Musician performance automation
What an individual player does, captured so it can be reproduced rather than re-negotiated.
You have a song. Nobody will tell you what recording it costs.
ABA, Arrangement Based Automation, is how this studio records a song: in milestones, each one priced before it starts and signed when it closes. One of the doors into ABA Media Platform, a one-person media studio in Greeley, Colorado.
A studio quote is usually one number for the whole job, arrived at somehow. You could not see what was in it, and you could not tell where the work would stop if the money ran out first.
Here the job is cut into steps. Each step is priced before it starts, and you decide, step by step, how far the record goes.
- You see the price of each step before it starts, and you only pay for the next one.
- Engineering that runs over is our cost. Hours that come in under come off your bill.
- Stop at any step and you leave with a finished performance. The exit costs one session, the Milestone 8 pass, and the sheet prices it the same way as the other steps.
- Your song and your performances stay yours. We are paid for the work, not for a share of the song.
What the milestones are for
Most jobs end in the same conversation.
Not the mix. The invoice. A number agreed months ago meets a number arrived at since, and the gap between them gets argued by two people who no longer remember which decision caused it. That conversation is not a billing problem. It is what happens when a job is settled once, at the end, instead of nine times along the way.
The way the job runs now
One estimate. One invoice. One argument.
01Carried
02Carried
03Carried
04Carried
05Carried
06Carried
07Carried
08Carried
09Carried
Then you send the invoice.
Everything that went wrong across the whole job arrives in one number, months after the decisions that caused it, and it is argued with a client who has already spent the money.
The same job, run in milestones
Nine settlements. No argument saved for the end.
01Signed & settled
02Signed & settled
03Signed & settled
04Signed & settled
05Signed & settled
06Signed & settled
07Signed & settled
08Signed & settled
09Signed & settled
The invoice is a formality.
Every hour that missed the estimate, over or under, was documented in red and settled at the milestone that caused it — while both people still remembered why.
The bars are a shape, not a measurement. There are no figures on this page because there is no average job, and a made-up number on a drawing about estimate integrity would be the exact thing the process exists to prevent.
Those nine are not arguments, because they are not surprises. Each milestone closes on a verification task carrying three signatures — client, producer, ABA engineer — and every hour that missed the estimate, over or under, is documented in red on the signed milestone. Those overruns are reconciled before the next milestone opens. The estimate is checked against the actual nine times over the job, instead of defended once at the end of it.
A yardstick for any quote
What should a record cost?
Nobody says, so a quote arrives without a scale. Here is one. In the mid-1980s a record made on a major-label budget worked out at about ten thousand dollars a song. That is Brad Huett's recollection from the Los Angeles sessions of the period, not a published figure, and the money was an advance: the band paid it back from royalties before they saw anything.
US consumer prices are almost exactly three times what they were in 1985 (the CPI went from 107.6 to 321.9 by 2025), so ten thousand dollars a song then is about thirty thousand a song now. Hold any quote against that, including ours, and ask what work is in the number and who decided the work was needed.
That second question is what Milestone 0, the kickoff, answers: the tasks and their hours at the rate card, laid out in front of you, and you decide what the record needs. If the budget says less, work comes out and the rates stay as they are. Cut the work, never the worth.
The example
Where a record starts, and what the first steps cost.
The price sheet is the lowest-cost road to a result you can use: the kickoff, the rhythm section recorded and mixed so a band can work with it, and the finished-mix pass. Three ways in: with our players, with your own band, or starting in the Muse Chart Room, the session that gets a song solid enough to record. It is not the whole song: horns, strings, solos and the lead vocal are the steps after it, each priced at the close of the one before. Its lines are steps you see before you pay for them, with our hourly rates on them.
How it works, in one view
Nothing leaves this studio through a side door.
The Muse Chart Room is for a song that isn't ready to record. Part one gets it solid enough to record. Part two records the rhythm section: the performances Milestone 1 starts from. Stop there, and your song goes out through the finished mix, Milestone 8, like every ABA song.
When you want to see it
Tell us about your song.
You'll see the price of the first step before you pay anything, and you only ever pay for the next one. If you already have a quote from somewhere else, bring that too: we'll lay ours beside it, line by line.
How it works
The process behind the price.
Why the record is built in milestones, what is settled before anyone plays, and what the automation is holding so a performance can be performed again. You do not need any of it to say yes; it is here for the day you want to know.
Open the process
What it is
Settle the technical decisions before anyone plays.
Get the technical decisions settled and automated before the creative work starts, so that when the musician plays, the performance does not have to compete with them.
That is the whole process in one sentence. The rest is the discipline of actually doing it — moving analytical work forward in the schedule rather than letting it arrive, as it usually does, in the middle of a take.
Why it works, and why not for the reason you have heard
It is about attention, not hemispheres.
