Subtle Hint: Demo Tapes

So I’m in the isolation booth, all by my lonesome, an acoustic guitar in hand and headphones snug on my ears. I hear a tinny voice in my head, the engineer, sounding like he’s a thousand miles away, asking me if it’s a go. Hey, at $50 an hour, who am I to delay things? I nod, ’cause I’m not miked up, but the acoustic is, and our song starts playing in my head.

I’m not new to this. It’s actually our fourth time in five years at a recording studio. Each time the quality gets better – the quality of songs written, the quality of songs performed, and the quality of the recordings themselves. Each time we move up to better and, because they’re better, more expensive, studios. At the above-mentioned rate, it’ll take about twelve hours to record and mix a four-song demo tape, spread in three or four hour chunks over a period of a week-and-a-half.

The song starts playing, and I start strumming along with it. I hear myself and Rich on distorted rhythm, me playing my trusty Les Paul, and Rich playing his Warlock. It’s a wall of crunchy mud, syncopated, with Mike’s pounding bass anchoring it and John’s crisp drumming prompting it along at an aggressive pace. The idea is that on this track I’ll be doubling the rhythm on the acoustic, buried somewhat but still discernible to the skilled ear, to fatten and fill out our wall of sound.

Five years earlier, only a few months into my career in the band, known obliquely as the Outpatients, Steve, Rich, and I booked a block of four hours at some dude’s basement recording studio just to get a few songs on tape, good enough quality to pass out to prospective band members. And also to get some experience under our belts.

It was somewhat stressful. Rich quit the band earlier in the day, only to show up at Steve’s house that night as we left for the studio. We wanted to do four songs ("Will and Won’t Care," "Backstabber," "Lonely," and "Kicked in the Face"). There’d be no bass; we had no bass player at this point. Steve would play drums, and, later, overdub vocals. Rich would overdub leads. Those four hours were long and stressful, but we made it through, and got a fantastic demo tape for what you could expect given our self-imposed limitations. We must’ve played it two dozen times into the early morning hours. We gathered at my family’s house, empty for the weekend, and made pasta for everyone at three in the morning.

Oh no – as the track’s being played to me and I’m picking along on the acoustic, my ears catch something wrong. Something doesn’t sound right. No one else has picked up on it, but I hear it, yeah, it’s obvious to me, and I think it’s a mistake I made on my previously recorded track. I stop playing; the track stops; the engineer asks me what’s wrong. I own up to it. I ask them to play the track again, and listen at the appropriate part. Now they all hear it. I think I accidentally play a C chord while the band’s playing a G, just for a split-second until I realize my mistake and adjust. But it’s there. And now we need to re-record that electric track of mine, so I have to break out the Les Paul and patch in the correct chord. A half-hour later, it’s fixed, and a half-hour after that, the acoustic track is laid down.

Two or three years after that first recording experience, Mike and Rich befriend some young dudes from a town a couple towns over. They’ve constructed a recording studio in a garage, and are going to school to master the process. They’ll work with us at a discounted rate for the experience. Excellent. We wind up engaging their services twice: the first time we record our whole set, a dozen songs, nothing fancy, no overdubs, etc, just to get our "live" experience on tape. Then, a couple of months later, we do another demo tape, three songs this time. Sitting with Mike in the playback booth, I am amazed at how heavy a band we are. Mike smiles, winks, and high-fives me.

My acoustic track down, we proceed to spend the rest of the evening recording Rich’s solos. Mike and I head outside for a smoke, then come back in. There’s a little kitchenette off to one side, and we drink some Coke. Hanging on the wall is this lever thingie called a "Can Crusher" – you put the empty aluminum can in it, pull down, and its crushed into a hockey-puck sized chunk of metal. Mike’s fascinated with it, and mentions it at least a dozen times every night we’re there.

We’re in the middle of our "Hello Cleveland" tour. It’s a hot July, and after work all this week we’ve been driving to this studio to get this demo tape done. This is the one we’re going to be sending out to agents, promoters, record companies, you name it. So it has to be good, and we have to spend the money to make it so. We’ve settled on "Cold Hell," "White Lightning" (revamped), "Driving Me Crazy" and "Money."

Here’s how you spend your time at a recording studio: you play your part, then it’s waiting, listening, waiting, listening, waiting, listening; repeat a dozen more times. We start our sessions around 10 pm the first night, and by midnight we’ve laid down all the basic tracks for the four songs (usually you rehearse the song once, then record two takes and settle on the best). The next couple of nights are spent laying down vocals, backing vocals, and guitar solos, and adding effects (we had a reverse cymbal crash start one song – really, really neat). Mistakes are corrected as they’re discovered. If you’re lucky, your engineer will seem to dig your work; ours did. You hear your songs, your beloved songs, played and replayed at least twenty or twenty-five times each.

It gets repetitive, yes, you need to take breaks, yes, but when you’re holding that finished product in your hand, well, nothing’s better than that feeling of pride over creative work well done.