1. Setup drums, notice cracked cymbal and old head, get a bit annoyed
2. Track scratch guitars and setup tempos, cry a little inside when watching guitarist's technique
3. Record drums, wonder how drummer is going to react when I tell him to not play 75% of his kick drum parts
4. Edit drums, plan suicide when I realize I was so lazy with performance quality because drummer sucked so bad and I couldn't stand to listen to another take
5. Setup guitars, smash head against proverbial wall when telling guitarists need to restring every couple songs and they reply with "no way dude my strings sound better after about a week, if we restring it'll sound like crap."
6. Record guitars. Only about 10% of the people who didn't kill themselves while drum editing will make it through this stage as well. This is where you weed out the weak. Punching in every other note, retuning every take (and remember each take is only 2 notes long), trying to teach the guitar player how to fret a note without bending it out of tune, or how to pick the string so it doesn't sound like a complete disaster, etc. And that is only if you are recording guitarists who are willing to admit that it sounds better, otherwise you are stuck with the, "no I'm not punching in 2 notes, just let me try it again I'll get it this time," guitarists. And I say guitarists loosely.
7. Record bass. This is usually a bit more pleasant. The recording gods are rewarding you for making it through the guitar tracking stage. It is still going to be awful, but compared to tracking guitars, it is like having sex with Natalie Portman.
8. Record vocals. This is hit or miss. Very often it's the most fun part of the process because you don't need to worry about transitions between punches and stuff since there's usually a lot of good gaps to work with. Other times, the vocalist is just so awful that you are struggling to decide if it's even worth tracking. It is very disheartening when you've spent 15 hours of tracking per song on the instrumentals only to have a vocalist come in that is so bad that it will complete overshadow whatever decent sounding recording you had going in the first place.
9. Edit vocals, this is annoying sometimes, but it's better than editing drums.
10. Go through songs and print drum samples. This sucks. Usually the drummer is really bad, so he hits like an inconsistent girl which means no triggering plugin on the planet can figure out what he's doing with phase accuracy, so you have to go through and slide around a bunch of hits and get everything sounding ok.
11. Mix. Mix it until it blows you away. Never send anything to a band half mixed. They should never receive an mp3 with the attached text, "Hey, just started working on this last night, it's not all the way there yet but it's coming along." It should always be done. Because even when it's done the band is going to bitch. They are going to complain about things they have never noticed on any of their favorite records, even though those things are all there. The amount of automation it would take to achieve these requests is unfathomable. "Can you raise the volume of the 3rd note in the hammer on in my second solo in track 5?"
12. Delete the session and drink until you forget you ever recorded them.
