You have just finished an amazing track, well atleast you and your cat think so! But what happens next? You want the whole world to hear what you have achieved but don’t know where to turn. Relax my friend, this easy guide will help you through the wonderful ride of sending a demo.

Demo in latin means “remove, to take away”, when I read this i actually had a nice laugh because even it does not have anything to do with music, it has a very suitable word of todays music business. Because most of the demo’s a record label recieve, are deleted and deleted very quickly. You see a decent label recieves a lot of demos on a daily basis and the quality usually doesn’t keep a very high standard.

Full Quality
This mean you have to send the record label full length track with a quality good enough to judge its quality on a proper soundsystem. This means no fades in the intro och outro, no mp3 files with a bitrate less than 192 (keep it at 320). Sending a demo without these features will waste the time of the A&R and the label might not be keen on listening to your future tracks.

Write an attractive e-mail
What I mean is that you should contact the recordlabel in a manner that makes you look professional. A label does not need to know how old you are, which your first unfluenses were and your favourite sports team. What you can do is to write previous releases, so forwarding your whole discography can be a good idea. A stabile link with an mp3- or wavefile is preferable and do NOT attach files to the e-mail, this takes a long time for the A&R to recieve and can be very annoying. Do NOT attach ten other labels in the CC so the labels you send to can see that over ten other companies having the track in full quality that you want one label to spend their money on and promote. My advice is to just send one label at the time, and if they do not reply, send one more mail (reminder a week later). If you are serious about your production, you wont spam it away.

Choosing label
This one can be hard, but if you know something in the scene, you already know which labels are the most popular ones. The best advice I can give is to send to a label that releases music similar to yours, this is not always a must, but it will help. Don’t send to low quality labels – why? – Are you desperate for a release my friend? Having a release is cool, but getting “signed” lost its meaning years ago. Today there are thousands of labels, and many of them are releasing pure crap. But if 20 labels did not even bother replying to you, maybe there is something wrong with your track.

Getting a reply
“Hello dear promo sender, we like the track you sent. But at the moment our release schedule are full, but please keep sending us demos because we like what you do.”

 - This pretty much means your track is not good enough and you are being told in a nice way. However you have something going on, they find some sort of potential in you, so keep producing newer and better tracks, and send them to the same label.

“Hi, cool track, have you sent this to anyone else?”
-this means that the label have some interest in your track, but don’t expect them to sign you before you have the actual contract in your hands.

Sign with one label and one label only!
Congrats, you have just signed your new masterpiece to a good label (hopefully). Unless the label treats you very bad and you are very unhappy with how your release was handeled, keep signing your tracks to the same label. But maybe you want to be signed to all the major trance labels out there because it’s cool. Might look cool in your discography but it will most likely be bad for your career. If you keep signing your tracks to the same label, you are being loyal which means that your label want to promote you as an artist helping you get bigger. This is why many serious recordlabels wants you to sign a contract with atleast three options (they own your name for three tracks). This should be done more often and is basically just done by the bigger labels, and for some reason these labels are the most successful ones.

I can sum eveything up in one sentence.

”Be careful, plan your music and be loyal.”

With a smile on your face you are sending over the final version of your track to a friend after sending it to a few top labels. When nothing can go wrong (besides the label rejection your demo) your friend states the following: “sounds dope mate, but I liked the earlier version better”. You are getting slightly nervous, annoyed, so you send it to a few more friends and find them thinking the same as the first friend. You are starting to sweat and the frustration is growing, growing, growing and growing STOP!

Working too much on a track happens to us all, pro’s, amateurs and kids playing the flute in 4th grade. You start thinking where it went wrong, did you work to much on the levels and mixing? Or perhaps you changed the main elements in a way that made it worse because you have heard the original theme so many times, you started hating it in the end and changed it in the last days so it would sound more fresh in your ears. Well guess what, it won’t be the same for the other listeners, because they never heard your track before. Maybe you added some elements that ruined the harmonies of the maintheme? Or maybe you went mental on the equalizer ruining the full mix! There is no definite answer to this one, but there are things to understand that made the track go down like titanic did in 1997.

