Musical Demo Submission thread

[BonsaiK]

Hi BonsaiK. I'm not sure if you're still on this thread now it has derailed. I'm in a progressive funk band (yes, progressive dream funk ) in Australia. I read what you wrote to the other prog muso in Aus, but I was wondering if you had any more advice for a less heavy band.

This is our heaviest song, I think it encompasses a lot of what we do. It's from a while back, and it was played was too fast, but it's still the best live recording we have.

Spoiler

It's been derailed to high hell but damned if I'm not going to try to get it back on track. I should start a separate "BonsaiK everything you say sucks cock" thread for people who want to troll me so they don't clutter existing threads.

The problem with most "funk bands", especially in Australia, is that they're actually not very funky at all. Add "progressive" into the mix and there's a unique problem - progressive music is all about going through changes as the song progresses (hence the name) whereas funk music is all about laying down a funky rhythm and keeping it there. As a result, people who actually like both progressive music and funk music in the same song are as rare as hen's teeth. The only bands who ever got away with that stuff didn't really play funk music.

The way I see it you've got two choices if you want this band to gain a wider audience:

1. Ditch the funk part of what you do and become a progressive rock band. Progressive rock isn't super-popular in Australia either, but it's a better shot than where you're at now. You practically are progressive rock anyway, it won't take much effort, all you'd have to do is chill out on the 7th chords a bit, and break the bass player's thumbs so he can't do that doink-doink stuff.

2. Go completely funk and ditch the rock influences. This means, above all else, confiscate the double-kick from your drummer and make him learn how to do actual funk beats. Your drummer plays like a rock guy and this is why you don't sound remotely funky at the moment, regardless of what the guitar and bass are doing. Without funky drums it's just not funk - it's rock with funk guitar over the top. Then you'd have to make him do the same tempo for an entire song too. It's probably a bit of a tall order, because you want to be progressive obviously and this advice is probably against everything you stand for, but if you can do funk well without the progessive rock influences, there's a real market there for this right now. And break your bass player's thumbs. What makes a bass line funky is note choice and placement, not that doink-doink stuff. The time for that playing was 1990.

I'd be interested to hear some slightly less-heavy stuff if you have anything, just to see if the same issues exist there.

 

[II2]

@BonsaiK

I have a slightly different question/submission that falls outside the criteria you established, but I think it's one you are probably familiar with and could easily give me a quick pointer.

I'm not really at the "demo submission" stage; I have 2 full length albums and an EP mastered to CD audio standards under my belt, but... they're not really doing a lot for me. Songs get written, mastered, thrown in the vault and eventually packaged for my website. Most of my paid work in the music industry is from semi-professional foley work and sound design, rather than my personal output.

Specifically, I would like to establish myself on itunes, to both officiate my music in the 'common archive' and remain self published while incurring a (likely minute) source of secondary income.

I'm sure you've had experience working with iTunes and was hoping you could provide some n00b pointers for someone who would like to jump on the bandwagon, with little prior experience save owning an iPad.

Cheers.

If you want to listen to my work, I'll PM you the link, but it ultimately is irrelevant to the advice I seek.

 

[BonsaiK]

@BonsaiK

I have a slightly different question/submission that falls outside the criteria you established, but I think it's one you are probably familiar with and could easily give me a quick pointer.

I'm not really at the "demo submission" stage; I have 2 full length albums and an EP mastered to CD audio standards under my belt, but... they're not really doing a lot for me. Songs get written, mastered, thrown in the vault and eventually packaged for my website. Most of my paid work in the music industry is from semi-professional foley work and sound design, rather than my personal output.

Specifically, I would like to establish myself on itunes, to both officiate my music in the 'common archive' and remain self published while incurring a (likely minute) source of secondary income.

I'm sure you've had experience working with iTunes and was hoping you could provide some n00b pointers for someone who would like to jump on the bandwagon, with little prior experience save owning an iPad.

Cheers.

If you want to listen to my work, I'll PM you the link, but it ultimately is irrelevant to the advice I seek.

I don't work with it a lot myself, but I have a friend with a catalogue of recordings he did over 30 years that does reasonable business on iTunes. He didn't try to set that up himself, he got an agent to do it for him. He's not very computer-literate though, he's a bit cynical about the Internet and so forth.

If you are releasing your own CDs yourself, completely independently, or even better pas part of your own company (iTunes like that sort of thing), there's no reason why you can't try and strike up a contract with iTunes yourself. That's as easy as following the dots on their website. They'll probably give you their standard agreement that they give to any artist. Read it make sure you understand everything in it before you sign. If there's any ambiguouty there get a music industry lawyer on the case. Looking at the profit-sharing ratios on iTunes, I'd say it's probably better for you financially to have a record company of some form before negotiating with iTunes, otherwise you might only get 10% of the income from sales, as they might try and move themselves in the position of being your nominal record company for Internet sales. If on the other hand you're signed to a major label, well you probably will only see 10% of profit from sales and there's nothing you can do about that... except not be on a label, or renegotiate your contract (good luck with that one if you're a relatively unknown artist).

