Stick with me, there’s more to this article than some cheap jibe at those using home recording equipment. However, there is a deeper question to ask about how songs go from ideas to release.
Do you know that one of the most iconic albums of the 1980s started life as a demo? If I had been writing this article in the 80s then no one would have batted an eyelid at that statement. Not so these days.
The album ‘Face Value’ by Phil Collins started life in his home studio. Collins had a Brenell 8 track recorder, the B of AHB, which was Allen Heath Brenell, who are now known as Allen & Heath. He also had a Prophet 5 and a Roland CR78. He recorded demos for several tracks including In The Air Tonight. You can check out the demo below. The final release is also included for reference.
It’s remarkable how close the demo is to the final release. According to a Tumbler post by blogger Austin Kleon, this is how it came about;
While delivering Genesis’ Duke album to Ahmet Ertegun in London, Collins shared some of his solo demos with the Atlantic Records guru. “He said, ‘You’ve got to do this and I’ll help you any way I can. You’ve got to record them,’” Collins recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t record them again. I’ve sort of sweated blood getting this far.’ So he said, ‘You tell me how I can help.’” Ertegun agreed that somehow Collins could work with the demos as masters and when Collins called engineer/producer Hugh Padgham into the project, he also agreed.
“We transferred my 8-track demos to 16-track,” Collins says, “which is all we had at the time. My eight tracks comprised stereo Prophet, stereo Rhodes, my voice, vocoder and a drum machine. I sang it again because the quality of what I had recorded really wasn’t as good as we needed, but on all of the tracks, I kept all the instruments, and that’s been my method of recording ever since. I always use my demos as the masters: Whatever I do at home ends up being the blueprint for the song.”
In fact, not only did Collins have a home demo set-up, all of Genesis had similar set-ups. They used them to create demos to then share with each other. Check out the two tracks below. It’s the demo of Misunderstanding (it starts about 57seconds in) and the final release.
As you listen to both versions you can hear the DNA remains in both songs, however a few things have changed. Both the key and tempo have changed, there’s now a lyric and also tighter instrumentation. Of course, given the restrictions of 8 track some of this would not have been possible at demo stage.
It’s sometimes easy to think that the early home recording revolution was much the same as the modern laptop and DAW set-up, however it was very different.
For many of us, myself included, the equipment we used at home allowed us to create barebones demos of ideas. Often nothing more than a basic melody, rhythm and some chords. We would use these to present to our writing colleagues, A&R, producers and labels. I recall submitting tracks like this for both publishing and recording. I would sit in the office of the A&R person and we’d listen then it would be play or pass, or often go away and make it better.
When making demos for Face Value, Collins was in one of the most influential bands of the time, Genesis, so the gear they had was top-end ‘home recording’ equipment. It’s nice to hear how much of In The Air Tonight made it onto the final release version. It’s interesting that the iconic, and one of the most seminal moments in recording history, the gated drums, are missing. Imagine the track without them. Yes, it would still have been the same song DNA, but it would have had a very different ending.
Also check out the interview with Sting below where he shows the early stages of writing Message In A Bottle. It’s around 3 minutes in. Again you can clearly identify the song’s DNA, however the final song sounds very different.
Why Demos Were So Helpful
I think the old-school days of demos were hugely helpful for a number of reasons. The first is the limitation placed on the writer by the technology. In many cases we had 4 tracks with which to come up with an idea that would be good enough. I see too many people bemoan track counts and other limitations, often not realising that if a song is crap with 4 tracks, it’s still going to be with 400 tracks. You’re just rolling the proverbial turd in glitter.
A demo helped us to establish if the song was good enough so we didn’t scrap it and good enough so the A&R didn’t tell us to kill it either. There’s an entire article to write about the benefit of the much demonised A&R part of the record making process, suffice to say, they helped keep the crap quota down. They certainly helped me. At current counts, there’s 100,000 new songs uploaded to Spotify and other streaming services every day! Many of those releases are just glorified demos that wouldn’t have made it out alive from a song review meeting.
Secondly, we often think of inertia as a bad thing. However, in modern music making we often start with an idea in a DAW and it flows into a final release. There’s no stopping moments, often the idea just gets stuff added to it and nothing taken away. It’s quite possible the key and tempo get changed, but it’s likely that the ideas for doing this with the Genesis example Misunderstanding, flowed out of the band collaborating.
It seems like a dream to sit in front of a laptop with a DAW and a ton of VIs and flow from demo to final release. I wonder if this is to the detriment of the final result? Not in all cases, but in many. No one wants to think their work is wasted by coming up with an idea then having to remake it again when coming to record the release version. I remember one of the reasons I bought a Pro Tools system in the early 2000s was so that the song ideas I came with up at home would then be used as the basis when albums were made. I don’t recall that happening once, instead the producer would start from scratch with new instrumentation, arrangements and players. Was I wasting my time? Not at all, the DNA remained, but the idea was now taking on a new shape, often far better than the one I had envisaged. This was partly because self production is far harder than most of us think. So we end up putting out inferior versions of tracks because there wasn’t a producer to tell us we could do better, or in some cases, do it differently. I’ve been in those sessions where the producer has said that changing the key would make it a better song.
Demos are an important part of the song creation process, I fear modern technology has removed the limitations that often made the demo the fire that purified the gold. Perhaps the very act of stopping and starting again was an important part of refining the gold?
Discuss.