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The Truth About Demos, Part 1

Exploration By Big George
Published May 1998

Making lots of working tapes can help you to ensure that when you go into a commercial studio to do a serious recording, everyone knows what they're doing and won't waste time and money. Here a drummer is playing to a click track.Making lots of working tapes can help you to ensure that when you go into a commercial studio to do a serious recording, everyone knows what they're doing and won't waste time and money. Here a drummer is playing to a click track.

In the first of a two‑part series, Big George looks at Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, getting signed to a record company on the strength of sending out a demo, and other fairy tales... This is the first article in a two‑part series.

Of all the misconceptions there are in the world today, one of the biggest, giving rise to an enormous waste of money and destroying many souls, must be the certain knowledge that sending out demos means you're going to be discovered and spend the rest of your life in supertax. IT JUST AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.

The reasons for this are numerous, but the main one is that all demos are completely crap — yes, even yours! Why? We'll come to that in a minute, but first let's look at exactly what you're doing. Along with literally thousands of (probably better prepared) other artists, you're sending someone you don't know something they don't want.

On top of all that, what you're sending has been done on the cheap. It may well have cost you every penny you and your family have, but compared with how much Oasis spent on their last album (and look how bad that sounded), it's a budget recording. And who produced it? You? People think that because they've listened to music all their life and written their own songs, they're going to be the perfect person to produce their demo (with a little help from the house engineer, who's done all this a million times before, and, despite knowing exactly where to place the microphones, probably just wants to get through another day in the studio with a bunch of self‑opinionated wannabes as best he or she can). Being that wrong before you even get into the studio doesn't bode well for the end result.

The fact is that when people produce their own music it usually ends up sounding like overblown, self‑indulgent, messy rubbish (I refer you to the band I mentioned some moments ago). You could argue the point, I suppose, but do you think that George Martin made a difference to Paul McCartney's music or not? Personally, I'd love to direct a big‑budget Hollywood movie — I've been watching films all my life, I've read dozens of books about how top directors go about getting actors to perform, how to film spectacular aerial shots, and how cutting‑edge special effects are achieved. But the truth is that I know my first efforts would look as embarrassing as anything sent to Jeremy Beadle — and quite apart from that, no‑one is queuing up to give me £100 million to burn.

What Is A Demo Anyway?

Having the benefit of someone else's ears can really help when you're recording your own music. Rupert Cook, owner and engineer of Lost Boys studio, is at the helm in this picture.Having the benefit of someone else's ears can really help when you're recording your own music. Rupert Cook, owner and engineer of Lost Boys studio, is at the helm in this picture.

Back in the black and white days of old, when me and your Mum were still in nappies, a demo was a 'Demonstration Tape', made by the writer/s of a song. It was played on a piano, with a committed vocal performance by one of the writers. All the words and chords, as well as important musical figures, were included, and that was it. No production values, no vocal tracking, no fairy dust — just the basic outline of the song. This would be given to a producer who would then, hopefully, take it into the studio, hire a huge band and cut the track with an artist. In the '50s, Tin Pan Alley (in London's Denmark Street) was where these demos were mainly done, and in the '60s there was a golden building in New York, called the Brill building, packed full of great writers. Today, apart from Nashville, Tennessee, the openings for demos like this are very limited, as the rich vein of opportunity for placing songs is now much reduced.

Along with literally thousands of (probably better prepared) other artists, you're sending someone you don't know something they don't want.

So that's a demo in historical terms. The kind of demo that's likely to concern you usually involves an artist (you) either going into a studio (pretty much unprepared) or spending months sweating in a home studio to do the best job you can. However you go about it, the most important thing to remember is what it's for! Are you recording a Working Tape, a Master, or a Sprat to catch a Mackerel? A lot of money can be badly spent if you don't take these things into consideration.

Working Tape: an awful (and I mean that in both senses of the word) lot of acts mistake this for their first or second or umpteenth demo. Working tapes are a very acceptable expense. Think of it this way: you spend a lot of money learning to drive a car before you can drive yourself to the shops without a grown‑up sitting next to you. So it's got to be worth a few hundred pounds to try out vocal harmonies for the first time, or learn to play with a click track in the headphones, or overdub live instruments, or even to experiment on getting a good way of recording a really important aspect of your sound. You should have done a lot of working tapes before you graduate to Masters, or even Sprats.

Sprat: I'm assuming that you're doing a demo in the hope that someone will hear it and love it so much that they will invest millions in making you into an international megastar. All you have to do is record a demo of your music (the sprat) and when 'they' (the mackerel) hear it, they'll immediately be hooked. Apart from booking you into the biggest studios on the planet with the best people in the business, they'll lavish the fabulous gifts of fame and fortune on you, and for the rest of your life your every need will be taken care of.