 

[BonsaiK]

*snip*

Thanks for the input. Everyone in the band has quite different influences, so I can see how that mix may sometimes sound jarring. Personally, I can't understand drums at all, so I don't notice. We were about to take a break as the drummer and I are heading to Canada soon, but we were already planning on easing up on the funk aspect and moving towards more of a fusion sound.

I think I would take the prog part over the funk part, mainly because I just can't write in straight 4/4 anymore. I think I've mentally scarred myself.

Yeah if you can't write in 4/4, and you don't understand drums (at least on a purely theoretical level), funk is not for you!

 

[II2]

snip

I don't work with it a lot myself, but I have a friend with a catalogue of recordings he did over 30 years that does reasonable business on iTunes. He didn't try to set that up himself, he got an agent to do it for him. He's not very computer-literate though, he's a bit cynical about the Internet and so forth.

If you are releasing your own CDs yourself, completely independently, or even better pas part of your own company (iTunes like that sort of thing), there's no reason why you can't try and strike up a contract with iTunes yourself. That's as easy as following the dots on their website. They'll probably give you their standard agreement that they give to any artist. Read it make sure you understand everything in it before you sign. If there's any ambiguouty there get a music industry lawyer on the case. Looking at the profit-sharing ratios on iTunes, I'd say it's probably better for you financially to have a record company of some form before negotiating with iTunes, otherwise you might only get 10% of the income from sales, as they might try and move themselves in the position of being your nominal record company for Internet sales. If on the other hand you're signed to a major label, well you probably will only see 10% of profit from sales and there's nothing you can do about that... except not be on a label, or renegotiate your contract (good luck with that one if you're a relatively unknown artist).

Cheers, Thanks!

 

[Treefingers]

snip

Brilliant.

http://ninja-starfish.bandcamp.com

2 originals and one cover...

Keenly awaiting your feedback.

 

[BonsaiK]

Right, I finally got the damn thing recorded. I'm a pretty bad singer, but I did my best with it.

Spoiler

I wrote it with one of my friends, and he does backing vocals near the end.

Okay, so you're not the world's greatest singer but then that's okay, your voice is workable. I'd lose the slight Eddie Vedder tinge in it though - nobody wants to hear that vocal tone in 2010.

Golden rule when your singing is best described as "functional" - don't overstretch yourself. In this song you're doing lots of reasonably hard-to-pull-off vocal gymnastics, and you're getting your pitching right about 60% of the time, which is about 40% shy of where you need to be. You don't really need all that airy-fairy high shit to make the song work. Maybe a tiny bit at the very end, at the most, but I'd consider canning that side of things altogether, and just concentrate on the notes you know you can hit. If that means the song only has a few notes in it, that's okay - use loud-soft (dynamics) in your voice instead of pitch to give the song the emotion it needs. In that end bit, instead of doing high stuff, why not try to inject some more angst into your voice and see where that leads... you don't have to make it into a screamo song, but given what the song is about, it really needs to "get serious" somehow in that end section. Just be sure to use compression on your vocals or the results won't sound good no matter what you do - compression is a vocalist's best friend.

On the plus side the guitar sounds good, but whoever is strumming it doesn't understand how to strum a guitar, because it's not quite in time. If I were to guess, I would say that this problem stems from the guitar player not understanding the true function of the right hand in guitar strumming. In this type of song, the right hand/arm acts like a metronome, keeping the player in time, and syncopation is realised not by speeding up and slowing down the hand/arm, but by keeping the hand/arm movement consistent as clockwork and alternating between "hit" and "miss" strokes on the guitar itself to generate a syncopated pattern.

The correct strumming pattern for this song therefore should be:

V - V A V A V - V A V A V - V A

The V is a downstrum, the A is an upstrum and the - is when you do either a downstrum or an upstrum but you deliberately miss the strings. If you're doing anything else, you're doing it wrong. Amateur players will often do:

V = A V A V A = V A V A V = A V

...or something like that. The = denotes the hand/arm staying completely still. This might seem more economical but it actually screws up your timing. Also note how this pattern forces the player to do two downstrokes in a row when it wraps around. That's fine if you're Metallica but it's not fine for acoustic ballads, and it will cause you to mess your timing every time you have to do it.

Hopefully this makes some sense. I'd consider the above to be the bare minimum of what you'd have to fix up before the song would be worthy of serious demo submission to a label or whatever.

