Person

Sideman Notes

TH Terrence Hobbs

Twenty-six years of playing on other people's records, written down for anybody trying to do the same thing. What the work is, what it pays, how five of us bought a building, and what I would tell a twenty-two year old who just moved here with a steel in the back seat. No inspirational content. Numbers and specifics only.

01 The job

What a session player is actually hired to do, which is not what most people think when they move here.

You are hired to be easy, then good

Being reliable, fast on a chart and quiet in the control room gets you called back more than talent does.

Talent is table stakes. Everyone on a date in this town can play. What decides who gets the next call is whether the session ran on time and whether you made the producer's day easier. That means: turn up an hour early, be tuned and set up before the clock starts, read the chart without asking for it to be explained, give an opinion once if asked and then drop it, and never be the reason the session goes into overtime. I have seen better players than me stop getting calls purely because they argued in the room. Nobody tells you why. The phone just gets quiet.

What it pays, plainly

400 for a three hour date, 250 a song remote, 120 session days a year, and it has not moved much since 2009.

My rate is 400 for a standard three hour date and 250 for a single remote track. Around 120 session days last year, plus lessons and my share of the room. That is a living in Nashville, not a comfortable one, and it took twenty years to get here. The part nobody says out loud: the per song rate for players has barely moved since 2009 while studio rates, rent and everything else has. That gap is the whole reason five of us bought a building instead of continuing to complain. If you are moving here, budget three years of not making rent from music. Most people who make it had another income for longer than they admit.

Four hundred records and a short list of regrets

The tracks that lasted were the restrained ones, and the ones I overplayed on are the ones I still wince at.

I have played on around four hundred released tracks. The ones people mention to me are almost never the ones where I played the most notes. There is a record from 2015 where I play one swell in the second chorus and about four notes at the end, and I have been hired off that track a dozen times. The ones I regret are all the same mistake: I was excited, or nervous, or trying to justify the fee, and I filled every hole. Steel is a loud instrument emotionally. One phrase in the right place is worth thirty. My rule now: play the song once through doing almost nothing, and start from there rather than from everything.
02 Buying a building with four other players

How the room happened, what it cost, and the agreement we wrote before we spent a dollar.

Why we did it

Room rates kept climbing, player rates did not, and renting somebody else's room forever was a losing arithmetic.

By 2020 a decent tracking day on the Row was 900 to 1,400. The per song player rate had not moved in a decade. So the artists we most wanted to work with, independent songwriters, could not afford a room, and we were sitting idle while complaining about it. Five of us put money in, bought a former upholstery shop in Inglewood, and spent nine months and most of our savings turning it into a live room and a control room. It is not a beautiful facility. It sounds good and it is ours. The rate is 450 with an engineer and it has not gone up since we opened.

Write the agreement first

Equal fifths, a written exit clause, rotating booking duty, and a rule that no owner gets the room free.

The single best decision we made was paying a lawyer 2,200 to write an operating agreement before we bought anything. Everybody wants to skip this because it feels like distrust among friends. It is the opposite. What is in it: equal fifths, no exceptions. A written buyout formula if somebody wants out or dies, which has already mattered once. Booking duty rotates monthly so nobody becomes the manager by accident. And no owner gets the room for free, we all pay a reduced rate into the account, because free rooms fill up with owners and never with clients. Four years in, no fights about money. That is the agreement, not our characters.
03 Gear and keeping it alive

What I play, what breaks, and the part of the trade that is quietly disappearing.

The instruments

A 1976 Sho-Bud Pro III, an Emmons push pull, a Dobro and two lap steels, all of them older than most of the sessions.

The Sho-Bud is the main instrument and has been since 2004. E9 and C6 necks, ten strings, eight pedals and a mechanism that would horrify a modern engineer. The Emmons push pull is heavier, meaner and comes out when a track wants something that sounds like 1968. Amps depend on the song. A Session 400 for clean and loud, a small tweed when the steel needs to sound like it is in the room with the singer rather than behind glass. I do my own amp work. Learned it on a tour bus out of necessity and it has saved me more sessions than any pedal I own.

The parts problem

Changer fingers, bell cranks and pull rod ends are barely made any more, and the people making them are old.

A pedal steel is a mechanical instrument. Under the deck it is rods, bell cranks, cross shafts and a changer with small precision parts that determine the pitch. Those parts wear and break. Maybe three people in the country still make them and two are past seventy. When they stop, working instruments become furniture. This is not nostalgia, it is a supply chain about to fail quietly. I am actively looking for a machinist willing to quote small runs from sample parts. Dozens, not thousands, in aluminium, brass and steel. If you run a job shop with a slow week, there is a small steady market here that nobody is serving.

Current tracking day rates, what is in the building, and how to ask about the two free days each month.

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