The guys from Nine Inch Nails recently bought 25 controller keyboards from us for Trent Reznor to use on the first leg of their upcoming tour. Why 25 you ask? They figure that will get them through the first 25 shows. Hopefully he’ll only destroy one per night. While this is an extreme example, the moral of the story applies to everyone. Always have a spare or some solid contingency plan for what you will do when (notice use of the word “when”) gear fails. For this Nine Inch Nails tour there is literally going to be at least two of everything. If any part of one keyboard rack goes down, there is an identical rack waiting to be inserted in its place. The specific problem with the rack that went down can be sorted out later. While these methods are appropriate for their circumstances they are probably somewhat extreme for most musicians, but the point is the same: always have a good contingency plan. As much as this is a no-brainer for live performance, I’m always amazed to find that studio owners don’t realize that they are also in a live performance. Anytime you have clients in your studio that’s as good as a live performance. If the hard drive on your hard disk recorder goes down in the middle of a session what are you going to do? Always have spares and backups of critical and volatile equipment. The equipment we use these days is so incredibly inexpensive that there is truly no excuse for a professional to not have a good backup plan. And keep in mind that brand new gear is actually more likely to fail than gear that has been in use (see Infantile Failure). Make an assessment of all the equipment you use with the following guidelines:
- – 1) How likely is it to fail?
– 2) What will it do to your production when it does fail? Is there a workaround or will it shut you down?
– 3) Can you rent or borrow one quickly when it fails?
– 4) How long is it likely to take to get repaired when it fails?
– 5) How much does it cost to have a replacement on hand?
– 6) Can the replacement serve some other purpose that helps justify its cost?
Number 6 needs further explanation. Lets say you’re a 24-track ADAT studio (you have 3 ADAT machines). Why not buy a fourth ADAT? They don’t cost that much. You can use the extra ADAT in a variety of ways, such as: mixdown deck (great for 5.1 mixes or high bit rate/sample rate mixes with something like an Apogee PSX-100 (which does bit splitting) or something), temporary 32-track solution for comping tracks, rental machine (rent it to the studio down the street who wasn’t smart enough to buy a spare – or rent it to clients to do work at home), etc. There are tons of ways it can be used.
If you think through these issues you can make intelligent decisions you can live with and/or mistakes you can learn from. Don’t put yourself in a position to be surprised and incapacitated when gear fails.