 

[BonsaiK]

snip

Brilliant.

http://ninja-starfish.bandcamp.com

2 originals and one cover...

Keenly awaiting your feedback.

I have to provide my email address to download the link? Not happening. Give me a YouTube or MySpace link please.

 

[Treefingers]

snip

Brilliant.

http://ninja-starfish.bandcamp.com

2 originals and one cover...

Keenly awaiting your feedback.

I have to provide my email address to download the link? Not happening. Give me a YouTube or MySpace link please.

You can stream them straight from the website.

EDIT: However if this doesn't work for whatever reason i will sort something out. Let me know.

 

[BonsaiK]

snip

Brilliant.

http://ninja-starfish.bandcamp.com

2 originals and one cover...

Keenly awaiting your feedback.

I have to provide my email address to download the link? Not happening. Give me a YouTube or MySpace link please.

You can stream them straight from the website.

EDIT: However if this doesn't work for whatever reason i will sort something out. Let me know.

Oh, so you can. My mistake.

God I hate the 12-bar blues progression, but I don't hate it as much as I hate funk/blues. Those two genres should just stay in separate corners because they just don't play nice together. That's kind of a crying shame because your band is actually really good. The vocals are good and even unique, everyone can play their instruments and let's face it, two-pieces doing just about anything are hot right now (thank christ you don't have a bass player because he'd probably do that insipid doink-doink shit and make me want to kill him). If your music was a little less blues/funk bar-band and a little more something else, this would actually be really marketable, that's really the only weakness you have. Start writing some songs for your next EP and stay away from funk guitar playing/drumming for the love of god... maybe also consider writing some songs that don't go in 12-bar format, even actual traditional blues bands are starting to shy away from that shit these days...

 

[Treefingers]

snip

Brilliant.

http://ninja-starfish.bandcamp.com

2 originals and one cover...

Keenly awaiting your feedback.

I have to provide my email address to download the link? Not happening. Give me a YouTube or MySpace link please.

You can stream them straight from the website.

EDIT: However if this doesn't work for whatever reason i will sort something out. Let me know.

Oh, so you can. My mistake.

God I hate the 12-bar blues progression, but I don't hate it as much as I hate funk/blues. Those two genres should just stay in separate corners because they just don't play nice together. That's kind of a crying shame because your band is actually really good. The vocals are good and even unique, everyone can play their instruments and let's face it, two-pieces doing just about anything are hot right now (thank christ you don't have a bass player because he'd probably do that insipid doink-doink shit and make me want to kill him). If your music was a little less blues/funk bar-band and a little more something else, this would actually be really marketable, that's really the only weakness you have. Start writing some songs for your next EP and stay away from funk guitar playing/drumming for the love of god... maybe also consider writing some songs that don't go in 12-bar format, even actual traditional blues bands are starting to shy away from that shit these days...

Sweet, ok. I'll keep your advice in mind. Cheers for your time.

 

[kds]

Hi 'advice guy', I've been reading this thread for a while and would love for you to take a look at my myspace page and tell me what you think.

I really like the feedback you've been giving to people- it can be incredibly hard to find people who can give you informed feedback that's honest and constructive. My myspace is www.myspace.com/karendesilva it's got 2 tracks that I've worked on with a producer.

I've only just joined up (about 10 years after everyone else!) Ok enough chatting...

Let me know what you think!

Cheers

 

[BonsaiK]

Hi 'advice guy', I've been reading this thread for a while and would love for you to take a look at my myspace page and tell me what you think.

I really like the feedback you've been giving to people- it can be incredibly hard to find people who can give you informed feedback that's honest and constructive. My myspace is www.myspace.com/karendesilva it's got 2 tracks that I've worked on with a producer.

I've only just joined up (about 10 years after everyone else!) Ok enough chatting...

Let me know what you think!

Cheers

I like it. It's probably the best music anyone's posted here yet and it's a hell of a lot better musically than, say, Rebecca Mayes Muses. The songs are genuinely good. I thought the first song with the sine-tone stuff was clever and I actually wanted to hear more of that sine-tone stuff and less of the other stuff. The other song was a bit less interesting texture-wise and a bit too middle of the road for me but both are quite good raw songs regardless of production and it's obvious that you're working with a decent producer here.

The problem that you're going to face is that there's a lot of competition in this genre so you're going to have to stand out in some way. Right now your stuff is very competent but how are you going to get it noticed? Approach enough labels and you probably will get signed, but your stuff may then sink without a trace once it gets released unless you can find a way to stand out from the pack. Your stuff is very good but to succeed in this genre it has to be more than very good, it has to be exceptionally noticeable, because every woman between the age of 15 and 50 who ever picked up a guitar aspires to be a singer/songwriter, and you have to compete with all of them... and they all have MySpace too...

