. She insisted we record the very first rehearsal we ever did together. Hard drive space is effectively free, so why not? A few minutes of that session ended up sounding great.
Are you planning to record to a click track? If so, you need to rehearse with one, and make your demo recordings with it too. It seems like it would be easier to play with a click than without one, but some people find it really difficult. Also, rehearsing with a click (or drum machine etc) helps you figure out exact tempos, which is a good thing to do before you get to the studio. You may discover that you tend to rush or drag in certain places, which you want to sort out off the clock. And you may discover that the chorus absolutely needs to be a few bpm faster than the verses, which is not unusual. Fortunately, it’s extremely easy to program tempo changes in the studio.
Recording yourself is good prep for other reasons too. The requirements of live music and recorded music are quite different. A song that works great onstage may fall flat in the studio (and vice versa.) The same goes for arrangements. That epic guitar solo that thrills audiences in the club might be excessive and tedious on the recording. This is why it’s a really good idea to have an objective set of outside ears when you go into the studio. This person might be a producer, a manager, the engineer, a trusted musician friend, whoever (but not anyone’s significant other!) The hardest thing to hear objectively in the studio is yourself. The engineer in particular is usually a great musical resource, having probably heard ten thousand bands similar to yours.
Bruce Williams’ point about the amount of time it takes to mix relative to the number of cooks in the kitchen is also crucial. Ego is the enemy of good mixes. Let’s say it’s the singer’s band, and the singer is the mixing authority. Rock vocals should be deeply buried under the guitars, but this makes singers anxious, resulting in corny-sounding, vocal-heavy mixes. Also, singers have a way of insisting on fiddling endlessly with tiny details of their performance, burning through studio time that could be better used to address bigger issues in the music. Same goes if it’s the drummer’s band, or the lead guitarist’s band, or whatever. My solution to this problem is to not let anyone have final say over the mixing of their own part.
Finally, I suggest openness to happy discoveries. Yes, you want to absolutely nail down your parts and arrangements before you walk in the door. But like I said, stuff sounds very different recorded than it does live, and sometimes you need to make some big changes inside the box. Maybe you make a “mistake” that sounds better than what you intended to play. If the engineer suggests you keep it, keep it! Maybe it would sound better to just copy and paste the first bar of the bassline through the entire tune. Maybe the song would be a lot stronger without that intricate bridge you worked so hard on. Let the process guide the product. This can be hard, especially if you haven’t done it before. Trust your engineer. Good luck!
Photos taken by me in NYU’s fabulous Dolan studio, where I work as an engineer.