Home Recording TipsIn this article from the series on recording the demo, I address some simple tips that can drastically enhance your recording output, and lead to a more effective demo. Check out the other articles in the series that talk about the benefits of home recording [0], offers tips on which home based system to consider [0] and how to maximize your time in the studio [0] should you go that route.

As you are recording—be it on Pro Tools or some other system—there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Avoid the temptation to make your demo sound more “professional” by drenching it in reverb. It doesn’t sound professional. Most producers hate overuse of reverb and use it very sparingly. If a demo comes in slathered in reverb, it usually says to me that the band is trying to hide some weakness. This, of course, does not apply if you are My Morning Jacket.
2. Avoid hissy sounding recordings. If you’re using Pro Tools, this likely won’t be an issue (though I’ve heard a lot of hiss on recordings recently, and am not sure where it’s coming from). But if you’re making your demo on a 4-track or some other cassette-based medium, you really have to work on your recording technique, so that you can get as clear a recording as possible. This means that you will most likely not be able to record the whole band, if that’s what you do. The process of bouncing tracks down results in an overly hissy recording that will be perceived as amateur sounding. It is incredibly distracting to listen through the hiss to get at the songs. Most people won’t take the time.
3. Avoid wild volume fluctuations between your tracks. Most likely, you’ll be “comping” (combining) tracks together from various different recording sessions. Try to make them sound somewhat uniform. While you shouldn’t pay to have your demo "mastered" (the final stage in the recording process where lengths between songs are inserted, and volumes are leveled), you should work to get the volumes of the different songs uniform and the spaces between the songs at some reasonably uniform time interval. Anything less is very annoying to the listener, who has to get up and raise and lower the volume for the different songs. There are countless CD burning programs out there (Toast being the most widely used) that will help solve this problem.
4. Make sure the vocals are high up in the mix. Give the A&R person the chance to determine what is going on with the vocalist. Burying the vocals is never a good idea. If you’re not happy with the vocals, work to get them right. Don’t equivocate by using a mediocre vocal and then trying to hide it by burying it in the mix. I’d rather hear an accurate representation of the vocalist, even if he hits a couple of off notes. Wrong notes can be fixed. Better that than for me to be unable to hear the vocalist and have to guess why the vocals are mixed so low. You can probably imagine that my guess is going to be that this person can’t sing. Demo listening over.

This article was excerpted from George Howard’s book, Getting Signed: An Insidre’s Guide to the Music Industry, and used with permission from the publisher, Berklee Press. To get more information check out the book available [1] at fine bookstores and Amazon.com.