Well I dunno... I used to arrange and record entire school musicals - things like "The Wiz" and "Godspell". I would have to arrange and record the individual songs for each particulat student's singing key and do the full orchestration. It used to take me a full week to do a score and I would get paid $800-$1000 for my time, which was raised by the students doing car washes, candy sales etc. The musicals in turn were performed at competitions and in concerts by the students. And this was 20 years ago - I had the only synth-studio in the area so I wound up doing a lot of work for a lot of schools.

I also used to do the same thing for beauty pageant contestents - arrange & record the backing for their singing portions of the competitions in the required key. These kind of projects used to run around $200 a song, paid by the parent (that sounds like a lot of money for just one song, until you realize how much they spend on their wardrobe). I also did this for talent show contestants.

And as a final example - in my last trio the leader of the band used to book our group for private parties and then promise to learn a whole host of special songs for that party - we'd wind up with several weeks worth of work just to cover one gig because the leader had obligated us to do it. I put a stop to it and instituted a $100/song fee if we had to learn anything that wasn't part of our normal songlist to cover music purchase and rehearsal time. This cut the "special requests" down to one or two or zero. A lot of other bands picked up on this idea and started doing the same.

The time of a professional musician is how they feed their family... as long as the fees are going to that effect then I see nothing wrong with paying it. In all of the cases I cited above, some substitute music or amateur musicians could have been used but the results would not have been as good as hiring a professional to do the job the right way. Your (Bill's) situation sound similar to many I've run into in the past in different forms.

[This message has been edited by The Pro (edited 03-01-2005).]