Face it, the chances of EMI coming to the Bull & Badger to sign you up aren't enormous. So why not start your own label?

When you've paid your dues playing around the pubs and clubs, made up your demo tapes, punted them around scores of record companies and learned only that nobody ever phones back, some smart-ass is bound to make the following earth-shattering suggestion to you – "why don't you make your own record?"

Well, why don't you? In some senses it's dead easy to go out and make a record nowadays, particularly since the recording process has been demystified by the boom in home studio equipment.

But there are still many traps and pitfalls for the beginner in the wacky world of the record business, and in this article we'll try to guide you through some of them and point out the bits you should be able to cope with more easily.

As an example, we've taken AMP Records, a new small label specialising in synthesiser music. Your humble author has more than a passing familiarity with this label, but we'll be generalising on the facts mentioned to cover all other types of music.

What do you want to gain from making a record? Are you on the way to a major label deal, or do you hope to make a little money for your band? Or are you seriously interested in setting upan independent label? It's true that most record companies now are more impressed by an existing record than by any demo cassette, particularly if you can tell them that you're already selling your music on vinyl, so you'll have to make sure that the record puts over the image you want for the band.

Making money out of a single or album is another question entirely; if that's your main intention, you'll have to balance costs and marketing methods very carefully to get the maximum profit.

And if you are into forming an independent label, you'll have to do all of the above, plus enter into the complexities of Performing Rights, Mechanical Copyright, possibly VAT and so on. It needn't be too difficult though, as long as you take it one stage at a time.

Recording

There are three main choices in the recording stakes – book a studio, hire some recording equipment, or buy it. If you're playing live at the moment, it's likely that you'll be able to get an album-quality performance down on eight-track, in which case a good section of outboard effects is the most important requirement. Any studio worth its salt should be able to show you around, play you some tapes from previous bands, and perhaps even name a few singles cut from masters made there. Look in the IM directory and the music weeklies for possibilities.

If you want your own studio, a second-hand eight-track machine is around £1,000 now, and you'll probably have to spend a total of £3,000 or so for a second-hand desk, effects and mastering machine. Divided between four or five members of a band that's not too much (considering the number of flexible friends about these days), but of course you may feel you'd prefer to keep your money to invest in records rather than recording equipment.

One alternative, if you have a suitable area (a garage or cellar perhaps) is to hire in recording equipment, which will give you more time to work than booking at studio, although you'll inevitably lose some time in setting up. Some hire companies are mentioned at the end; they'll all deliver equipment and will want some form of identification and a deposit before delivery.

Two sides of a single could be recorded in a couple of days or less, so you're looking a studio fees of perhaps £200 for an eight-track studio, plus you'll have to buy the mastertape if you want to keep it for a later remix. As we all know, there's no upper limit on studio fees – you could book you self into Battery 4 for about an hour for the price of a small car.

Let's assume you now have a finished mastertape of your album or single. Some will tell you that it should drip with 0dB test tones at 100Hz, 500Hz, 1,000Hz, 4kHz etc, but this is really a matter for you to decide. It will help the cutting engineer worth his salt will have that machine in perfect condition anyway; the minimum requirement for your master tape would be to put a 30 second tone at 0dB on the start. The cutting room will normally be prepared to forward your valuable lacquer to a pressing plant without your ever having to put your sticky fingers on it.

Pressing

Then you have to decide who's going to turn your tape into a record. There are three main ways of going about this:

1) Do It Yourself
2) The Broker
3) The Package Deal.

If you can afford it, the third of these options is the best for the beginner. AMP Records took their first production to SRT Records in Finchley, North London, who gave a package price for sleeve printing, label printing, cutting and pressing, bagging and delivery, and also gave some advice on distribution – of which more later.

One advantage of SRT is that they use Abbey Road studios for cutting, which apart from prestige value does give you some degree of confidence in the service. You're only allowed 90 minutes to cut an album, so it's best to 'phone Abbey Road to book an extra hour or so for yourself. This will be charged at a discount rate which is much less than the usual £55/hr; if you choose to go to other cutting rooms, such as the very highly respected Tape One in Windmill Street, you'll be looking at over £100/hr.

If you've mastered on a digital tape machine such as a PCM-F1, be sure to specify so that the right equipment is on hand at the cut. You'll be able to attend the cut (some rooms charge extra for this privilege) and ask for specific changes to be made – a bit of bass off here, chase the fade a little there. This doesn't absolve you from the responsibility of making the best possible master tape though, because there's only a certain amount that can be done at the cutting stage (yes, we all know that Jeff Lynne used to add harmony vocals as the album was being cut, but this is real life)...

If you go for the do-it-yourself approach, you'll have to spend some time building up contacts before you start. You'll have to choose a cutting room, a pressing plant and a printer, plus decide how to create the artwork for your sleeve, whether you need typesetting or special artwork, or even the services of a professional photographer. All these bills add up, and while you can save money this way, it's often not worth the heartache of chasing seven different people to see why your sleeves have come out all murky...

The Broker will do all the chasing around for you if you like, but at the sametime you'll have to pay him a little on top and you don't always know where your precious tapes and artwork are going (sometimes out of the country). There are some reputable brokers such as MIS, but one does keep hearing horror stories of two-week turnarounds turning into 11 weeks, failed deliveries and missing artwork.

Printing

On the subject of artwork, this is what you need to do. Roll up your left trouser leg, bare your breast, cover yourself in green jelly, hop backwards to your nearest colour printer, shake his hand while waving a masonic apron around your head, and intone the magic words "please tell me all about colour printing". It won't get you anywhere, but it will give him a laugh and make him more disposed to help you out.

