The Nashville Feed

Ask the song hounds — producers, artists and other music bizzers who sniff out hits in haystacks of demos — what it takes to find a smash, and they’ll often describe their special blend of market savvy and musical sense as “ears.”

Maybe ears get too much credit. What about the inner ear’s basilar membrane, which triggers millions of neurons that set off a psychedelic light show of electrical impulses in the brain?

As long as Nashville has been a songwriter’s town, there’s been a lot of talk about exactly what makes for a great demo. Some say all they need is a rough work tape — just a voice backed by a single instrument — to spot a great tune. Others say a fully produced demo is the key to understanding if a song or an artist is worthwhile. It turns out the answer could be more physiological than either side suspects.

“How a demo is perceived may lie at a sensory encoding level as opposed to a cognitive level,” said Jeremy Federman, a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University who specializes in audiology and music perception and cognition. As a former L.A.-based songwriter, Federman brings more than one perspective to this discussion.

“When I was pitching a song to Bonnie Raitt’s producer, he said they didn’t want fully produced demos because they like to do whatever they want to songs, with no preconceived ideas,” Federman related. “But all of my demos were fully produced because of an intuition that a lot of people don’t really know what they are listening for.”

Federman cautioned that “music perception and cognition is a brand new area of research and conclusive results are just emerging.” However, experiments have revealed that more electrical impulses occur, while listening to or performing music, in the brains of musicians than non-musicians because more brain areas are activated, and that the basilar membrane within the inner ear, which converts vibrations from sound into signals in the brain, is more stimulated by a full band than a solo performance.

“Other factors — the skill level of the musicians, the mood and emotional state of the listener — can also affect perception,” Federman added. “But more complex signals do generate more excitation in the inner ear and brain. So it’s possible that a fully produced demo could get a better reception because it causes more neurons to fire.”

Meanwhile, the debate continues on Music Row.

“As a producer, I prefer getting work tapes,” said Rivers Rutherford. “That gives me an opportunity to hear my own interpretations.” But in addition to producing albums for Montgomery Gentry, Jamie O’Neal and other artists, Rutherford has penned smashes for Brooks & Dunn, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley and Gretchen Wilson — and in submitting his songs for consideration, he has learned that sometimes a solo demo just doesn’t do the trick.

“I’ve had it work both ways,” he attested.

Rutherford has also found that the process of recording a full-band demo might even improve a song’s structure. Nine years ago, he and co-writer Tom Shapiro had a guitar-and-voice work tape of a tune they believed in. “But it didn’t get any interest,” Rutherford recalled. “Then we went to demo it in the studio, and I realized while hearing the band play that the work tape was six to eight beats a minute too slow. So we sped it up.”

The result was Brooks & Dunn’s No. 1 single, “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You.”

At typically $800 to $1,000 per song, recording a demo with a band in a Nashville studio is an expensive lottery ticket. But if it hits, the payoff can be big.

Tom Hambridge won an ASCAP Song of the Year Award in 2007 for co-writing Keith Anderson’s Top 5 hit “Every Time I Hear Your Name,” which was shopped as a fully produced demo. Although he’s had tunes recorded by Rodney Atkins, Billy Ray Cyrus, Joe Nichols, Montgomery Gentry and many others, Hambridge is, like Rutherford, also a solo artist and producer, with albums by Susan Tedeschi, George Thorogood and Johnny Winter among his production credits.

“Because I’m a songwriter, when I’m producing I can hear a good song whether it’s just a singer with a guitar or a full band,” Hambridge said. “But I always do full productions of my own songs that I’m going to pitch, including background singers. In Country Music, the bar is so high that you need to get your song across in the best way possible. The greatest songwriters in the world are here in Nashville, vying for spots on big Country albums every day, and not every decision maker hears things the same way.”

This means presenting each of his songs in a form most likely to help a variety of listeners hear its particular strengths. “Some producers are wizards behind the board, but they need to know what a finished song might sound like,” Hambridge said. “A&R staff may help pick tunes — or management or maybe even the president of a record company. If a label or artist is really going to bet on a song, the marketing department might be asked for an opinion on whether radio will play it. And chances are not all of those people are songwriters.

“Let’s put it this way,” Hambridge summed up. “If you really want to knock somebody out, do you give them a shiny new car or the old one that’s back in the shed?”

How To Make Your Demos Real Contenders

Before you or your engineer push the “record” button, here are some demo basics and not-so-basics to consider:

• Get It Done: “A work tape is crucial,” said Rivers Rutherford. "Specifically, it's a blueprint for demo studio musicians. Beyond that, with just one instrument, one voice, and a cheap digital recorder, it might be all you need to bring a tune to life. Just be sure you’re got the structure of the song tight.”
• Hit Your Groove: “Make sure your tempo is correct for the song and that it’s locked in,” said Rutherford. “The groove has to be on the money for a song to be convincing.”
• Sing It Pretty: “You need a believable vocal performance of a good melody,” Rutherford noted. “You don’t want to get too over-emotive. This is a song-driven market, not a record-driven market like rock ‘n’ roll, so you’re just trying to get the spirit of a song across.”
• Buddy Up: A good studio crew can cut four or five songs in an afternoon session. Tom Hambridge suggests sharing sessions with other writers. “Sometimes there are five or more different writers at a session, all splitting the cost to get good demos of their best tunes.”
• Trust Your Musicians: “In Nashville the session musicians are the best in the world at getting demos done,” said Hambridge. “Songwriters are not usually producers, but good musicians spend so much time in the studio playing on all kinds of songs that they often know exactly what you’re going for. Listen to their ideas.”
• Polish Your Sound: Hambridge likes the sheen added to his demos by a final run through the various compressors, EQs and other devices used in mastering. “My demos sound like commercial recordings,” said Hambridge, “because that’s what most people are used to hearing.”
• Get Personal: Once you’ve got demos to pitch, network through artists’ rights organizations, publishers, showcases, parties, etc., — wherever you can find the industry people best positioned to help place your song. And make friends. “There’s no guarantee that artists, managers or label people are going to hear your demos,” Hambridge said. “You’ve got to get out there and make them interested in you.”

By Ted Drozdowski | © 2008 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.