Recording Music Demos

Video Transcript

"Before going into the studio, it's a good idea to record demos of your music at your practice space. That way, you get a sense of what the stuff is going to sound like played back and you can identify any glaring problems that might not be evident as you're playing. For example, often times when bands are playing, they tend to naturally speed up or slow down during a performance because they're feeling the energy. However, in a recording, this will often come across as amateurish. So you don't want this to be happening and you want to identify if you're doing it during your performance. Or if you are doing it and you realize that if you were just to make sure that everything was at the same tempo, that the song would be missing something, then it's time to write a new part. Whatever the case may be, it's good to hear your music played back to you before you get into the studio because once you get into the studio, the time for changing the song writing is really over unless you have a huge budget. So what I recommend you do is either as an entire group or just a couple of you, even one person is OK for this, sit down even just with a tape recorder and play out your songs and listen back and see if you hear any mistakes, because once you go into the studio, you're not going to really be able to fix those mistakes. We're talking about structural mistakes. Either the song is too long or the bridge is too short or you need an extra chorus or something, you need to figure that out before you get into the studio. If you choose to record your entire group playing in your practice space, you're probably not going to be able to get a great recording. What I would recommend doing is not using a tape recorder because you're going to get a horrible sound with the drums. I would get a, use your vocal microphone, bury it under pillows or something like that, hook it up to a laptop if you can demo that, that's the best option, and then record and accept the fact that you're not really going to hear vocals but at least the drums won't be knocking out the bass and the guitar. You can also treat this as an opportunity to figure out tempos. So as you're coming up with demos, you can keep an eye on the tempo that you're recording at so that once you get into the studio, you know what all your tempos are ahead of time."