I have a home studio with a lot of amazing gear.
Dont mind the photo its a lot of work to install 50 channels
(The speaker with the missing grill is worth $30K so ignore the cracked grills.)
I have only regular studio microphones and pre amps no high end pre amps.

Recently a woman asked to have her kids record rap vocals on my DJ setup.
Yes I have a lot of nice synths and a vocal room and guitar amp room.
Pretty much 36 individual channels into cubase, and another 24 on a sub mixer in another room.

Ideas? Im extremely rural and there no jobs and its either this or sell my moog.

My gear is not fully installed excuse the mess,
Thing is the woman and her kids said her friends wanted to also book blocks of time.

Yes im the guy who edits wedding videos and bday parties on AVID for a few bucks a year and its getting almost serious.

if it were me in your situation i'd probably charge the kid's mom like $50/hour. maybe more flexible if they book a whole night or something. i imagine you're probably not gonna be able to charge some kid's mom top dollar.

I'll give you my thoughts... I'm in rural Arkansas, but almost all of my work is coming from out of state. I'm not really targeting local people as much, but I've been doing this for a while now and have a lot of people I've worked with over the years willing to come out here. I've had better success booking with a day rate to give people a starting point, then negotiating some sort of a project rate from there. I think most people will appreciate not having to constantly watch the clock, and it's easier to convince people to go ahead and factor in for a project as opposed to a quick in and out. You end up getting to know people better, build relationships and get repeat business.

I don't have a flashy/huge studio with a commercial look. I always wanted it to feel like you're sitting around in someones living room playing music. My overall advice is that for the most part, if you're planning on just "recording" people, charge a day rate. Unless you're a larger commercial studio, I don't see the point in charging people an hourly rate and giving them the option to "book an hour or two". I got bombarded by local people when I first built the studio here that wanted to book a few hours, and most of those were a total waste of time. They weren't very good, were not prepared, didn't take things seriously and generally were not pleasant to be around. I think it's better to force people to at least book a day at the very least, and push to negotiate a project rate. You might miss out on a few little things here or there, but in the long run you'll weed out the time wasters that aren't serious about things.

There's always exceptions to this and plenty of situations where maybe charging by the hour for some specific service (like editing or something?) might make sense. If you're wanting to actually get people in to record though and you're a smaller space starting out, I wouldn't recommend the hourly approach. Realistically, I doubt you're really going to run into days where you can potentially book multiple artists in the same day for an hour or two each. Once you agree to record someone on a day, that day is going to be completely shot for you. Start out reasonable and be willing to negotiate a big discount if someone is willing to do a whole project with you. That's going to help you build a much more solid foundation and reputation as opposed to trying to get anything and everything you can. I tried that, and it really sucked . Come up with a reasonable day rate and ask people to respect your time. If they want to book an hour for a vocal, they're welcome to try that with a commercial facility that puts up with that crap (which most don't anymore).

Went with $30 an hour for me to record my ASR10 LA RIOT drums and the Traktor DJ. Tossing in some TR-909 for an even $100

Hope it makes some kids day/

For basic studio services in a home studio, $30-50 seems to be the mark. I was charging that 25-40 years ago, and it hasn't much increased. Like playing local gigs. I was making $150 a night in the 1970's when I could buy a brand new MG sports car or VolksPorche for $2900. I now make $150-$250 a night, half a century later when a nice little sports car is 20 times what it was then. That's the small time music biz.

As I was doing a whole production thing for artist/songwriters, playing everything, arranging, producing, engineering, I could do better with a by-the-song package deal because I work so fast. But add all those services in at the hourly rate, and all they did was sweeten the deal so that people came to me instead of the other places in town that just recorded/engineered. And this added hours to the project also, so there was that.

But you can't make a living. Even back then when $30 was three times what it is now, it was a mad-money hobby thing, at home. Labor of love, more like doing favors for starving songwriters.

From what I’ve seen on your site, your studio is a beautiful space (as is the space around it outside). For some reason I thought you were in Europe. Either way, your space looks like it has a great vibe to make music.

IMO, the correct answer to this question is: "whatever the traffic will bear". Location, the local competition and your reputation will be more influential in what you can charge than your gear list. If you just opened to the public, you may need to have a lower price to attract people in. If you name gets around, maybe you can start raising your rates, even if your equipment remains exactly the same.

I think every studio gets a certain amount of "birthday present" sessions. It's pretty rare that these result in repeat business, though.
Potential clients aren't going to look up your gear on Ebay to see what it is worth. Nor do they even care unless they are using that specific unit in their session. OTOH, appearances matter.
To me, your place looks very well set up - for you to do your work. But I suspect that few of these young rapper clients will really take advantage of all those synths. For clients, "mess" is not going to be attractive. Making your studio look like a sleek, futuristic spaceship is probably going to be too expensive, but there is always the "cozy" approach. You know, rugs, lamps, couches, etc. Which can be a little cluttered, but still needs to be comfy and relaxed and certainly not dusty or dirty or with wires hanging out.
Not sure what counts as a "regular" studio microphone, but if if local rappers are going to be your market, you might want to make sure you have at least one decent vocal mic. I wouldn't worry about outboard mic preamps right now.
that could work somewhat in your favor if there are no competing studios nearby.

I agree with charging a day rate, but don't make it too low, this is why I specialised in just mixing, I only really enjoy recording if they are amazing, the reality is that you're not going to get the cream of the crop, also make them pay up front, for the entire project or nothing, if they're willing to do this then they're usually decent people and trustworthy. One of the worst things you can possibly do for your mental health is record a deluded drummer who thinks they are the next jeff porcaro but in reality it's more like mr bean on crack cocaine, you're gonna be tearing your hear out 'correcting' every single mistake, you need to have the balls to just say no you're not good enough and don't do it for any money.