Both.Live is immediate and in your face crazy.Immediate reward and immediate money in pocket.Such a buzz especially when it goes over the top.Sometimes though very boring and painful.The audience is just like "we ain't gonna get into it no matter what you do."And then you can play for four people that dig it and you are getting into it as though it is four thousand.Live requires an audience response,you are bouncing off of that and getting into it with all that you have got.But sometimes you have to play for pissy people who want karoke or a DJ.They do not want to relate to people really playing and singing.And it makes no sense to get into a conflict with them,you just lay back and get through the boring gig.It is an opportunity for a paid rehearsal.I will tell you this so sincere,if you have a dream you cannot let ugly little people get inside of you who want to ruin you.And you do not do a half-ass show either,you are rehearsing for tomorrow night which may be a whole different set of circumstances.You have got to remember you are getting paid to be onstage and every club in the world now,even the miserable shitholes have got a hundred bands hoping to play there,"we will play for draft beer!" and trust me,they sound like it too...They are too damn loud,they argue onstage and take forever to get to the next song,they get drunk and sound like shit.Maybe they have got a lot of their high school buddies coming out to the show for one night and the bar makes good money but the next night it is empty.And to play a club is not to be a rockstar as you may think,you are being paid to be a liquor salesman which is how the bar pays their bills.I am cool with that and have sold quite a few tons of liqour.The hard thing about this is the anti smoking laws meaning if the bar sells food nobody can smoke in the bar.If I were watching a band that I like I would have a glass of wine and enjoy smoking a cigar.They have systems developed that will pull all of the smoke right out of the club so non-smokers are not troubled by it.And most smokers are prone to drink more.So you are playing to a room that has not got a lot of people in it because the smokers are outside smoking.Smokers pay an incredible amount of tax money for the privelege of smoking and if the club provides a systrem to suck up the smoke they ought to be able to relax and enjoy a smoke and listen to the band and buy another round for the table.We have played two really nice cigar clubs with these systems and you cannot smell any cigar smoke in them thinking that the place would reek of it.When I work a gig at a club and walk into the bathroom and it is cleaner that my bathroom in my penthouse I think "what a nice club!" And we may work a place like that tonight and tomorrow be in a nitty gritty shithole with an audience going nuts for us.Or vice-versa.Such is the life of a musician.It is to look to the end of the night when you receive your music award package which is your money.Paid up without complaint. The studio so beautiful yet in a different way,it is laboratory and clinical,analytic and mathmatical.Measured fidelity,ambience..synergy..What may work wonderfully onstage may suck in the studio.You are freezing time and space with "fixed sounds."You also are now paying to play.The product is a fixed object that always sounds the same.This enviornment is about now the economy of your playing/singing.You might freak out onstage and do some crazy things with your guitar that the audience loves that will totally suck on a recording.Because you can't just blow over the top of it here,every note has to mean something and every clam will stick out like a sore thumb.The thing that the engineer and producer are listening to is the silence between everything which you are not concerned about yet this is what makes a dynamite recording.Surely this is what the session players know that you don't as you watch a guy come in and cut the part you were struggling with easily.And after several takes a producer will be admant about this especially in New York or LA,they have a first call guy that will come in and set it all straight.You just re-learn it to play it onstage.Don't worry to much about it,you will still get the credit and the session guy will get his bread whilst you set out.All of it gets wound as tight as it can in the studio.It can be such a torture chamber for so many players and singers.Yet the vets are hanging loose and having a ball.The MOST important thing about a recording session is to be having fun doing it.That is what is going to show up on the mastered recording.which is going to be around forever.