Booking studio time somehow always makes recording a new album more real. This time around, I especially feel it. Why? Simple: I haven’t actually *paid* for studio time since my first record, Leave It All Behind. Commit was recorded for a class at Columbia, Love Said and Glimmer were both recorded on my own gear, in my own studio, on my own time.

So you might be asking yourself right now, “Why would Jay be paying to go in to a studio to record this time around – especially when all of the records he’s done in his own studio have just been getting better and better?” Again, simple answer: when you’re recording such a delicate type of album – one where the instrumentation is super-simple – every component in the recording process has to be excellent: the instruments themselves, the microphones, the cables, the pre-amps, the A/D converters, the room/environment itself, and the channel effects.

In my case, I lack really nice pre-amps. The price tag on buying a unit that has four of them built in? $2,700. Yeah. I don’t think so. I could rent them, but it would still cost a pretty penny. The best bang for the buck is just going in to a quality studio, with a quality engineer, and having somebody else work with you to record it.

In my opinion, going in to the studio is always a better option than recording it on your own, in your own environment – unless, of course, you’ve already invested the $15,000 needed to get all of the nice stuff you’d need: the microphones, the cables, the pre-amps, the A/D converters, the room/environment itself, and the channel effects.

So there you have it. I’m going in to a studio to record my next record. I have the jitters.