For local and regional bands, who need a polished demo recording with a minimum amount of pain and confusion, q music’s comprehensive Demo Package provides a professional marketing tool showcasing the band’s musical strengths.

Unlike other area studios, who require tracking at their facility, our Demo Package starts with tracking at a live band performance. This can be scheduled to occur at the band’s favorite live venue, thereby documenting the excitement of a live performance in the presence of their most adoring fans.

Unlike other remote recording services, which rely on a stereo recording of the room ambiance (and all the resultant compromises inherent in capturing the band, the audience, and a room-optimized mix), q music’s Demo Package captures the performance as a multitrack recording of up to 48 tracks. This allows for all the usual studio sweetening such as song-specific mix optimization, clam replacement, overdubs, and the like.

What to Expect in the Standard Package

In conjunction with our standard Sound Reinforcement services, we will prepare and patch a 24-track digital multitrack recorder. This will capture each instrument and voice as a separate track. This process is detailed on our page entitled Mobile Recording.

Approximately 2-7 days later, we will deliver to you a stereo ‘board mix’ of the entire night’s performance. This will be in your choice of either audio or .mp3 CDs or DVDs, or an email containing .mp3 files. The purpose of this is for you to choose five songs upon which you are pleased with your performance. These five performances you select will be the tunes that will be mixed, sweetened, and mastered down to your final product. Note that, as a board mix, this mix will contain exactly what was coming through the sound system on the night of performance. As a consequence, this board mix will exhibit poor balance between instruments - guitars tend to have a loud stage level, thereby being under-represented in the board mix, while vocals require a lot of reinforcement through the PA, leading to them being over-represented in the board mix. No matter - the purpose of the delivery of the board mix is solely for you to choose which songs will be mixed for your recording.

Your choice the five songs to go on to the next stage is expected within one week of delivery of the board mixes.

Now it’s time for q music to work its mixdown magic. We will employ our vast assortment of eqs, compressors, reverbs, delays, and other tools, and most importantly our extensive experience, to craft each song into a cohesive aural landscape. This phase usually requires between 3 and 10 days, depending on our workload scheduling.

What you receive from us at this point is an audio CD with the five professionally mixed tracks on them. Your task at this juncture is to review the materials for any issues, and choose a final song order.

Also at this stage, you may define a ‘snippet medley’. This is done by choosing ‘snippets’ out of each performance (such as 2nd verse and chorus, a guitar solo, the a capella section, or whatever), showcasing the part of each song that demonstrates your capability to a club owner, agent, or other industry contact in your best light. This approach forms a valuable tool for demonstrating the breadth of your talents to the sometimes-limited attention span of such individuals.

Your decisions on song order and snippet choice are expected within a week of delivery of the aforementioned CD.

q music then performs its final task, which is to perform a guerilla mastering upon the mixed tracks as per your instructions. This consists of trimming ‘tops and tails’ of each track, ordering as per your desires, building a sixth ‘snippet medley’ track, adding any desired final sweetening ambiance, any required equalization touchup, and application of multiband compression to ‘punch up the impact’ of the final product.

This final product is typically delivered by q music within 1 to 3 days after your input is received. This will be delivered as an audio CD, and another CD with compressed files suitable for web distribution (your choice of .mp3, .wma, .aac, etc.)

This final product will be a compelling, professional sounding CD. It will be something you can be proud to use either as a demo to secure improved venue bookings, or as a self-published EP/CD to sell through your fan network, website, or at gigs.

The entire process from start to finish, can take from one to four weeks, with about half of this time determined solely by you. You can have a final product in your hands in as little as one week after a performance!

Costs

The following is a breakdown as to the costs of q music’s Standard Demo Package, as described above. There are a number of options described elsewhere which may raise or even lower this price. Please feel free to contact us regarding a workflow to suit your needs.

Set up and track - up to 24 tracks, up to 4 hour program, per night $100.00 Media rental - duration of project - up to two nights’ program $25.00 CDs or DVD of board mix $10.00 Mix session (unattended) $200.00 CD of mixes $5.00 Guerilla mastering session (unattended) $100.00 Final CDs $10.00 Total cost for recording, mixing, and mastering demo or EP/CD $450.00

Note that this cost also assumes you will be employing q music for sound reinforcement services on the night that tracking is performed.

Options

Where to begin? Full length CD in mind? We can do that! Duplication services? We can arrange that! Overdubs? Certainly! Want to use someone else for SR? We can, and have, interfaced our mobile recording rig with other systems. Feel free to contact us to define what your particular needs are.