When you first start working on a track, you are inspired, you just made a cool piece of music/beat and it sounds so good. You are on fire, you are in the “hot zone”. If you had nothing else planned for the coming hours or days, you should have finished the track while you were still warm! Working too long on a track can be both positive and negative. But you should stop yourself in the process to give yourself some time to think, what is it that makes this track so good? Keep in mind the key elements of the track, and don’t change them too much!

Export clips from time to time and label them with the project file name. This way you can go back, and discover that perhaps a certain clip sounded better than the rest. But this might be lost work if you only used one project file on your sequencer and can’t track the exact changes down. Whenever you make an improvement or working on the track for a specific period of time, export a clip and label it with the project title. You can never save too many project files (unless you have an extremely small harddrive), but you can however save too little of project files.
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Finally you created that killer anthem you have been dying to make since the spicegirls appeared on MTV. You add beats, basslines, drums, FX etc. But for some reason it still sounds like something is missing. Is the theme not strong enough? Are there not enough elements playing? Is the atmosphere too simple? You don’t have to study rocket science to understand that there is not a simple answer to this problem since each track is uniqe in every way. In theory you can work on a track forever, improving, changing and so on and so on. But this is not reality, there will always be a limit on how much you work on a track, depending on how much you think it’s worth it.

A few examples:
You have a techy track with an awesome beat, you might be missing a killer theme or a nice melody in the break down.
You have written an 8 bar melody which is not very uniqe, but still good, you might want to add a melody on top. Problem in this case can be that two melodies are hard to get down in one climax, each element might drown in the other. In this case you have to seperate the two melodies based on their sound and flow. If you for example have a sawpad playing with about 4 kicks as length on each note, you could add an arp with a square waveform.

Two things to consider though, at first the sawlead waveform and square waveform sound very different and will not clash. Second, the fast notechange in the arp wont interrupt with the long notes in the pad. If your two new coworkers are black and white and have different height, remembering their names wont be a problem at all. One thing has to be similar though, they have to be related somewhat in the harmonies, otherwise when you bring in the second melody, it might sound like a different track and the ears of the listeners will have a hard time hearing both parts playing together. In the end there are no real rules, what sounds good, sounds good!
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Of course this post wont cover all cases, but hopefully it made sense. So to sum it all up.

Overworking a track: Remember what makes the track so good, don’t change a winning concept. Mix down different version labeled with their project file name. Save often and mix down often, specially when you make important improvements.

Underworking a track: Add new elements, but make sure they wont clash with the main elements, a new sawpad over a plucky arp might give the track a whole new better feel. But adding another arp with similar waveform will only ruin what you have already.

Welcome everyone to my blog, so you might ask yourself if you are a frequent visitor of my sites, what is new this time? Well about two years has passed since I stepped into the scene officially as a solo producer under Akesson. After many thoughts and regrets, I decided to go with my full name, since many people used it everywhere it could be perhaps confusing, it’s a step that felt more than right. So from now on “Bjorn Akesson” is here to stay. The music will follow the same melodic spirit, but I will try new ideas, arrangements in order to develope. Fear not, another perfect blue styled track is on its way! I got a new logo and new website, new myspace design and so on. My radioshow threshold will be relaunched in february, it will be bigger, better, but the concept will remain! More on that later since now I want to write about this blog.

Blog, Bloggin, Blogger, Bloggomaniac, these are all words that haunts us on a daily basis. Wether it’s in the newspaper, the radio, television and even in bus, we have all heard of this. Some people makes a lot fo money on this, some just do it for fun. I think the most worthless use of a blog is to write too much bullshit no one is interested in, such as which toothpaste you use, a friend you just saw downtown since a long way back that gotten fat or that sexy girl you never have the balls to talk to in class. Some even write about which sandwich you had for breakfast. However this is not what this blog will be about!

This blog will be a combination of my own experiences, my own thoughts and what others talk about. This blog will focus on topics such as music production and dj related subjects in order to inspire and influence people that are upcoming producers and djs. But who knows, maybe the more experienced people will find this inspiring aswell, or atleast have a fun read!

I will soon get back to you all with the first topic, this stays as an introduction for the blog. So for now, have a great start of 2010! See you soon!