 I'm lucky enough to get to chat with some of the best producers in music on a regular basis. If you put a bunch of us in a room together, you'll get an earful of stories of the woes of the creative process and how it breaks down in the recording studio. Inevitably, there will be stories of the big studio budget that couldn't outdo the demos recorded at home. The next story will be how a band constantly compared studio recordings to their demos, leading to the downfall of their record since they weren't open to developing their demo ideas to their full potential in the recording studio. The funny thing is, they both may be right or completely wrong in their assessment. Whether or not they were right is obviously subjective, but they may have made a different decision if their objectivity wasn't tainted or too attached to their demos. In this video, I'm going to talk about how producers can maintain their objectivity and stay focused on making sure records come out as good as they can since that's their job. Hi, I'm Jesse Kahn and this is Muse Formation. One of the most difficult balances to strike is doing enough drafts of your demos so that you get a full picture so you can make a great song while not drafting them to the point that you're so attached to the demo sound that you can't hear the song any other way. You must give thorough consideration to your demos but not at the sacrifice of your objectivity. You need some of that objectivity to spare when recording the songs your audience will actually hear. This same idea goes for band rehearsal. While everyone wants to be well rehearsed when going into the studio, there's a point where you're so used to the way a song sounds in rehearsal that any tweaks for the better sound unnatural. This leaves little possibility of objectivity when production decisions are made in the studio crippling the development of a song. To make the struggle worse, oftentimes the first version of a song that someone hears and wants to listen to again and again is usually the one they like best. Test yourself on this. The next time you hear more than one version of a song from a musician you love, see if you consistently enjoy the first version you hear of the song more. As someone who's pulled their friends on this for years, the resounding answer is the first version you listen to continuously is hard to get over. This means all of your teammates who work on your music and listen to your demos numerous times are on team demo whenever making a choice as to whether part of the demo is better since they heard it that way first. However, there's an exception that shouldn't be overlooked. About 25% of the time, the demo can be beaten, even for those who loved it. But this is so hard to measure that it's almost irrelevant. On projects with a decent budget, you'll regularly see bands who have lost perspective take their record to a mixer or a different producer at the end to help make better decisions. Today in pop music, we see countless producers on a pop song. Since suits commonly think a song hasn't reached its potential after a producer hands in their work. So they employ another producer to further explore what can be done to this song that's good, but not quite great yet. The fresh perspective that they have can clearly see the dilemmas that have left the musician in paralysis. This objectivity goes for every mastering engineer or mixing engineer's job, which is mostly about objectivity and that they need to be fresh years that put some final touches on what perspective you may have lost in the recording process. But how do we avoid the loss of objectivity when we're doing demos or working with scratch tracks since that's part of the process? Since we're trying to avoid getting too used to the way a demo sounds, what can we do to avoid this plague? While you must make the music you want to hear, you need to exercise restraint in your consumption of this music. The more you listen to a specific recording of your song, the more objectivity you lose. Conversely, abstaining from listening to your demos won't allow you to gain perspective on what you've recorded. What's so tragic about this is listening to the same mix repeatedly can impair you from making a good decision, yet you'll feel confident that this is what your heart feels is right for the song. Unfortunately, many musicians decide to go with a demo element when evaluating a song, only to return to listening to that song a year later to discover that there was more room for improvement that they had been blind to due to a loss of objectivity. Demos are one of the most useful tools at our disposal, but to make them effective, you must exercise restrained listening with concentrated note taking. Even if the note taking is as informal as cranking down the windows on your car to listen as you would any other song, this is some of the most important time you can spend as long as it's rationed. Excessive listens with a half-minded attention only further cements the way a demo sounds, hindering your objectivity to further development. Scratch tracks can poison objectivity as well. If you've been hearing a scratch vocal while you work on a song for three weeks, inferior vocal inflections can skew your objectivity away from those that further the emotional resonance of a song as you become used to how the scratch track sounds. The nuances of the performance become so ingrained that any alterations that stray from the demo version seem wrong. To alleviate this at the start of a project, I'll have the singer sing a scratch vocal a handful of times to start each day before we start to work on the song. I'll then change the take that we hear throughout the day so we hear different ways that they could do it. This way the performance is always different so I can hear the best of their inflections as we record the song. This technique