The familiar version of this argument says the analytical left brain interferes with the creative right brain. We do not make that argument, because it is not supported. The hemispheres are not separate personalities and they do not take turns; they work together, and the pop version of the story has been contradicted for years.
The defensible reason is simpler and harder to argue with: analytical work and creative judgment draw on the same limited pool of attention. An open technical question is a withdrawal from that pool, and it is being made at the exact moment you need the balance.
This distinction matters more than it looks. A process resting on a claim that does not hold collapses the day someone checks, and takes the parts that were true down with it.
The instrument
A question to ask before the next session.
This one is free, and you can run it tonight, on a session that has no connection to us.
Which technical decisions are still open?
List them before the performer arrives. Not the ones you expect to go wrong — the ones that are simply undecided. Routing, levels, headphone balance, what happens to the take afterward.
An item left on that list gets answered during the take, by somebody, using attention that was supposed to be going somewhere else. Answer them first and the list is empty when it matters.
That is the entire principle, and it works whether or not you ever automate anything. The automation is what makes it repeatable rather than a good intention.
What automation is holding
Three layers, so the performance can be performed again.
Section automation
The same at the level of a section, so a group moves together without a person riding it live.
Solo performance automation
The line that has to breathe differently from everything around it, held separately for exactly that reason.
With those three held, the last pass stops being a mixdown and becomes something closer to conducting: live control over sections and soloists, decided by ear, on a performance that can be performed again tomorrow the same way.
The process, before it had a name
One groove. Seven pieces of music. The groove underneath did not change.
The bed below is a G groove — bass, rhythm guitar, drums. It does not change once. Not a chord, not a fill, not a level.
Everything you hear change is laid on top of it. Seven modes, in order of brightness, over a foundation that is not renegotiated. That is the argument on this page, played instead of explained.
Seven Fish in a Phish Pond — a continuous excerpt from a single unbroken take, covering Ionian, Mixolydian and Dorian. Submitted to Tommaso Zillio’s Master of the Modes program by a guitarist who had been teaching modes since 1977.
There is a second thing happening, and it is why this was submitted for academic credit rather than posted as a lesson. A mode is usually taught as “D to D in the key of C” — which puts C in your head at the exact moment the point is D. Holding the root still and changing the mode around it removes the explanation entirely. You are not asked to accept that the modes sound different. You hear it, over the same bass note, and you no longer have to take it on trust.
Which is the same move as everything else here: replace a claim the reader has to believe with a difference he can check.
A result you can hear
The same master was right for the club and wrong for streaming.
One master of Cosmic Honey, the radio-ready version of 31 August 2026, went through ABA AudioVibes three times. Its measurements were the same all three times: −8.37 LUFS integrated, −0.86 dBTP true peak, 2.73 LU loudness range. Only the question asked of it did. Against a club it was release ready. Against Spotify it was 5.6 LU too loud, so the platform would turn it down, and its dynamics were flat for both.
The lesson is the one the kickoff exists for: a master is good for somewhere, so where the record will be heard is settled before the first note is recorded, and a mix is measured against that target before it leaves.
The same gate, pointed at the material
The hours are not the only thing a milestone owes.
A session produces far more than a song: the reference tracks the client sent, their phone demo, the charts, the session file, the takes nobody chose, six bounces of one mix, a master, renders for three platforms. If you work sessions, you have touched this whole list, and almost none of us has ever organized it correctly.
The cost of that is not untidiness. It is the ten minutes spent looking while a client waits, and what the client concludes during those ten minutes. So the same question the milestone asks about the hours gets asked about the material — and a milestone does not close while the answer is unclear.
Lexicon
No violinist consults the one beside them. The unison is the score’s doing.
How the AI team works: shared constraints, written down, rather than agents asking each other what to think.
The unity is of standards, not of correctness.
Everyone following the same rulebook makes them agree with each other. It does not make them right.
ABA Media Platform | AMP · Lexicon · Approved · Company observation
Where the whole process lives
The milestones are drawn above. The tasks, forms and checklists are in the Playbook.
The graphic under “How it works, in one view” is the process at a glance: the ways in, the milestones, the ways out. The milestone-by-milestone detail, with what enters each one and what closes it, is written up whole in The ABA Playbook, on the Shelf at the foot of this page.
The rest of the platform
The tool, the rulebook, and who signs it.
The tool the process produced
AudioVibes measures a finished master against the target it was made for, and names the difference. It runs in the browser, on the machine in front of you.
The rulebook
The claims on this page and the approved sentences they came from — including the one still open, and the one that was withdrawn and left on the page where it used to be true.
Who signs it
One owner and seven AI workers, working to that rulebook. The signatures on a milestone are only worth what the name behind them is worth, so the name is on the page.
The Shelf
Free first. Then the Playbook.
The Shelf has the free tools and books that show the process working, and the paid ABA Playbook that carries the forms and checklists behind it.