When Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue with his quartet, they spent a total of four days in the recording studio. They created one of the bestselling and most important jazz albums of all time in less than a week.
Of course, they’d been exploring for months. In clubs, in front of an audience, trading fours and taking risks.
Studio time is expensive. Studio time should be de-risked.
You’ll need to find a place to noodle. A place to take risks and do things that might not work, where the stakes are real but the stakes aren’t so high that you forget why you’re doing this work in the first place.