This is the real world, though, and in the real world you have to wake up to some harsh realities. The first of these is that making successful music is not a matter of chilling out and letting the vibe take you there. The vibe needs preparation, or, as it's known in the recording world, pre‑production — and I'll be covering top pre‑ and post‑production tips next month.

Master: There's never been a cheaper time to get 50/00/000 copies of your masterwork pressed up to sell to friends and relations, which will then pay you to send it to 'Them'. Some 'masters' can take a month in the biggest studio in Tokyo, just to record the bass part! This would be followed by a year re‑doing cymbal overdubs and sacking two producers over their lack of vision on the various orchestral sessions, and using hundreds of studios to achieve the right amount of reverb on the tambourine. Other masters can be done to perfection on a 4‑track for £50, with only one mic working properly. Or anywhere in between. Anyone can record a master, and if you get it right you can have a hit — you've just got to do it properly.

Modern Times

When you send out a demo, include a publicity shot which is in keeping with the band's musical direction. This photo would tell you right away that the band (Creep) are not a reggae act or an ambient trance remix team.When you send out a demo, include a publicity shot which is in keeping with the band's musical direction. This photo would tell you right away that the band (Creep) are not a reggae act or an ambient trance remix team.

As a reader of the best music making magazine on earth, there's a good chance you're one of the thousands of people who have spent a medium‑sized fortune on getting all your own great gear in order to do your thang. I'm now going to suggest the unthinkable: that you should consider going into a recording studio and paying someone a wad of your money to record your music. A couple of reasons why you might do this spring to mind:

You can take all your irreplaceable great gear into somewhere with even better gear.

You get someone else (the house engineer) giving an objective view of your work. You don't have to take their comments on board, but they do this sort of thing more often than you do.

A different environment can give a different and added perspective to the sound of your work.

Someone else sorts out tedious stuff like patching and making the tea, while you focus on the job in hand.

If the beginning of a song is crowded with too many (what seemed at the time) good ideas, the listener's attention will be diverted away from the melody and structure of the song.

It might have taken you weeks, months, or even years to get all your own gear to work as well as it does. Fine, but keeping to deadlines and having a structure to what you're doing in your own home, with all the associated distractions, is a tough discipline, especially if you're not getting paid for it. Being in a commercial studio for a finite amount of time (all of which you're paying for) can really concentrate the mind.

Producing The Goods

Big George doing a bit of demo mixing at Abbey Road Studio 3 — not that it helped!Big George doing a bit of demo mixing at Abbey Road Studio 3 — not that it helped!

To go back to my earlier point about producing your own recordings, many more great song demos have been passed on because of duff production values than have ever been accepted. Of course there are no records kept of this fact, but no artist/producer/ manager would switch off a track because it didn't have a massive layered guitar intro or a flanged backwards cymbal. However, if the beginning of a song is crowded with too many (what seemed at the time) good ideas, the listener's attention will be diverted away from the melody and structure of the song. The best bit of advice there is for producing hits of any kind is: If In Doubt, Leave It Out.

When people go into a studio for the first time and try to produce their own recordings, things can go badly wrong. They spend forever thinking up bits to stick in here, there and everywhere, and they can't see that the middle eight is rubbish and should be replaced with an instrumental chorus with a clave counter‑rhythm. Many talented musicians with a really exciting vision end up cocking up the production of their work and ultimately their career, because they didn't have the help of an objective producer with good judgement. If you're going into a serious recording situation, unless you're a total genius, it should be with someone you trust, someone who can give direction, who has your vision, and someone who — if they haven't got a reputation and wouldn't mind building one around you — would be prepared to start their production duties helping out with some of the working tapes.

Surveying The Situation

When you've actually got your sprat recorded and ready to go, before you send anything to anyone, you might want to try one or two of the following exercises. Some of these are designed to clue you in to the real demo tape‑record company interface situation, so that you're not too gutted by the inevitable rejection slips.

Send a blank cassette tape or CD to a company and see if they notice. Of the five record companies to which I sent blanks, two said they liked my music but it wasn't for them at this point, another said they would keep my tape on file until the next A&R meeting, and the other two didn't reply at all.

Send an early album track of a company's top‑selling artist and see if they pass on it. In the mid 1980s I was turned down by A&M on a Squeeze track, RCA on a Bowie track and Warner Brothers on a Doobie Brothers track.

Ring someone you haven't sent a tape to and ask them what they thought of it. You get a feel for the sort of people you'll be dealing with — and don't give your own name, as pissing people off who may one day give you a career packed full of money is not a good idea.

Many more great song demos have been passed on because of duff production values than have ever been accepted.

Place an ad in the music press asking for demos from acts who do the same(ish) sort of thing as you do. A knowledge of what other desperate artists are doing is no bad thing, and if you saw an ad in the music press asking for demos you'd send in yours, wouldn't you? I've never done this myself, but I've heard a lot of demos in my time; it can be both heartening when they're useless and depressing when they're fabulous.