For now, if you record more songs with this producer, don't be afraid to go out on a limb. You're in danger of sounding a bit "safe", you don't want that to happen. "Safe" is hard to sell these days, that market is kind of all tied up by reality TV shows at the moment...

 

[kds]

Hi, thanks for that. Yes, point very much taken! These are just the first songs I've recorded so while I've been doing this I've really tried to work on my songwriting. I feel like this is one of the areas I could try to stand out as I think good songs are the most important thing, obviously along with voice, image, etc but in every other sense I would absolutely, just be another face in the crowd! So I'll definitely try to think a little more out of the box when approaching songs in the studio.

I don't understand what you meant about the 'sine-sound' is that the harmonies in the background vocals? Anyway, I'll be putting a 3rd song up there probably within a week or so which is extremely poppy- still along the same 'safe' lines but everyone seems to be liking it because its catchy, etc. Anyway I'll let you know when I've put it up and maybe you can let me know what you think?

I really appreciate your time and thanks for the compliments they're very encouraging!

 

[BonsaiK]

Hi, thanks for that. Yes, point very much taken! These are just the first songs I've recorded so while I've been doing this I've really tried to work on my songwriting. I feel like this is one of the areas I could try to stand out as I think good songs are the most important thing, obviously along with voice, image, etc but in every other sense I would absolutely, just be another face in the crowd! So I'll definitely try to think a little more out of the box when approaching songs in the studio.

I don't understand what you meant about the 'sine-sound' is that the harmonies in the background vocals? Anyway, I'll be putting a 3rd song up there probably within a week or so which is extremely poppy- still along the same 'safe' lines but everyone seems to be liking it because its catchy, etc. Anyway I'll let you know when I've put it up and maybe you can let me know what you think?

I really appreciate your time and thanks for the compliments they're very encouraging!

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you on this, I had to wait until I was in front of a computer where MySpace player actually worked.

The "sine-sound" is referring to some of the stranger keyboard noises in your song. A "sine" tone is a particular type of synthesiser-generated tone which has no harmonics. While the keyboard noise in your song isn't strictly like this, it does resemble it somewhat.

You don't have to stand out musically, there are other ways you can stand out in the industry... but you may not consider some of them acceptable for a variety of reasons. However, what you do need is a marketing strategy, and a large part of determining this boils down to answering one single question - "what would make someone buy my music/attend my gigs, as opposed to another artist of equal artistic merit?".

 

[kds]

Hi, yes- the eternal question you ask there! I think its probably a combination of things like the image that goes along with the music, how competent I am as a performer, advertising, connections (although I don't think this is as important as it used to be) etc.

I'm also planning to go o/s next year hopefully, I feel like Australia doesn't have as much of a playing field as the UK or US- that obviously means there's more competition overseas, but also more opportunities. My next step is to try and start performing more regularly to become more experienced as a performer. I think that will build up my confidence a lot more... Also I'm going to do a photo shoot with my friend who's a photographer to get some decent photos to post up on the websites and to go with the songs..

Anyway, can you be more specific in the, 'other ways' I could stand out?

 

[kds]

Oh, I've also posted the 3rd song too

 

[Infinatex]

...If it's a MySpace link...

Hey mate, I've been watching this post and have decided to throw out some of my stuff for you to have a quick look at I've been making various hip/hip related stuff for a few years now, but never really done anything in terms of sending out demos etc. Most my stuff has just been for my mates and just for fun. It's pretty hard to make anything from music in Australia (especially Hip Hop) so I haven't really been pushing it.

Anyway I've put 2 tracks of mine (the 2 most finished I guess) up on a makeshift MySpace page for you to check out. The page is pretty ugly but on the plus side it'll take no time to load! Unfortunately I haven't recorded any solo stuff so both these tracks have featurings on them.

The first track (If You'd Be Mine) I only have 1 verse (which is the first one) but will be recording another soon to replace the current second verse. On the second track (Boiling Point) I'm verse 1 and 3 as well as doing parts of the hook. The production of the second track is still a bit 'meh' but hopefully I'll get some time to finish the beat and clean up the vocals this weekend. For both of these tracks I wrote my verses, the hooks and also worked with a mate in making the beats.

So let me know what you think! Here's the link: http://www.myspace.com/555798423

Cheers!!

 

[Shivarage]

Hey, here's my first proper demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLs80nELTMI

Well, only things to note are that I play the instruments and realize that the drums dont sound like real drums (cause they aren't) and well... hope you like

edit: apparently youtube compresses files so there's a bit of fuzz that I think clears up

 

[Mr. Self Destruct]

I shall be back when my bands live EP comes through, luckily, people say it was the best we've ever played