Inspiration As The Picture Gets Clearer

Inspiration As The Picture Gets Clearer | By Jesse Cannon |

Demos are like fuzzy out of focus pictures; you can hear the broad strokes and main ideas, but details of what a performer is doing are often clouded in the lack of clarity, tightness and refinement of a demo. After all, that’s what makes it a demo and not a final recording. As we begin to see this picture clearer, it becomes more and more obvious what we should be doing to make it great. It’s inevitable as the picture becomes clearer, you’ll begin to see mistakes, timing inconsistencies, clashing notes and other flaws in your song.

One of the hardest parts of creating music is it doesn’t sound like a final mixed and mastered record when we’re making it. Garageband demos can sound unbearably harsh making it difficult to know if you need to work harder on the melody to get that feeling you get from your favorite records. Even in an expensive studio with a great producer/engineer the rough mix doesn’t quite sound like a finished record. For an inexperienced ear it can be hard to figure out if they should harshly judge what they’re hearing or that it’ll sound better as the process goes on.

To make matters worse, our brains have a tendency to see new flaws once we’re able to concentrate on other details. I often find singers get tunnel vision in their consideration of a song until their vocal is done. All of a sudden they can see parts of a song they never noticed before their tight focus on the vocal is completed.

When you’ve been working on a record for weeks on end, it can be a tense moment where someone points out a flaw that should have been caught two weeks ago. Just as despised is when someone realizes during the mix another melody or harmony is needed to make the song “perfect.” While we can wish this epiphany came weeks earlier, until we hear songs in their near completed or mixed form it’s often hard for musicians to know how they should sound during the development of a song. The reaction of those paying for the session or trying to get home at a reasonable hour can be harsh when a drum track recorded a month ago all of a sudden has a new found flaw.

Experimentation­

One of the biggest fights in the studio is when someone decides to start “experimenting” when another member of the team is concerned there’s not enough time to get everything they want to do done. When this experimenting is now being done “on the clock” it can start to become detrimental to the recording coming out optimally. While this doesn’t need to be a fight, the anger is not without justification in many cases. The fact is if studio time is limited so that you can record the ideas you had before entering, taking precious time to experiment can be costly to the overall project.

It should be known before entering the studio that even the least inspired musicians are probably going to get more inspired in the studio and tinker as they hear what’s possible. So if studio time isn’t allocated for this, you’re not going to be able to bring your songs to fruition as you see where new parts should be added. This means if you want this song to come out great, you need to be sure that you’ve drafted this song enough there won’t be knots to tie up or that you’ll have time to do this when there are. 

Jesse Cannon is a Brooklyn based record producer, mixer and mastering engineer. He is co-founder of Noise Creators a service that connects musicians to the best producers in music today. He is the author of Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The New Music Business and the upcoming Processing Creativity.

Click here and listen to Jesse Cannon’s guest URM Podcast episode where we discuss strategies upcoming audio engineers can use to promote themselves, and lots of juicy mastering tips.

Click here to read Jesse Cannon’s previous URM blog entry, “Band Practice Is Toxic To Your Creativity.”

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