The following will breakdown a simple and effective process for creating useful demos. Recording your own demos of your songs before bringing them to the studio is an inspiring and time-saving process. I have access to unlimited studio time and I still make myself go through a phone demo process before laying down vocals to a song, because it’s that beneficial. This is a beneficial process even if you record yourself. The following plan will also work for instrumental projects, but I will be explaining it in reference to vocal songs.
Benefits of Demoing
Your efficiency - you’ll be more prepared by having practiced recording the material already. This will likely lead to less takes in the studio, therefore a more efficient use of your session dollar.
Your team’s efficiency - your demo creates a resource to share with your producer and collaborators to get familiar with the material in advance.
Straight to the action - If you record your demos to a metronome, your producer can load them directly onto their DAW grid at the top of the session and quickly begin to build their production around it. This has potential to get you into to a productive session flow sooner by making it easy to build the foundational layers of the song on top of the demo version.
Audio preview is helpful - it’s best not to make the studio the first time you’re hearing an idea recorded. Hearing your song idea recorded in any form will give you perspective on how it’s sounding and give you time to practice and rewrite any rough spots. I prefer low quality demo devices, like phone voice memos, because their rough quality makes vocals sound flat. If you can can get your performance to sound decent on a voice memo playing out of a phone speaker, it’s more likely to sound great recorded in a studio environment.
Simple and Effective Demo Creation
To start you’ll need any device that can record and send an audio file - smartphone, laptop, tablet, portable recorder, camera, etc. Don’t overthink the complexity or audio quality of the device, it’s best to keep this simple and low quality. If you’re experienced working in a DAW yourself, you can record a demo there but no need to spend a bunch of time perfecting takes, editing or playing with the mix.
Next you need a metronome (here’s a good youtube tutorial if you aren’t familiar with this device). For one of the reasons listed above, getting straight to the action, working with a metronome is a great advantage. On most smartphones, tablets and laptops it’s possible to play a free metronome app out of the speaker at the same time as recording a voice memo. If you need to play the metronome click on a different device from your recorder you can use a traditional metronome, every musician should own one to practice with. If you need one, here’s a $20 metronome that will do the job and last forever.
Find the BPM of your song. Just about any metronome app will have a tap tempo button so you can identify the BPM of your song with 4 taps of your finger. If you’re using a more basic metronome without tap, turn the click on and determine if it’s faster or slower than the tempo you’re hearing in your head. Use the arrows up or down to go faster or slower to find the BPM that best represents where you want your song to groove.
Once you have a metronome going at the proper BPM, let it play in the background as you perform your song to it. Guitar/vocal, piano/vocal or even A cappella are all helpful ways to perform your song on a demo. Don’t get caught up in chasing perfection. You do want to get correct the song’s form and perform tightly with the metronome but you don’t need to perform with zero mistakes and perfect intonation (although being able to do that will make you a champ in the studio). If you’re bringing a song that’s not fully complete to the studio (it happens), demo as much as you have written as accurately as you can.
Bring your demo files or your demo recorder with the files on it to your session for your producer. For each song, the producer can now easily load up your demo and begin recording foundational layers of production over it. Being able to hear the vocal at tempo as many times as possible and create loops of it will help your producer hear what can be added to serve the lead vocal of the song. As the production builds, the demo will be referenced and played back less and less as it’s eventually completely replaced with high quality versions of its parts.
Those are the benefits of and action steps towards making useful demos. I hope this gave you inspiration and a path to starting or improving your demo process and making the most out of your time in the studio working with engineers and producers.
Hit me up with your questions or if you need to schedule some studio time with me!
Drew Mantia
Feel Good Music Recordings
3146264270
feelgoodmusicrecordings@gmail.com