I Read 700 Reviews of New York Recording Studios. There Is Only One Real Complaint

I went looking for what artists hate about recording studios. I expected a pile of complaints about money.

What I found is that almost nobody complains at all, and the few who do are all complaining about the same thing. Not price. Not gear. Not the room. They complain that they did not get what they paid for, finished, in their hands.

How I counted

Seven New York studios, chosen to cover the range rather than the top: a landmark room, a couple of live tracking rooms, a producer's shop, and several hourly vocal studios. I read every review with text in it. Five of the seven publish their totals, at 83, 44, 207, 225 and 133 reviews, so around 700 before counting the other two.

I am not naming them. This is not a list of who is bad, and a few of these rooms are places I would happily send you. The point is the pattern across all of them.

The first finding: this industry barely gets complaints

Every one of the seven sits between 4.6 and 5.0. Some have over two hundred reviews and a handful of unhappy ones.

That surprised me, and it is worth saying out loud before the rest of this, because the rest of this is about the exceptions. Most people have a good time in a recording studio. If you are nervous about booking one, the base rate is on your side.

The second finding: the complaints are one complaint

Strip out the tourists, the spam, and the people reviewing a building they photographed from the street, and the genuine unhappy clients are a small group. They say versions of the same sentence.

They delivered a faulty product and then went quiet. My song came back wrong. My mix was not finished after four hours. I had to fight to get my recordings.

Different studios, different prices, different neighbourhoods, one problem. The thing that makes a studio client angry is the handover.

The third finding, and the useful one: the owners explain it themselves

This is what makes the pattern worth writing down. These studios reply to their reviews, publicly, and their replies are not evasive. They are describing how the model works.

One owner, answering a client whose mix was not done:

"If an artist raps or sings for five hours in a six hour slot, we can't possibly fully mix five hours of work in one hour."

The same owner elsewhere:

"Mixing and mastering is not included in our sessions. We give you a rough mix depending on the remaining session time."

Another owner, answering someone who struggled to get their files:

"Stems are a separate deliverable that most clients don't request."

And a third, on files again:

"It's the responsibility of the artist to leave with the product that they paid for."

None of that is dishonest. Every one of those statements is true and defensible. Read them together and you can see the machine that manufactures the anger: you buy hours, the mix gets whatever hours are left, stems were never in the deal, and nobody tells you any of it until the end.

The artist thought they were buying a song. They were buying a room, an engineer, and a clock.

The fourth finding: people book a person, not a studio

Worth noting because it is the loudest signal in the positive reviews and nobody mentions a console.

Across all seven, reviewers name their engineer. Repeatedly, by first name, and they tell each other who to ask for. At the busier rooms the clients openly coach strangers on which engineer to request, which tells you the experience varies by who you draw.

And the second most common complaint is exactly that: people who could not get the same engineer twice. One put it as a question, which is the whole issue in a sentence. When an artist finds an engineer who works well with them, wouldn't you want to stay consistent?

What I actually hand over, since it is only fair to answer my own question

I do not sell hours of vocal tracking, so take this as one working answer rather than the standard.

Most people leave with the stereo mix and the stereo master, and the Dolby Atmos file if we agreed on Atmos before we started. Mixing is usually remote for me, in person when the project calls for it. Two rounds of revisions are included. If we go past that we have a conversation about it, and on bigger projects that conversation is already written into the contract.

The one I get asked for that I cannot always promise is the instrumental and the vocal as separate bounces. That is worth explaining, because it is the honest version of the stems answer.

I mix into compression. The instrumental and the vocal are not sitting politely in their own lanes waiting to be split; they are leaning on each other, and a lot of what you like about the mix is that leaning. Pull them apart and you will get something, but it will not sound the way the two of them sound working together. Sometimes it simply does not make sense. If you need separates, tell me at the start and I will mix so that they exist.

The other thing I see is the tail end of somebody else's session. Artists who tracked everything at a bigger room, ran out of money or time before the mix was finished, and bring it to me. Or they need one overdub and their original studio only books full days, never halves, so a whole day rate for one guitar part stops making sense.

What to ask before you book anything

Four questions. They take one email and they prevent every complaint above.

1. Who exactly is engineering my session, and can I have that same person next time?
2. What do I leave with, named as file types, and when?
3. Is mixing included, or does it come out of my booked time? This is the one that causes the arguments.
4. How many revisions, and what happens after those.

If the answers are vague, that vagueness is the product you are buying. I wrote more about that, including the version of these questions I use myself, in how to choose a recording studio. If you want the timeline behind a properly produced record, here is where the forty hours actually go, and if you want to know what your budget realistically buys, the rate calculator answers in about a minute.

The studios in this study are mostly good at their jobs, and their reviews say so. The failures are not failures of skill. They are failures of saying what is included, before the money moves.