You may have sung your latest song a hundred times in your writing room or while performing it live on stage. But it is often hard to spot any remaining flaws in the song’s structure when you’re busy concentrating on playing your instrument and trying to give a good vocal performance.
If the first time you get to listen back to a recording of your song is when you’re already in a professional demo studio, you could end up wasting expensive studio time by having to make last-minute adjustments to the song.
The best way to judge whether a song is truly finished is to hear it back just like an ordinary listener. In other words, listen to it without singing or playing along. Just your ears and a lyric sheet.
To do this, you need to make a simple recording of your new song—in effect, a rough ‘demo’ of the demo recording that you intend to make.
“I recommend that writers record all the time,” said The Kinks’ Ray Davies. “When you’re writing, you’re doing this balancing act between the instinctive thing that leaps right out of you and the refinement of that moment. The first time you sing a line, you might use a weird phrasing, or put a line on the upbeat rather than on the downbeat. Shifts like that will change everything, and you have to document what you did … You can always play the tape and say, ‘Oh, that’s how I did it!’”
This ‘memo’ demo should be an essential part of the re-writing and editing process. It can be as basic as a simple guitar/vocal or piano/vocal captured on a hand-held digital recorder or a smartphone.
During the re-writing process, you should re-record and listen back to your rough recording every time you make more changes to the lyrics or melodic structure. You’ll be amazed how it gives you a different perspective on how the song can be improved.
Once you’re absolutely satisfied with the song and your final test recording, you’ll then have something to play to the musicians and the vocalist (if you’re not planning to sing it yourself), so that they can learn the song in advance … and save you time and money in the studio.
# # # #