[sdiy] making 2 or 3 dollars an hour on synth building?

Thu Oct 2 15:24:35 CEST 2008

yeah...that is similar to how i make my living..which is installing, teaching, and troubleshooting recording equipment.
it has no overhead, and i need no equipment. I just go to the persons studio, fix the problem, and often i also get hired to mix a band's album, or do soundtrack work etc....and i sell my own personal music to music house's for sound libraries.

BUT i was just HOPING there was a way to supplement my income with electronics. it is NO big deal though if not ;)

thanks

--------------------------------------------
check out various dan music at:

http://www.myspace.com/lossnyc  

http://www.soundclick.com/lossnyc.htm

http://www.indie911.com/dan-snazelle
(or for techno) http://www.myspace.com/snazelle 

Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:06:36 -0500
From: uber.leetness at gmail.com
To: subjectivity at hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [sdiy] making 2 or 3 dollars an hour on synth building?
CC: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl

Hi!
It was just after high-school when I learned that building something for other people is way too much work and too little money. It's all good, if you building for yourself, because you get to keep it.. If you want to make money, you have to do something simple, but popular, like, install plasma tv with speakers for $500. It's like, one evening job, and people will be really grateful..

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Dan Snazelle  wrote:

well i installed the audio ark this weekend at a beautiful estate in northern new york. i was terrified the person paying for the box was going to hate it but luckily that was not the case. it sounded great and looked good in his rack sitting above two eventide boxes and an MPRESSOR.

HOWEVER

 i am quickly starting to see that making a living, or supplementing my income from audio electronics may be a bit of a

ridiculous idea. for the amount of hours i put into the audio ark, i probably ended up making about 61 dollars a week (for

36 weeks)

this is NOT practical. especially when many of those weeks, i was working so much on the ark that i had no time for my REAL job of being a recording guy in nyc. If i was working 40 or more hours a week on the ark (which was often the case) i was making around 2 or 3 dollars an hour. (or even less)

(AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE MANUAL)

maybe due to the size or the amount of work that went into figuring out a good method of tracking, or due to the time of soldering and wiring..i dont know...but if this is the most one can make building a box of that size...well i dont think i would ever do it again! and this isnt meant as an angry statement. far from it. But it was a TON of work. late nights...early mornings...technical hurdles...hand burns....and I think for that amount of work, there has to be a payoff. (which there always is when you are building it for YOURSELF)

at least the parts were paid for as i was building it. but lets stop and think about if they were NOT...then i would have had to put about 2000 dollars of my OWN money into the box, which would not have been recouped till the very end. which seems very risky (if you arent even sure there are buyers)

wow.

so i am interested in knowing

1. is it really THAT hard to do better than breaking even when  building synth related stuff for people (even just one offs)

2. how does anyone make a real living doing it?

3. is it any better with small boxes? (fx,etc)

4. what are some good ways of estimating a cost at the start? (i estimated waaaay too low and hurt myself because of it. an agreed upon price is an agreed upon price no matter how wrong i might have been.)

granted...i will be doing synth diy for myself no matter what. and i am proud of the

monster that i built.

but maybe stompbox style synth creations are a bit more realistic than giant machines?

i would love to hear of your experiences with this.

thanks so much

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