Make the best out of your band's demo, part 1

Before starting to record an album it would be a good idea to make a demo of all the songs that you're planning to record. However, making a demo may be very time consuming thing to do, so, that's why it's important to make the best out of the time spent on the demo. In my earlier post The best decision to make before starting a recording process I already discussed how we used the same tempo throughout the demo, recording and live performance.

Before going any further to explain the demoing phase on STUD's last album I briefly tell what we did differently with our two earlier albums. With the earlier demos we recorded the basic tracks, that is rhythm guitar, bass and drums, live in our rehearsal room using a simple Zoom H2 stereo recorder. The stereo track from Zoom was transfered to Pro Tools and synced to a click track (the basic tracks were recorded playing to click). After that the vocals, guitar solos and keyboards were added, and the whole session was mixed down finalizing the demo phase.

Now, going back to our last album's demos, we didn't make the basic tracks in our rehearsal room, but did everything from the start in Pro Tools. The demo drums were done with EZdrummer 2, which is absolutely wonderfull tool for making drum tracks fast. It's super easy to drag drum parts to EZdrummers's drum track and edit, copy and paste pieces together.

For guitars I used a plugin. I tested several different plugins for guitar, but when I first time tried Scuffham S-GEAR I was totally sold. S-GEAR doesn't have any of that high end fizz that makes many other plugins sound unnatural. It has pretty cool presets too, which you can use as a starting point. The bass track for the demo was actually a guitar tuned down an octave and run through Softube's Bass Amp Room, a compressor and an EQ. For keyboards I used plugins that come with Pro Tools.

With these steps and tools I was able to make the basic tracks for the demos, and even use some of the tracks on the final recording. In the next post I will go further in the making of the demos for our new album. So, stay tuned, if you wanna read more!

-Mika

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Recording guitars to an album, is it right time for a change, part 2

In this post I will go through recording guitars for STUD 's third album. I already discussed recording guitars for our two previous albums in my post " Recording guitars to an album, is it right time for a change, part 1 ", which you might also want to check out. However, on the third album I took a complete different route, and therefore the question: "is it right time for a change?". Some of you have read my post " Make the best out of your band's demo, part 1 ", where I told that I used Scuffham S-Gear plugin for guitar, when making the demos for our new album. By the time it was time to start recording backing tracks for the album, I asked myself a question: could I make the record using S-Gear instead of real amps. At first, I thought that it's not a real deal if I didn't have my amps blasting through microphones, but little by little I started to really like the idea. Already, while making the demos I noticed that the guitar sou...
Read more

13 steps to take when you're recording and publishing your bands music

Since I’m going to mention different persons involved with the project of making STUD ’s 3 rd album by their names, it’s fair to briefly introduce myself and the other guys in the band. I’m Mika Kansikas, the guitar player, songwriter and the producer of STUD’s albums. I’ve also done big part of recording and mixing the albums. The other guys in the band are Ari Toivanen (vocals), Jyrki Partanen (bass) and Stenda Kukkonen (drums). Besides being great musicians and friends for life, they have done their share of adding flavours to the songs here and there, doing the background vocals and percussions, and of course being the most important judges of the end result. Enough said about us. Let’s jump back to the topic. After my last blog post I started to think that I really didn’t answer my own question: How is it possible to spend 2+ years recording an album before anything is released ? So, let me try again. One big reason, of course, is that we have our day jobs, families and othe...
Read more

Getting the basic equipment for your recording project

To make a professional recording by yourself will require certain amount of equipment and other tools to have available. For myself to be able to take the recording process as far as possible without assistance or a need to borrow equipment has been mandatory. That has given us a total freedom to proceed at our own pace, and ultimately have a good sounding demo before needing any outside help. I've basicly had the same equipment from the time we made the first STUD album "Out Of The Darkness". So, we've used the stuff already on three albums, which I consider a pretty good investment. One key requirement was that the recording gear must be portable, so that I can work both at home and at our rehearsal room, and where ever else we decide to work. Before starting to work on our first album in 2012 I got myself a MacBook Pro with enough power to run the software needed for the work. I've got Pro Tools 10 as a DAW, which really has been a wonderful platform to gr...
Read more