Colour printing is really complicated. It makes working in a 64-track SSL studio seem simple, and it's so full of magic words that the beginner gets lost in about 10 minutes. If you don't know the difference between a tint, a Pantone, a transparency, a set of films and a percentage conversion chart, you've had it.

Of course, you could go for the easy way out and provide what's known as Flat Artwork. All you do is lay out an album sleeve, front and back, with typesetting pasted into place, high quality colour or black and white prints and everything else you need to scale. Then the printer just has to shoot the whole thing, in black and white (cheapest), two colour (for instance, yellow on black – a good compromise if you have an eye-catching design) or four colour (with full colour pics).

The alternative to flat artwork is to provide transparencies, clean artwork and a rough layout and get the manufacturing company to lay it out themselves. Of course, this will cost you money, as will the provision of materials to create coloured backgrounds, artistic patterns and so on. For instance; if you provide transparencies for the front and back sleeve pictures, plus black or white artwork and typesetting, you'll have to pay about £40 per shade to have that artwork come out in colour.

The same applies to the record labels – additional artwork here will cost money, although a plain coloured label with black type won't be an expensive item.

If you've gone for the complete package, the pressing and labelling of your records will probably wait until the sleeves are ready to receive them. Then you should be able to take delivery of a large number of boxes of shiny new records – of course, the manufacturer will want the rest of his money at this point.

Distribution

The first AMP Records album, a compilation of three artists, was recorded in one of the company's studios over a period of two months or so and cut, pressed, bagged and sleeved over about three weeks by SRT. Initially SRT couldn't deliver all 1,000 copies (the minimum order for album or singles is 500, the minimum number of sleeves 1,000) because approximately 150 were rejected by their quality control section. This meant that new labels had to be made up; usually there'll be some spare sleeves left over, and in the case of SRT you'll be given these free – a useful promotional item.

Promotion and distribution will be your main problems now. Perhaps you've produced a single purely to send it to record companies – in which case all you need is the Music Week Yearbook and a lot of record mailers. Incidentally, your friendly neighbourhood record shop may give you used mailers, although they might be a little battered, and you shouldn't forget that normal parcel post will allow you to send 25 albums the length of the country for around £4.

Perhaps you're in a gigging band and want to sell records at your live appearances. This may be the best way of making a quick profit, but remember that the industry average on rejects is 10% and people will become very annoyed if you're not prepared to replace a scratchy record.

You could also sell records by mail order if you have an established following. Advertise in local and national papers, try to get your record mentioned in papers and on local radio, and do whatever you can about posters, promotional leaflets and other items. Photos are best reproduced from a good black and white print with Letraset captions by a company such as Walkerprint (minimum 500 10x8s for £50). Badges can be easily made up nowadays, and quick-print shops are better for this sort of thing, while back street printers (look in Yellow Pages) are better for larger posters and so on. Try to feature the design for your record on any promotional items so that the punters recognise it when they see it.

AMP Records started by taking orders at gigs and selling by mail order with adverts in the national music papers (you probably won't be allowed to solicit money directly, so you'll have to lay on some kind of order form or catalogue). Beyond this stage you start getting into conventional retail distribution, and you'll find that an independent distributor such as Backs, Red Rhino or Rough Trade will give you about £2.20 for an album, which is bad news if you've spent £1.80 manufacturing it as AMP did.

If you can show that you've sold a few albums locally, a national distributor will probably take it on if you're lucky. You could even goto the distributor at an earlier stage and go for a P&D (pressing and distribution) deal, which means you won't even have to find the money for the pressing – it'll be taken back from your initial sales. Distributors should pay within 60 or 90 days of receipt of a batch of your records.

A couple of other points you should be aware of. If you're releasing music by people other than yourself, you're obliged to join the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, inform them how many records you're pressing and where, and pay them 6.25% of the retail price of the records at the time of release. Since this means forking out about £300 on 1,000 LPs it's a major pain, but unfortunately it can't be avoided if the artists involved are to have their mechanical reproduction payments.

You also be advised as individual artists to join the Performing Rights Society (£35) and to join it as a label if you're planning on marketing several records (£125); this means you'll get a performance payment from live shows if the venue has its music license and fills in a PRS return form.

In the unlikely event that you plan to turn over £19,500 per year or more, you can register for VAT; if you can't register, you can't charge it.

Once you've got an album or single off the ground, you'll find that selling about half of the initial pressing should get your money back. Anything more is profit, which you can put into additional promotion or into the next project.

Your pressing company will probably hold the masters on file and should be able to make a re-press of your album more cheaply than the original batch; the same applies to master artwork for the sleeves.

After this stage the world is your oyster. Either your indie single will gain the attention of a record company and get you a major deal with a massive advance; or your album will sell in its thousands and enable you to set up a very successful label; or your first half-dozen albums will enable you to retire and move to the Bahamas.

Fantasy, perhaps. In the case of AMP Records, the first Compilation Album sold enough copies to finance a second album, Barcelona 1992 by the Spanish synthesist Michel Huygen of Neuronium. At the time of writing AMP were waiting for a TV showing of the film for which the album forms a soundtrack, and hoping to mop up, K-Tel style, on TV sales.

Hopefully some of the addresses below will be of help (the Music Week yearbook contains all of them and more), and some of the hints above will convince you that producing your own album and even setting up a label needn't be too difficult. On the whole, people will be happy to answer your questions if you admit your ignorance, although it's best to get alternative quotes and to haggle a bit to get the deal you want. Above all, decide what your aims are at the outset, and head for them with as little compromise as your bank balance will allow. Go for it!