Session etiquette that gets you invited back

Everyone in a studio remembers who was easy to work with. Very few remember who played the hardest part. Over a career the first thing books more days than the second.

Book the time your setup needs

Your booked slot starts when you can get into the room, not when you are ready to play, and there is no quiet buffer in front of it. The hour before yours can belong to somebody else's session, so turning up early to set up is not a favour to anyone.

Book enough time that setup fits inside it, or agree earlier access with the studio first. Then be there at the start, working, rather than expecting the room to absorb forty minutes it was never asked for. This is the habit that separates the people who get called again from the people who do not.

Protect other people's time

• Tune between takes, not during them.
• Have your parts decided. Rewriting on the clock spends everybody's money, not only yours.
• Keep talkback short. The engineer is holding several things in their head at once.
• Ask for breaks out loud, between takes, rather than fading during one.

Know whose call it is

In someone else's session you are there to serve their record. Offer an idea once, clearly, and then let it go. Producers remember people who contributed and dropped it far more fondly than people who were right and kept saying so.

Nobody has ever been booked again for having strong opinions about a snare.

Read the house rules before you book

Most listings carry house rules, and they are the room's actual constraints rather than boilerplate: whether food is allowed, whether guests can come, what happens with gear left overnight, and how quiet the building needs to be after a certain hour. They are on the listing, so read them there, before you pay.

Breaking one is rarely malicious. It is almost always somebody who never read them, which is a bad look for a thing that took ninety seconds to avoid.

Leave the room as you found it

Coil the cables the way the studio coils them. Put the mic stands back. Take your rubbish. It takes four minutes and it is the last impression the room has of you, which is the impression it has when somebody asks for a recommendation.

The studio reviews you too

Reviews run in both directions, and a studio has 14 days after the session to leave one. Neither side sees the other's until both have written or the window closes, so there is nothing to react to. That review then sits on your public profile rather than on the room, and the next studio you approach can read it.

It cuts the other way as well. If a room was not what the listing promised, leave the review, calmly and specifically, and message the studio from the booking first so there is a record. If the session went properly wrong, open a support case rather than settling it privately.