How to Prepare for a Recording Session: Industry Pros Share What Actually Matters
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
When was the last time you caught red light fever? In a music and entertainment context, it is defined as “nervousness whenever recording a track in the booth of a music studio.” Whether you're tracking your first EP or finally booking the session you've been putting off for months, it's normal to feel the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
As you enter a recording session, unspoken rules and collab jitters make you feel less prepared than you actually are. This perception can be exaggerated in spaces that lack women and gender-expansive musicians, producers, and engineers. What most emerging artists and techs lack is a roadmap, one with best practices, unspoken rules, and the information that lives behind closed doors.
But knowledge is power, and having a grasp on practical guidance will set you up for a confident and creative recording session. Once you are aware of the best practices and expectations in music recording environments, you can fully focus on articulating a unique voice.
We connected with music industry professionals in the We Make Noise community to share their insights and tips on what they wish they had known as emerging creatives. As part of We Make Noise’s initiatives to combat global gender equity through music and technology, CJ Oliver, Colby LaPolla, and Cassie Plunkett share their advice to help you walk into your next session feeling prepared, confident, and ready to make something impactful.
All three are producers who have worked with WMN Sessions, our 2-3-day songwriting camps that bring together women and gender-expansive musicians and creatives. Colby LaPolla is a vocal and mixing engineer whose credits include Let Me Be Water by Madame Gandhi, a record that was itself born out of a WMN Session. CJ Oliver has produced at two WMN Sessions and collaborated with We Make Noise to create Vinyl Aura, a sample pack available now on BandLab. Cassie Plunkett produced at WMN Madrid and serves on the WMN global team as Community Programs Manager, and makes their own music as Plunki. In other words, this advice comes directly from the type of collaborative, creative environments WMN was built to foster.
If you want to go even deeper, we put everything together in The Studio Code, a free downloadable guide that outlines etiquette, preparation & best practices for every session. But more on that at the end!
How to Prepare for a Recording Session
Before you begin: The Best Skills to Walk In With
Set your mindset before you set your levels.
Before touching a single piece of gear, check in with yourself first. Studio sessions (especially collaborative ones) have the potential to bring up a lot: insecurity, comparison, and the pressure to sound perfect on the first take. Unchecked, it’s not difficult to enter the space with buried anxiety, or even to subconsciously quiet down your ideas.
This is a good time to reflect on your role in the project and have a clear understanding of what you’re bringing to the table. Remember: The most productive sessions aren’t about being the most polished person in the room. Before hitting record, place your trust in your vision and your skills, and extend the same to everyone alongside you.
CJ Oliver, music producer based in South Central LA, puts it plainly:
"When going into a collaborative session, try to leave ego at the door. Come prepared, bring ideas, but be open to starting something new if the vibe leans that way. The best sessions happen when there's enough trust and chemistry for everyone to contribute freely, and not worry about who had the 'right' idea first. Sometimes one idea opens the door to a better collective one."
Collaboration is a skill, not a personality trait. Regardless of how many sessions you have under your belt, thoughtful preparation is a must-have. Here are a few tips to set yourself up:
Come with ideas, but hold them loosely. Bring 2–3 reference tracks or concepts that inspire you, and treat them as conversation starters rather than blueprints. The session will probably go somewhere you didn't expect, and that's usually a good thing.
Agree on communication styles early. If you're working with a producer or co-writer for the first time, a quick check-in before you dive in goes a long way. How do you both like to give feedback? What does a good session feel like to each of you?
Let yourself be new. If this is one of your first sessions, you don't have to perform experience you don't have. Saying "I'm still learning how this works" builds trust faster than pretending you've got it all figured out, and the right collaborators will meet you there.
Best Practices: Where Pro Quality Is Won
Prep and processing that pays off.
The difference between a good recording and a great one often comes down to the decisions made before a single note is tracked. Whether you're behind the mic, the board, or somewhere in between, attention to detail goes a long way before the mix even begins.
Colby Lapolla, a high-performance vocal producer and engineer based in Los Angeles, is known for delivering fast, lasting results to professional singers and recording artists. Lapolla shares two traits of professional-sounding recordings:
Pay attention to how well artists are set up to perform, and the signal processing on the way in. Get both of those right, and you've already done a lot of the heavy lifting.
“If a song has vocals, the vocals are the most important part of the song. Always make sure you check in with the artist about how they like to track — tune, reverb, levels, etc.”
How a vocalist feels in the headphone mix directly affects how they perform, and performance quality is something no amount of post-processing can fully fix. Before tracking begins, the conversation about monitoring preferences should already be happening. For artists, knowing and communicating those preferences ahead of time is part of showing up professionally. For producers and engineers, asking is part of the job.
Processing decisions made during tracking set the boundaries of what's possible later. The goal is to capture something clean and present that holds up at every stage downstream.
“Compression and processing on the way in not only saves you a ton of time in the mix, [but] it also is a key component in super pro, competitive, expensive-sounding vocals.”
Tips from Colby:
Lower your pre-amp until you don’t even see yellow. A pre-amp pushed too hot introduces distortion that can't be undone. Remember: You can add gain after the fact, but we can't undo the gain on the way in.
Keep your gain reduction at -3 to -5dB at every stage of compression. Remember: you're not trying to get one compressor to do all the work.
Continuing the Momentum
Wrapping Up and Following Up
You made something! That's awesome! The energy in the room is high, everyone's feeling good, and it would be easy to pack up, say your goodbyes, and ride that wave home. But what happens in the last twenty minutes of a session can determine whether that idea becomes a finished record or quietly disappears into a hard drive.
Cassie Plunkett, music producer and Community Programs Manager at We Make Noise, has seen it go both ways. Her advice for closing out a session is straightforward: protect the momentum you just built with these simple reminders.
Send a bounce before anyone leaves.
A rough bounce sent while the room is still warm gives everyone something to hold onto and react to. It keeps the creative conversation going after the session ends and gives each collaborator time to sit with the material before the next one. For producers, especially, it signals a level of openness that goes a long way. If you prefer to tidy things up before sending, that's fine, but don't wait too long.
"It's really important to give everyone time to sit with the song so you have enough perspective to develop a clear direction for the next session."
Before you leave, schedule the next one.
This might be the most actionable piece of advice in this entire post. Scheduling the next session with everyone present removes the back-and-forth that kills creative energy between sessions. This seemingly small logistical step can be the difference between a song that gets finished and one that gets forgotten.
"99% of song ideas die from scheduling complications. Don't look up that statistic, but trust me. It is so easy to get off course and kill the momentum. I've lost so much time and frankly great song ideas to poor planning."
The most impactful work doesn't stop at the final take. The session is only complete when the creative momentum is secured with a plan for what comes next.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
The professionals featured here didn't walk into their first session knowing all of this. The road to establishing your voice and skills in the music industry space is paved with years of showing up, making mistakes, and learning from others.
An abundance of knowledge within communities of women and gender-expansive professionals is out there to help you, including right here within We Make Noise. Collaborative learning, mentorship, and resources equal access to better projects and sharper skills. The problem has never been a lack of knowledge, but the lack of access to it.
The Studio Code, a free downloadable guide, was designed as part of WMN’s mission to close that gap. It goes deeper into everything covered here, including breakdowns on types of recording sessions, universal studio Dos and Don’ts, checklists for every role, and more.
Knowledge and confidence are crucial to communicating an artistic vision. Uncover cultural habits, unspoken rules, and know what you're walking into.
Written by Iniobong Obong
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