Sending Out The Sprat

Don't forget to put your contact number and name on everything you send, and that includes no more or less than: a CD and a cassette (one for the office and one for the car — don't send a DAT; no‑one wants them); a photo or visual representation of who you are; and one glossy A4 of whatever you want to say about yourself, your music or the state of the environment, printed in a bigger font size than this column. We live in a sound‑bite world, so telling them when you started playing, who your first best friend was and what you hope to achieve in your life won't catch their eye as much as something like "We Are Surfing Love Zombies And We Desire Your Minds". OK, I'm sure you can do a lot better, but you get the picture. And unless you can think of a truly brilliant wheeze, I'd forget about chirpy gimmicks. Big boxes containing helium‑filled balloons are a pain in the butt. (As a matter of interest, the best gimmick I ever saw was a job application. It arrived in a shoe‑box wrapped in tinfoil and it contained one large banana, nothing else. The sender had written on the side, by pricking it with a pin "I'd be perfect", then her name and phone number. She must have done it before it had ripened, as when it arrived it was yellow and the message was clearly written in dark brown. She got the job.)

Whatever you do, no matter how much you love your work, don't send out every song you've ever recorded. Remember, you're sending out a demo in order for the person who gets it to take an interest in your music, right? Well, don't imagine that the more songs you send, the more they'll like you. In fact, it's the complete opposite. The old advice was to send out three songs, putting what you believed to be the best song first. This is advice which has been adhered to by millions of unsuccessful acts over the past couple of decades. In truth if 'they' do listen to your recording, I guarantee that if the first 10 seconds doesn't grab them on the first track, the chances are that they might give the next track a 10‑second chance. But if they're not blown away by then, you've lost this round of the game. On the other hand, if they do like the first 10 seconds, they might listen to an entire minute of the song and most probably give the next couple of tracks a quick spin, until they've heard enough. But there's a stack of other (no) hopefuls for them to get through, and most likely you've lost again.

The best bit of advice there is for producing hits of any kind is: If In Doubt, Leave It Out.

Now if there's one thing in the entertainment business that acts as a barometer of whether you're doing well or not, it's who's calling who on the telephone! If they're ringing you, things are looking up. So with that in mind, I think the New Best Advice is to send no more than one minute, 60 Earth seconds, of your best song. If they like it and want to hear more, they might call you, and if they call you (rather than you calling them) you're doing better than you could ever have expected. If they don't like your 60‑second taster, it wouldn't have made any difference if you had given them the full 7‑minute opus: they'd still be in a meeting every time you called.

Don't Let Them Grind You Down

Be truly prepared for everyone that you send your music (and your soul) to, to either hate it, not be bothered or, worst of all, be completely non‑committal about it. But on the off‑chance that 'they' show a modicum of interest, have an idea of what you're after from the person you're sending your tape and CD to. Naturally, you'll say yes to pretty much anything they offer, but having a clue about what you want is a good idea. Things you can ask for are:

A face‑to‑face meeting in their office.

For them to put up some recording time.

For them to come to see you either in your bedroom studio or live or in rehearsal.

An invite to a press launch as their guest.

A 1950s pink Cadillac with red interior...

There's a good chance you'll get a couple of them if you play your cards right, but ask for all of them anyway.

Enough of this ego‑bashing: next month we'll go through a few of the tricks of the trade, do a bit of ducking and diving, and sort out exactly how you go about reeling in not just a mackerel, but the Loch Ness Monster of a music/recording career (doing it on the cheap, and executed efficiently). Now cheer up and go and produce a hit!

Copyright

Record companies and publishers stealing songs is not the most prevalent crime the police have to deal with — although that doesn't stop writers getting paranoid about someone out there stealing the chorus of their soon‑to‑be‑worldwide‑smash song. The best methods I can think of to copyright your music are these:

  • Send a DAT/CD/cassette of the work in a recognisable state (keyboard/guitar and voice will suffice) in a registered envelope, to your priest, old school teacher, doctor, or anyone not connected to the music industry and whose appearance is as far removed from the Prodigy's Keith Flint as possible, for safe keeping. That dates it to the date of postage. Make sure they don't open it, though. Sending it to your bank manager to deposit will cost a bit of money to sort out, but if you've got a groovy bank manager they might like the idea of doing it for nothing — no harm in asking.
  • Have it played on any logged broadcast medium (archived transmissions). All (legal) radio stations you can pick up in a car have their entire output recorded, which means that if your track is played on the farming hour on BBC local radio you can date it to that transmission time. Some hospital radio stations are also logged.
  • Have the work published by a reputable publishing company. Sending the title of the work to PRS (Performing Right Society) does register the work, but it does not copyright it. But if you send them a copy of the lyrics and the top‑line melody, it might be enough to win in a court of law against someone who does try and nick your tune. It's not cast‑iron proof, though, and you do need to be a member of PRS before you can avail yourself of their services.

Sleep easy.