Members sabriel9v Posted April 12, 2008 Members Share Posted April 12, 2008 Hey, I am a guitarist in NC and I released my demo, however I did not charge people for it. I recorded my song concepts on Reaper and the rendered them into itunes. I then burnt about 100 copies which were given away pretty quick. Those 100 blanks only cost about $13.00 on sale. My point is I just gave people a taste of what i am capable of so when I do come out with a real cd they will be lined up for it. 93 people really enjoyed the music I had on there. If money is an issue for you then make your cd as cheap as possible and make sure it is worth buying. Good luck with your band. Godbless Nice strategy Personally I have no qualms with indie artists giving away music samplers for free. A cd simply stores digital information...while it is advantageous to shoot for the best possible recording, packaging, and artwork, etc. you still have to realize there is a risk in doing so. I'd bank on physical merchandise sales if I wanted to earn a profit. In general, I feel that many indie artists will not make much money anyway without the support of a solid label or management...so the main focus should not be profit. It should be exposure...but exposure that leads to fans wanting more and more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members richardmac Posted April 12, 2008 Members Share Posted April 12, 2008 Most homemade CD's I've heard sound pretty bad, I'd agree with that. What I don't understand is WHY. Well, yeah I do... I was born in 65, and I started messing around recording myself and my band in about 83. Back then, you're talking about bouncing two cassette decks back and forth. Bad stuff. I graduated to a 4 track cassette, and a drum machine, a sequencer, and a couple of keyboards. TONS of people were jumping on the home recording bandwagon because of the cheap 4 track cassette decks you could buy. There were tons of magazines you could read (Home and Studio Recording was my fave.) Everyone and their brother wanted to have their own little studio. And those 4 track cassette decks sounded like crap, but we loved them. Now all you need is a relatively new computer and some software and a decent mic and audio interface and you're SET. You can have essentially unlimited tracks. You can have as many outboard fx as you want. You can do whatever you want. Don't have a drummer? Buy Drums On Demand loops. They sound awesome. Want to clean up your vocals? Melodyne Uno is only about $150. Want to record a vocal 30 times? Go ahead. The tools are SO much better now, you'd think all the recordings would be good or better. But you still hear so many bad ones. There ARE some good recordings out there done in home studios. Definitely. But with all of the evolution, you'd think the bad ones would be gone, but they're not. I think it's because technology has made it easy, and kids growing up today are used to listening to absolute crap quality. They grab the latest Maroon 5 single in MP3 format from their friend. The song was already overproduced and overcompressed and crappy sounding, and then you make a small MP3 file of THAT, and you end up with something that sounded like our 4 track cassette mixes did, back in the day. But I think maybe also people lose patience with the recording process. Not everyone wants to listen to a mix on their studio speakers, on their stereo speakers, in their car, on their iPod, and then tweak the mix, and repeat. Since we have less patience than ever before, maybe we're more likely to just say "good enough." I'd say there are two approaches one should take. Either give up and don't try to do recordings at home, or learn everything you possibly can about recording. Devour every article, record and mix as much as you can, listen to lots of music, discuss mixing and engineering and producing on forums, do everything you can do to get better. All or nothing. It's the same as songwriting. Sure, you can write songs using three chords you've learned after playing guitar for 6 months, but it's a shadow of what you will one day be able to write if you keep after it and you keep trying to get better. Unfortunately, in both cases, people (especially young people) often lack the patience, and so they play guitar for 6 months, write a song with 3 chords, record it using Radio Shack microphones, and put it up on myspace. I mean, at least they're doing something, but they might be better off waiting until they know more chords... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members richardmac Posted April 12, 2008 Members Share Posted April 12, 2008 I've been doing this since about 1995, when I recorded on crappy ghettoblasters, then upgraded to 4 track cassette, then 8 track digital, and now 16 track standalone on an AKAI DPS16 (which is an amazing unit). It's never quick or easy. Sounds like my story! I just got done posting and hadn't seen your post yet. We all loved those stupid 4 track cassettes when they came out! The biggest trouble was that by the third pass, your tape was DEAD. So you pretty much had to nail your vocals, first or second take. I'm still learning and trying to get better. My first CD didn't sound very good. My second one sounded better. I think my third CD will sound better than my second. That's the theory.As far as giving away CD singles... yeah, I can't decide whether to charge a dollar for them and put them next to the tip jar, or just put them next to the tip jar, knowing that some folks who take them will drop a buck in the jar. It will probably work out the same either way. Decisions, decisions... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Instrospection Posted April 12, 2008 Members Share Posted April 12, 2008 Sounds like my story! I just got done posting and hadn't seen your post yet. We all loved those stupid 4 track cassettes when they came out! The biggest trouble was that by the third pass, your tape was DEAD. So you pretty much had to nail your vocals, first or second take. No kidding. I DO NOT miss tape dropouts. Nor dedicating your best take to something that wasn't dedicated to the proper odd/ left, even/ right channels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members richardmac Posted April 12, 2008 Members Share Posted April 12, 2008 When I went to college, I took electronic music composition, and we had this old half-inch tascam four track reel to reel, and you had to SHUTTLE it when you used it. Needless to say I had no idea what "shuttling" was, so the first time I hit "stop" after rewinding, the reel went flying off the machine! Then I learned you had to hit "fast forward" while rewinding until the machine came to a near stop, and THEN you could hit stop. Sheesh. Now I have unlimited tracks in Logic. I usually end up using about 24. And I can cut/copy/paste tracks. It's absolutely