Lesson 6

Exporting, sharing & collaboration

---

---

From demo to studio (…to release)

This final lesson of the programme presents an opportunity to celebrate your creativity, consolidate your learning but also address the opportunities that exist after a portfolio of recordings/demos has been created. An important door has been unlocked through this access to intuitive recording technology; and the ability to record and craft performances and songs provides a palette of lifelong assets for all musicians:

• It enables you to continue improving your song creation, arrangement and pre/production craft;
• it facilitates your songwriting through layering and recording experimentation;
• it provides a range of percussive and rhythmical support tools to continue sharpening your timing precision and grooving ability;
• it inspires collaboration;
• it allows for reflection;
• and, it also provides you with concrete outputs of your creativity that you can showcase and share with the world.

There are many examples that can help illustrate the range of effort and processes involved in bringing a demo in front of an international audience in a professional format. But what is important here is to draw out some of the common denominators in this progression, and show that creating demos of crafted songs is effectively a calling card that can facilitate these further processes; at the same time preparing musicians for the studio and the professional collaborations that these entail.

The difference between demos and released songs

The previous research activity into album credits will have provided you with an understanding of what is possible and what can follow after your demo pre/production. Identifying the sonic and musical differences between demos and fully actualised releases will help make the comparison more concrete, and it would be valuable to find examples, next, of songs or albums that are available in both pre-production and officially released form (for example, historic or special compilations that include band demos or rehearsal recordings, as well as the mixed, mastered and officially released productions). The next list of questions can help guide a comparative analysis, drawing out said differences:

The studio workflow and personnel

Now that you’ve identified a number of elements that have brought improvements to the demo recordings discussed, think about how the listed personnel may have affected these:

• a producer working on the structure and instrumentation with the band during rehearsals (e.g. Rick Rubin and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers)?
• session players or band members with a unique playing style and instrumental sound?
• a recording engineer in a tracking studio with classic audio equipment ideal for capturing a particular style of music?
• a hired mixer with an identifiable or radio-ready sound?
• a mastering engineer that can ensure translation on multiple playback systems and formats (radio, club, streaming, car, etc.), who can make sure the song is appropriately loud and impactful?

Act (exporting Songzap data to a DAW)

In a practical sense, how can we effectively prepare and share our demo recordings with other musicians, engineers and producers to facilitate the best possible route to their further development? In the next activity, we’ll export a song recorded and crafted in Songzap both as an .mp3, as well as in the form of its constituent assets that enable further development in a studio. We’ll also consider why these different types of assets (high-resolution individual audio tracks, groove MIDI maps, arrangement markers, notes and lyrics) are valuable, and what can be done with them using more advanced audio software and/or in a professional studio: