The simple reality is that in most sessions, there is little to no rehearsal; sometimes, you are asked to find other musicians to play with, and sometimes they are chosen ahead of time by someone else. What this all adds up to is that sometimes your ability to get a solid take can be severely hampered by an incompetent musician; or, sometimes, the music is quite difficult, and even with a strong group of musicians a really excellent take may simply be out of reach.
What this can add up to is the idea that to reach the standard I set for myself, I would need to do a LOT more work than I'm getting paid for. Some artists understand this concept and behave accordingly. Others abuse it, most likely not due to any maliciousness, but just because it hasn't crossed their mind. A few examples:
I have worked with the band Emanuel and the Fear for quite some time now (will be three years as of this November). Emanuel is very careful to never schedule unnecessary rehearsals. Sure, the band could be tighter and more in tune if we rehearsed once a week, but the reality is we aren't getting paid enough for that, and so we settle for what we get by rehearsing only very occasionally. Because everyone in the band is a pro, the result is still at a very high level, but it certainly could be better. But it's a necessary compromise.
About a week ago, I played a Cuban music session with a string quartet. The music was exceedingly difficult, and we only had one rehearsal to put together three songs. We were paid quite well for the job, and the level of all the musicians involved was quite high, and so of course no one objected to spending all day in the studio. That being said, if the engineer and artists who we were recording for had insisted on perfection, we would have been there all night as well, and to be honest probably wouldn't have had a better end-result. I'd say the end result was quite good, but I know everyone left some blips in the takes that we'd like back.
Lastly, I recently did a session for a Brooklyn indie band who are friends with a colleague of mine. This was an unpaid session, which I agreed to do partly because it was my friend who asked me, and partly because I'd heard a lot of good things about the project. Also, it was just supposed to be background string tracks for a three songs, so I figured it would take at most two hours. I was dead wrong. We were at the studio for about six hours (including a dinner break), mainly because the band and the recording engineer were nitpicking every little thing. So the end result was at a very high standard, the sort of standard I'd normally like to shoot for in any session. Except, again, it was unpaid.
This bothered me quite a bit. I sort of feel it common sense that if you have a group in for free, you don't insist that they nail everything perfectly. I can honestly say that I sympathize with and admire the mindset, but there SHOULD be a law in music as immutable as, say, the law of thermodynamics. And that is that you can either have top notch strings on your album, or you can have free strings on your album, but not both. And the next time I'm asked to do something like this, I'm going to set a hard time limit ahead of time so they know what my expectations are. It's just bad for business to give your very best work and not get paid.
And then, to end on a happy note, sometimes you go into a session and find nice, well-written, not-too difficult charts, top-notch music to play over, excellent musicians to work with, and a decent paycheck. I've had two sessions like that this summer, both with the same group of people at the same studio. Hopefully, they hire me again.
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