can help preserve objectivity immensely as well as help keep a clear picture of what a vocal should be doing when it comes time to track it for the version that the listeners are actually going to hear. When producing records, I severely ration my influence from demos to maintain a higher level of objectivity than musicians. In the best case scenario, I won't have heard any demos for weeks before we start pre-production or the recording process. The band sends me demos, I try to take it in as fast as I can so I never get used to it. This usually means listening to each song one to five times while taking notes. After this initial listen along with one session of re-evaluation, I never listen to the demo until we're done recording the song. While the self-produced home studio trend continues to grow, this objectivity is usually what makes a producer worth their paycheck on a project. While I've talked a lot about the demo being detrimental to your objectivity, it also could be the greatest savior at the end of recording a song. If I've done a good job of forgetting the demo, putting it out again once we think the recording of a song is completed can be a life-saving safety net to make sure we've exceeded everything good about the demo. I can't count how many times I've revisited a demo after tracking a song to find two or three cool elements to bring back that had so much resonance to a song. But let's talk about how you effectively listen to maintain objectivity. In order to maintain my objectivity as a producer, I abstain from writing songs with the band from day one. After I initially hear what they've written, I may send the band back to the drawing board and say, the verse works, but scrap the rest of the song. But I won't be there when they rewrite it. If I have to be in the room as they try out 400 different variations of how the song could go, I have then lost the same amount of objectivity as them, which defeats my purpose as a producer. To do my job effectively, I can't sit through the infinite possibilities of songwriting, since I need to maintain an objective perspective and a quality control role. I must still have objectivity after a song is as fleshed out as a band can make it on their own so I need to minimize micromanagement throughout the process. While this doesn't sound very effective, it keeps me with an objective mind to evaluate what they write. This is much more valuable to me and many other producers than any time saved. To maintain this objectivity, I outsourced to the tedious tracking of guitars and synthesizers to my co-producer. I leave the room while they get the tone to return with fresh ears once it's dialed in, whether this is a synth patch or a guitar sound, when it comes time to track guitars for six to eight hours of tedious tuning and punches, I have to leave since my perspective gets lost if I sit through that. If an extensive development of harmonies is needed to make a song work, I'll also leave the room for that so I don't get tainted by the options and tedium of tracking them. This allows me to not be biased in my judgment of a performance by the effort expended to record it. If you spent four hours recording it, you don't really want to redo it. I also don't know how long it would take to redo it if it doesn't feel right and I don't have to have that pressure bearing down on me. If I don't have to punch the guitars for three hours to fix them, then I can make my decisions solely based on making the song great, not my annoyance with the process. I should say I'm not the only producer employs this method either. Famous producers like Rick Rubin and Howard Benson are famous for this technique. But what about maintaining objectivity and mixing? The other common culprit of demoitis is how the interaction of levels in demos and rough mixes influence those afflicted when they judge a mix of a song. With tracking songs, the vocals and drums are often turned up excessively loud to help performers get a good performance. Once a song is mixed though, these levels are placed in a more realistic balance. So those who have been hearing a tracking mix feel a loss of excitement when they're mixed at a reasonable level. I've had a few practices helpful to prevent demoitis when I start to mix a song. Don't set any levels of an instrument excessively loud compared to the others in a rough mix. During tracking, it can be helpful to have drums turned up loud to perform tight to the groove. Take these mixes down when making rough mixes. Otherwise, it could be hard to get used to more reasonable balances when mixing a song later. Make different mixes each day. One of the benefits of mixing on consoles compared to DAWS was they would allow the mixes to not be the same each day. The variances of different fader levels didn't allow your mind to get used to exact balances, which allowed you to hear different perspectives on the levels of a song to judge against later. As well, you need to make a change or stop dwelling on the demo. Unless you're adding or subtracting from the demo, don't give superfluous listens without making new versions. Come back to them with fresh ears. Many of my producer friends find that as years go on, they get better and better at trusting their gut to discern what's good and bad as opposed to being biased to the familiar. This also tends to come with those who learn to judge every choice emotionally instead of what concepts that stem from the head. Do your best to keep building your creative muscles so that you can maintain your own perspective and follow these best practices I just outlined. Thanks so much. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlists or con artists, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you want to learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. 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