I received a call from a singer/songwriter buddy whom I haven't seen in almost a decade. He had moved back to town and established his second career again (the median income for most songwriters here in town is actually about $6K a year, so that means there are a lot of songwriters with second careers!) and had written some songs he wanted to demo. A demo will usually not end up on a record, but will be used to pitch the song to Recording Artists or Managers and Publishers and can be anything from a simple guitar/vocal arrangement to a complete band session as this was.

The first issue I had to address was his budget for each tune. Nothing will burn a client faster than the mysterious appearance of several hundred dollars on a studio invoice. When I ascertained what he wished to spend, I matched his budget with a studio here in Nashville. Because he had a modest amount to spend per tune, I chose a smaller studio on Music Row owned by a keyboardist/audio engineer buddy of mine. In this way, I could negotiate a deal for the studio time since I was also hiring my friend to do keys and engineer. This saved my client several hundred dollars in the long run.

I chose a drummer and a bassist that I had worked with off and on for over 20 years. The drummer and I went all the way back to playing with Nashville legend Mac Gayden (Bob Dylan, JJ Cale, Area Code 615, and others) and I chose the guitarist because he could think on his feet, had good time, and could do anything from acoustic rhythm, mandolin and electric lead all the way to fiddle if I needed it. We had worked at that studio as a rhythm section often, so the engineer was familiar with each of our sounds.

At that point, I had to meet with the writer and prepare charts. He and I both played guitars and I established the best set of chord changes and the best arrangement ideas prior to the session. I then wrote a Nashville number chart with all of the Kicks, Walkups, and Rests written in (See the companion column this month in Beginning Bass). Writing these charts for the session musicians saved time (and money!) by not having then write their own charts.

My experience is that the more preparation you do on the front end, the easier the session goes. For example, if I'm dealing with an inexperienced singer, I'll usually try to whip up some sort of karaoke style MIDI track on a CD for them to sing with, usually with prompts for Verse, Chorus, and Solos if any. For all of this extra work, the Musicians Union sets the scale for session leader at double scale which you certainly earn if you do the advance preparation I do.

Tracking was set for last month, when all of a sudden the Singer/Songwriter had a setback in his second career. I had to contact the studio and the players and see when we could reschedule a month later. Then, two weeks before the session, the Singer/Songwriter caught the flu! More white-knuckling as we waited to see if he would get well enough to sing a scratch track. He barely did, but even that helped as the guitar and keyboards needed to see where vocal line had holes to fill and what melodies to play off of.

We just completed the basic tracks for the two songs yesterday. The basic tracks were both first takes and the entire process including overdubs took less than an hour for each song (in Nashville, demo sessions go fast). They sounded great, the client was happy, it was dead on the budget, and we've already booked a session next month for 3 more songs. All of the advance preparation paid off.

Peace and Low Notes,
Roy C. Vogt
Nashville Bassist
Bass Instructor, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

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