On Jan 16, 2005, at 4:40 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
more of my clients are now demanding audio demos of arrangements and orchestrations in advance.
You know, that aspect of the business has changed quite a bit since I started out. Before, clients had to make do with off-the-cuff live piano demos, maybe with the composer bellowing tunelessly on the melody and explaining instrumentation in an aside (is it the movie Network "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" where there is a hilarious scene as two young composers "demo" the news theme this way?) Clients had to imagine how it was going to sound.
Nowadays, since it is possible to create a reasonable-sounding MIDI mockup, everyone insists on it. These are not easy to do, and can eat up a lot of time that could be better spent on the final product. If you rush it (maybe with cheesy sounds, little or no phrasing, little attention to mixing) you run the risk that the client will reject it because it doesn't sound close enough to a finished recording and he doesn't have enough imagination to fill in the blanks. If you spend a lot of time making it sound as good as you can, the client might reject anything that doesn't sound EXACTLY like the demo as being something different from what he signed off on, even if the live musician version IS better. Plus, many clients send you back for arbitrary changes simply to exercise their prerogative, or to feel like you are working as hard as you can to do the best possible job.
So strangely, all the effort one may put toward making the demo sound good may be counterproductive in the long run. It just makes you work harder, and doesn't make the client happier.
One method I have come up with to educate clients is this: I have a previous project demo – the tinniest, cheesiest, quickest-produced lo-fi recording I can come up with, and I play that for them, saying "This is what demos sounds like. Don't be put off though, because THIS is what the final product will sound like." Then I put on the fabulous, brilliantly performed and mixed recording that was the final version of the previous project, and smile and nod knowingly as the client's eyes bug out of his head.
Christopher
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