There may well be more than one post on demos. There are so many ways to do it.
At some point you may want to record your music and for a variety of reasons. In fact, these days there is little difference between the idea of a 'demo' and just a straight indie recording of your music. With either the internet, or by physical distribution at your shows, once your music is in the public domain - it is.
In this post i'm going to give an outline of how our band did a 'demo' and then let you hear it.
The traditional idea of a 'demo' recording carried an idea of legitimacy. The demo was a stepping stone for an unsigned band to try to get shows and to get signed to a label. A full budget recording done by a label was like 'the real thing'. But with modern technology you can achieve pretty good quality by yourself, or with self-financing.
But also, with the indie philosophy and a sub-culture non-commercial approach, you do not necessarily need quality to be legitimate. Let's go on.
The Shanghai band Pairs are quite cool. I've seen them. They have got shows at the main venues here and generated a small amount of buzz. They did it with extremely low-fi demos that are tape-recorder-in-the-room style. At near zero-budget.
At the extreme other end. Stegosaurus? skipped the demo stage and just paid a studio and producer to record their CD independently at standard studio quality. It cost them a ton of money.
I opted for something in between. At the time we didn't have a full fixed line up so I got some friends to help jam the songs and made simple recorder-in-the-middle-of-the-room rehearsal tapes.
Then I enlisted the help of friend Brad Ferguson who is good at technical stuff. He has:
a laptop computer
some music production software called Logic
a USB audio interface made by M-audio to go between the laptop and instruments
a program for making drum beats using Midi
He then listened to the rehearsal tape of our song and copied the drum beat, recreating it in Logic. Next he came to my house. We ran a cable between my small practice amp and his laptop via the interface. I then donned the headset and layed down the guitar and bass over the drums - directly without using a mic to the amp. My amp has a specific output for this.
So now we had most of the song down in two short sessions.
Finally we rented a room with a mic at a rehearsal room for two hours. We used Fanfare on Fahuazhen Road and it cost 60 rmb. There we recorded the vocals.
Finally Brad did some editing and production. We wanted good quality, even with the raw punk/rock style, so Brad spent a bit of time on this. We then uploaded the track to our pages at Neocha and Douban and got a pretty good reception. I was lucky enough to have Brad helping for free as he wanted to experiment with his recording set up.
So what does a semi-cheated (I would always choose to record drums live if possible) lap top home version sound like? Here it is, Paris 68 by Expendable
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