Making the most of your recording experience -The 6 elements of an effective publishing demo (Part 2)

This guest post was writ­ten by Joey Stuckey. Joey is a record­ing vet­eran with over 2 decades of expe­ri­ence in the music and record­ing indus­tries. He owns and oper­ates Shadow Sound Stu­dios in Macon, Geor­gia. Joey has per­formed and recorded with Trisha Year­wood, James Brown, Ted Nugent, Smash Mouth, The B-52’s and more.

What works for a fully pro­duced record­ing project ready for retail and dis­tri­b­u­tion isn’t the same kind of record­ing needed for a book­ing demo for your band to get per­for­mance oppor­tu­ni­ties and that is again dif­fer­ent from what is needed for a pub­lish­ing demo.

In this post, we will explore what makes a good pub­lish­ing demo from a sound record­ing stand­point, but, we will nec­es­sar­ily also have to explore just a bit about what pub­lish­ing is and thus what you need to do to have a record­ing that fits that criteria.

If you were to ask me what aspect of the music indus­try has the most ben­e­fits and the fewest draw­backs in regard to money spent, or put another way, what part of the music biz will pro­vide the best income for the least amount of work, I would say be a pub­lisher or song writer.

The songwriter/publisher relationship

The job of the pub­lisher is to under­stand the busi­ness side of the music biz and to get
the song the right oppor­tu­ni­ties to be recorded and dis­trib­uted. The song­writer is
more con­cerned with the craft of song­writ­ing, being cre­ative and com­mu­ni­cat­ing to the tar­get audience.

To make it pos­si­ble to fully exploit the poten­tial income of a musi­cal com­po­si­tion, you need the col­lab­o­ra­tive effort of both indi­vid­u­als. Some­times these are the same per­son. Many hit song­writ­ers own their own pub­lish­ing com­pany to retain a larger per­cent­age of the rev­enue gen­er­ated through the com­po­si­tion, how­ever each func­tion should typ­i­cally be han­dled exclu­sively, as they both take a lot of time and exper­tise to do well.

Just because you write it, doesn’t mean you should per­form it!

Just because you can write a great song — some­thing that is much harder than most peo­ple think — doesn’t mean you are the right artist to per­form or record it. In addi­tion, you also need some­one to facil­i­tate get­ting the musi­cal com­po­si­tion to the right artist and to man­age the busi­ness of col­lect­ing the money the song earns (believe it or not, this can be a daunt­ing task). This is where the pub­lisher steps in.

Did you know that many of the big stars like Car­rie Under­wood, Aero­smith and Rihanna don’t write all their songs? That’s right! They have songs pitched to them by music pub­lish­ers. How many times have you said, “This song I just wrote would be a big hit for one of my favorite per­form­ers if I could just get it to them.” Well, besides col­lect money and admin­is­trate the copy­right of the song, this is what a pub­lisher does for you.

Now, that isn’t to say you can’t be a song­writer and the artist. For exam­ple, U2, Bon
Jovi, Alan Jack­son and even Tay­lor Swift write or co-write their music and also are the pri­mary artist to per­form their music, but much of the time, that isn’t the case.

The 6 ele­ments of an effec­tive pub­lish­ing demo

1. A sim­ple record­ing where lyrics and melody stand out

The cru­cial thing about record­ing a good pub­lish­ing demo is to have a very sim­ple
record­ing where the lyrics and melody can be eas­ily heard. Don’t over­pro­duce, but rather make the record­ing some­thing that leaves a lot to the lis­ten­ers’ imagination.

The goal should be for the rep­re­sen­ta­tive lis­ten­ing to the record­ing to say, “I can hear my artist per­form­ing this song.” This is where many pub­lish­ing demos go wrong – the record­ing is pro­duced as if it were an album for sale, when it should be very min­i­mal in its approach. You want to leave room for poten­tial artists to envi­sion them­selves per­form­ing the song.

2. The right instru­men­ta­tion is used to enhance the song

You don’t need/want to show off your lead gui­tar prowess or how many back up vocals you can cram in to the cho­rus. Keep it straight ahead. For exam­ple, use a piano or gui­tar hold­ing down the rhythm and chords. Then maybe a lit­tle lead gui­tar or vio­lin or sax if needed keeps it from being too bland. Add bass and drums if needed to help the lis­tener feel the groove of the song.

Remem­ber that each genre will have dif­fer­ent needs. For exam­ple, R&B will need bass and drums. So will techno. A coun­try bal­lad how­ever, might not. In this case, you might be fine with just piano and vocal.

Ask your­self what instru­ments are needed to get the point and mood of the song across and only record those instru­ments, noth­ing more.

If that means you just do gui­tar and vocal, fine. If you need to have a full rhythm sec­tion that is fine too, but, again, remem­ber you aren’t try­ing to show off how well you can play — that would be more appro­pri­ate for a book­ing demo.

Remem­ber, your job is to sell the song and keep­ing it sim­ple is the way to get that job done. Don’t rule out a drum machine or even record­ing the drum tracks with a key­board if you have a good feel for that. Loop libraries such as Toon­track are also great to use.

3. The best vocal­ist for the job (hint: it may not be you!)

Many song­writ­ers can sing, but that doesn’t mean they can do it excep­tion­ally well!  Don’t make the mis­take of singing lead on your demo if it’s not the very best it can be. Also, when search­ing out a lead vocal­ist to sing on your demo, give con­sid­er­a­tion to the genre you are in. The last thing you need is some­one who sounds like Julie Andrews (no offense, Julie!), singing a con­tem­po­rary pop song in the tra­di­tion of Adele.

4. The vocals are hot in the mix

Make sure the lead vocals are up in the mix so the lyrics and musi­cal phras­ing and melody are easy to dis­tin­guish. Keep your objec­tives clear. The instru­men­ta­tion is there to enhance the song, not over­power it.

5. The right equip­ment and pro­duc­tion knowl­edge is utilized

The good news for home record­ing enthu­si­asts is that a good pub­lish­ing demo can
be done from home as the require­ments are much less than for book­ing demos or full
pro­duc­tions. If you have a few decent mics (I’ll cover the sub­ject of mics in another post) a good com­puter and inter­face (prob­a­bly around $2,000), you should be able to cre­ate a good pub­lish­ing demo in your home stu­dio. The main thing is to keep it clean with no extra­ne­ous noise like hum, clicks pops or hiss/white noise. If you can do that with your home setup, you are golden for a pub­lish­ing demo.

6. The demo is pro­fes­sion­ally mastered

Get your pub­lish­ing demo mas­tered by a good mas­ter­ing engi­neer before sub­mit­ting your demo. It serves to even out the dynamic vari­ables of the sound and gives it that pro­fes­sional lus­ter. It won’t cost you a sec­ond mort­gage to do so, either!

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