unreal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mmmiddle Posted April 15, 2008 Author Members Share Posted April 15, 2008 Wow thanks for all the replies! I will have to read through them more in detail. We are still deciding what we want to do but we are leaning now towards 5 or 6 songs and getting them packaged in eco-friendly cardboard cases from diskfactory. I think that will cost us around $400 for 200 CDs because we know folks who can do the artwork so that would work out to around $2.00 a CD cost for us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mmmiddle Posted April 15, 2008 Author Members Share Posted April 15, 2008 Oh yeah, some of the songs we are working on are up now at http://www.myspace.com/thefollowthroughmusic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TRevMFB Posted April 15, 2008 Members Share Posted April 15, 2008 might want to look into morphius for printing/press your discs. http://www.morphius.com/manufacturing/index.cfm?cc=cd# my old band used them to press our digipacks and it ended up saving around $150 on 1,000 discs compared to the other companies, disk makers, disk factory, even some canadian company was a bit cheaper than disk factory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Instrospection Posted April 16, 2008 Members Share Posted April 16, 2008 Most homemade CD's I've heard sound pretty bad, I'd agree with that. What I don't understand is WHY. Well, yeah I do...I was born in 65, and I started messing around recording myself and my band in about 83. Back then, you're talking about bouncing two cassette decks back and forth. Bad stuff. I graduated to a 4 track cassette, and a drum machine, a sequencer, and a couple of keyboards. TONS of people were jumping on the home recording bandwagon because of the cheap 4 track cassette decks you could buy. There were tons of magazines you could read (Home and Studio Recording was my fave.) Everyone and their brother wanted to have their own little studio. And those 4 track cassette decks sounded like crap, but we loved them. For sure! I loved the 4 track cassette, for, oh....about a day or so. The tape hiss was NUTS. I still have all those 4 track recordings of mine and never released them. Maybe one day, slowly....gems here and there, but I never honestly thought that they were worth releasing. Even if there was an audience for it (which there wasn't.....this was 1997 and no MySpace, no real online distribution), I just didn't think that they were good enough to release. I didn't even let friends hear them....it was a fun thing to do, though. Now all you need is a relatively new computer and some software and a decent mic and audio interface and you're SET. You can have essentially unlimited tracks. You can have as many outboard fx as you want. You can do whatever you want. Don't have a drummer? Buy Drums On Demand loops. They sound awesome. Want to clean up your vocals? Melodyne Uno is only about $150. Want to record a vocal 30 times? Go ahead. Yeah--even bad recordings these days sound ten times better than in the old days, if for no other reason than the lack of tape hiss. But the thing is, the tape hiss made it obvious that it was a home recording done crappily. Now it's sometimes tough to tell whether it's an experienced engineer doing a sub-par recording, or the bands mimicking a sub-par engineer. I think that one of the biggest downsides to the producer/ artist relationship is ones that aren't at all suited for each other. Like someone once said, "if a producer isn't making the band hits, an artist can make a flop album themselves". Which is true! But without a producer or someone (take a guy like Butch Vig in the underground scene, around the 1988, 1989, 1990 range) to tell those bands what they need more or less of, alot of the recordings suffer. Even Steve Albini, as good an engineer as he was/ is, has always needed a mix engineer, and/ or producer, because some of the sounds are great, but the mixes are sometimes atrocious. My friend is a very talented writer and is a very good engineer and has done some great stuff on his recordings. But you know what? He never releases anything! I mean, he has stuff that I think is great, but sometimes what you get is bands overworking stuff into oblivions that was good, and then they work themselves out of the initial brilliance of it. Sometimes, for some artists, the problem isn't knowing what's bad--it's knowing what's good. So I think that you could essentially boil down most current home recordings to that statement--you have some bad bands that think they're great; you've got some great bands that think that they're crap. You need someone else who's not in the band to go, "whoa, wait...what was that? That was awesome! Do that again, but do that before the chorus this time", or "you can do better on that take" or "that weakens your album" sort of thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MaximumMetal Posted April 20, 2008 Members Share Posted April 20, 2008 My band just recorded 3 tracks about a month ago. We recorded them in my basement on cubase. The drums and both left and right rhythm guitars we're recorded together to save time, and we did the bass, vocals, and guitar overdubs later. It took about 2 days to do and it sounded pretty good for what it is. It's not perfect but now we have 3 tracks that represent our band and we have something we can pass out at shows, and in terms of playing and quality I'm much more satisifed with it than anything we've ever recorded that we've spent like a month on. We bought a pack of 100 memorex CD-Rs, 100 paper CD sleeves, and some labels at office max and went to town and it seems like the kids we hand the stuff to at shows dig it. The songs are on our myspace incase your interested in the quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members fivebodyblade Posted April 20, 2008 Members Share Posted April 20, 2008 Hey everyone. Just thought I'd get feedback on my thinking. I am starting a new band and I was wondering what you all thought of selling a demo CD. Is that a bad/good idea. We don't want to release any official recordings yet. If the OP doesn't want to release any "official" recordings of this band yet then they probably don't have a package worthy of slapping any price to. I say write some killer songs and get them so tight that you can play them backwards in your sleep. Then play em live as much as you can. You will know when/if people are willing to pay for your songs. Giving away your stuff can make it look like you're begging the audience to want you. People can smell a needy band. Play it cool. Make them want you because you're a tight and well rehearsed band playing good songs. I mean, that's the only reason I buy cd's when I'm at a show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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