Unless you have your own home recording set-up where you can afford to experiment with demos, don’t make the mistake of taking a new song into a professional studio believing you can fix any structural weaknesses during the demo recording process.
When you’ve booked a studio for a certain number of hours—and the studio clock keeps on ticking—there’s a huge amount of stress and pressure in the room. It’s like taking a crucial test at school and you’re working against the clock and starting to panic. Unless you’re in a successful band with all the studio time in the world, it’s not the ideal environment for trying to perfect a song.
So don’t waste expensive studio time on trying to fix a problem that should really have been resolved at the re-writing and polishing stage.
When you have a brand new song and you’re really excited about it, there is understandably a temptation to rush into the nearest studio and demo it right away— even if there are still one or two cracks in the song. Much better to be patient and spend a little more time getting the song right before you enter a studio.
Hit songwriter Max Martin, for example, sets a very high standard of quality-control for his songs which results in only one idea in 300 getting to the demo recording stage. “Sometimes you have to be a mass murderer and kill your darlings,” he told Time magazine.
You can save yourself a lot of wasted time and money by making simple guitar/ vocal or piano/vocal ‘memo’ demos on a hand-held recorder or a smartphone at the re-writing stage. Once you’re satisfied with the song, you’ll be able to play your final rough recording of it to the session musicians and demo vocalist (if you’re not singing it yourself).
However, if you still have any doubts about the song before going into the studio, don’t think giving it the full demo treatment will solve the problem. It probably won’t.
Most songs will, of course, sound better with the help of a full studio production and professional musicians. But experienced publishers and A&R executives will look behind the production façade—and all the fancy guitar fills and background vocals—and spot any remaining flaws in the song itself.
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