Oh, and the process is you show up and play songs and someone records you.
But seriously, if you want to maximize your investment, whatever it ends up being, make sure you have your sh*t together when you walk in. You don't want to waste time working out an arrangement of a song or trying out new stuff. Don't want to B.S. around with the drummer changing his old dull heads for $70/hr. When your session starts you're paying for the time until it ends. If you futz around for three hours trying to get a good sound and working out the kinks in the tunes, bickering, etc. that's money down the drain.
When you're low on money, or at least on a budget, if you can't nail the song within two takes with a little time for punch ins, you shouldn't be paying for studio time. Think about it. Three songs, at 5 minutes each is minimum 15 minutes. If you have to take even four times for each song, there's one hour right there. Add in time for setup and teardown (yeah, you'll probably get charged for that - the studio makes money from people being in there. If you take forty minutes to set up and twenty minutes to tear down, if they don't charge you that's $x.00 the studio is losing), listening back to EACH complete take and now you're up to 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Now that you've finally got each take that you want to use for your three songs, it's unlikely that it's perfect. We all make mistakes, even hardened studio cats. Add in another 40-60 minutes for punch ins for all members to fix their major screw ups (you don't throw out a perfectly good take because the drummer missed two fills and you dropped four or five notes). Now you're at around four hours.
Do you have a singer? Usually you record vox separately to keep everything from bleeding into the vocal track and making it easier to get a nice clean vocal take. Now you've got to sing through those three songs several times each until you get good vocal takes. The engineer may have to comp your vocal tracks (that means, take the best of the singer's numerous attempts at singing a song and layer and combine them into one final seamless vocal take). If your engineer is good, comping could take 30 minutes max. If your engineer is worth the $30 an hour you're paying him, he may be too incompetant to get it right, or take a looong time to do it.
Now you've got to mix the songs - get a good balance between all the instruments, eq each instrument so they all have their own space in the music. Think of this like soundcheck at a concert except in recording it's done afterwards. Before recording they'll get levels to make sure you aren't peaking and distorting as you record, but they will get the levels just right AFTER you're done. Quickie job, 10 minutes per song (and it will probably sound like he spent 10 minutes on it too). Average, 20-30 minutes per song. Pros spend a lot more time mixing, but they're doing it on tunes that will be listened to but 50 million people, so it's got to be perfect.
Now you're probably at around 5-6 hours in the studio, maybe more if there were problems along the way, maybe less if everyone (including the engineer) nailed it on the first swipe. This is assuming your tunes are well prepared and only took a max of three times to get that "great" take, your setup and teardown time was negligible, and you nailed the vox...and the engineer mixed the songs like a freakin speed demon.
