29/07/2010

Kenny Chesney needn’t dive deeply into his personal history to recall the frustrations of Mark Heinrich, founder and drummer for Cheyenne, the Austin-based cover band said to be the favorite of Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Chesney remembers his hunger to step out from the shadows of Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Jr. and other barroom favorites. He had a satchel filled with songs he’d written. But reality held him back.
“The bar owners, they wanted to sell beer,” Chesney recalled. “So if I was singing ‘Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound,’ they were happy. If I did one of my own, they weren’t. They’re about moving drinks, not breaking artists.”
Heinrich can relate. He’s been banging the drum slowly or loudly — whatever it takes to keep the crowd happy — in Lone Star State frat houses and roadhouses for a decade and a half. But his hoped-for destination is far removed from the bridal shows, college parties and regional clubs that dot Cheyenne’s gig calendar.
“I want to come to Nashville as an artist,” said Heinrich, 41, an electronics and IT guru for the city of Austin by day and road dog on nights and weekends.
A major step on that journey would be to get crowds to listen to his songs: Perhaps the right ears would hear him and doors might open. On this night, for example, he’s playing a club in Marble Falls, Texas. His band might trot out an original or two, but mostly they’ll draw from well-worn and loved songs by Chesney, Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn and Merle Haggard.
Chesney would do exactly that too, during his cover-band apprenticeship. “I was writing my own songs at the time,” he explained. “I’d throw in one or two a night. You know you want to do your own songs, but you know too that nobody cares. You’re playing for the guys and girls who are there to have fun, so you want to make sure they do.”
To get to his show at Marble Falls, Heinrich tidies his desk at workday’s end in a city office building. He and his band then have about two hours to drag their gear up to the Sports Arena Bar & Laundromat, a wine cooler, beer and setups joint along Farm-to-Market Highway 1431 in Marble Falls. Heinrich views the show at this 3,000-square-foot, 171-capacity club as one more step toward stardom. “If I’m above ground, I’ve got a 100 percent chance of making it,” he said. “All it takes is one song.”
He even thinks he’s written that golden ticket. “It’s been in my head since my dad passed away. It’s called ‘Go the Distance.’ If the right person hears the song, it’s going to be a hit.” But folks in Marble Falls aren’t lining up for Cheyenne to hear introspective singer/songwriter fare. They want to wash away Texas dust by sucking on longnecks and listening to favorites like Chesney’s “How Forever Feels,” Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” and anything by George Strait.
Brooks remembers exactly how it felt to be anonymous on a bandstand and know that his job was to recreate the songs made popular by stars of the day. “I was lucky enough to be in a band called Santa Fe,” he said. “We played honky tonks around Oklahoma. The time was 1985 and ’86. We all came to Nashville together in 1987. The band was made up of the Skinner Brothers, a freewheeling, play-anything-with-a-bad-ass-groove, three-part harmony group. I wanted to be George Strait and Randy Travis.”
These days, Brooks is still taking requests, though the crowds drawn to his stripped-down show at Wynn Las Vegas holler out for “The Thunder Rolls,” “Ain’t Going Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up)” and others he wrote or co-wrote. But he remembers when audiences just wanted him to deliver Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” or Travis’ “On the Other Hand.”
“We selected our songs by what would get the people on the dance floor,” Brooks said. “The more action on the floor, the more action everywhere in the club — the bar, pool tables, concessions, etc. The more action, the more the club owner was happy; the happier the club owner, the better the chance of getting invited back to play.”
Luke Bryan knows the house rules too. He began performing as a teenager around his family’s home turf in Leesburg, Ga., and then became a college-crowd sensation as the acrobatic and enthusiastic lead singer and acoustic guitarist with the cover band Neyami Road. Even after he’d moved to Nashville and started writing songs, those weren’t the tunes he played on weekends when he returned to the Georgia college circuit.
“We always did songs like ‘Fishin’ in the Dark’ (by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) and we did ‘Mountain Music,’ all your old Alabama tunes,” he said.
Bryan credits the exposure he gained on those gigs, heightened with his special EP releases tied to spring break, with helping to lift him toward his present success. But not every artist on the cover-band circuit wants to be the guy whose songs everybody else is singing.
Take Don Kelley, who continues his decades-long stint working five nights a week on Nashville’s Lower Broadway. Playing for tips and tipplers at Robert’s Western World is all the affable Kelley plans to do. His ever-evolving Don Kelley Band has included musicians who have helped flavor the works of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard; other Kelley alums cash in as part of the Music Row session scene.
“I’ve been playing music since I was 15, and except for a few years in Vietnam, this is all I’ve ever done,” Kelley mused. “I’ve never had a real job. I’ve never wanted to be a singing star. I sing good enough to get the gig. I’ve never been out of work.”
One key to his durability is the care he takes in picking material. “The way I choose a song is, if I like it, I’ll work it up. If I play it, I go a lot by the audience: If they respond real well, then I’ll keep it. And, I stay with the ’60s and ’70s guys — Cash, Buck Owens, Haggard — because they always had those swingy guitar players.”
Brooks had a similar approach to building set lists during his days with Santa Fe. “We always kept the promise of never doing anything anyone in the group hated,” he said. “That made it very enjoyable to play. And any new stuff we had was upbeat. It was suicide trying to introduce slow stuff nobody had ever heard before in a dance hall.”
This helped Brooks develop his “melting pot of all music,” which helped draw new fans to Country Music in the 1990s. Even now, he nourishes his performances by drawing from work he admires by others. “I believe in my own music,” he said. “But this gig at the Wynn in Las Vegas is a road map through my life, playing the artists I was raised on and how those artists have influenced creating and performing the music I now call my own.”
Bryan sums up the benefit of playing covers more succinctly. “It just lets you see what kind of songs people want to hear and what are the songs that get people up and going,” he said. “Years of playing in front of people and playing covers make you more seasoned. It helps you grow and become a better entertainer and performer. You learn what people like and you go from there.”
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The Demo Revolution: Technology is Helping Songwriters Expand Their Professional and Creative Option
By Fett
© 2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
During the last several decades of the last century, the demo producing and pitching process remained pretty much the same. Songwriters would emerge from a writing session with a “work tape” reference recording on cassette. They’d present the work tape to their publisher, who would provide feedback and determine when the song was ready for a full demo.
The publisher would then fund a demo session, which usually took place at an established studio on Music Row, using experienced, professional session players and singers. The publisher would use the resulting recording to pitch the song to potential end-users — mostly major-label producers, A&R reps and artists.
Over the past 10 years, this process has changed dramatically, driven by universal access to high-quality, low-cost technologies and greatly expanded song markets and marketing avenues. At the heart of these three phenomena are two vital tools: the personal computer and the Internet.
As a result, today’s process for producing and pitching demos looks like this:
Songwriters emerge from a writing session with an MP3 of a reference recording most likely recorded using GarageBand on one of the songwriters’ MacBook laptops. The GarageBand tracks might very well be the starting or “pre-production” tracks for the full demo.
The songwriters e-mail the MP3 to their publisher, but while awaiting feedback they start promoting the song themselves through e-mail and cell phone, social networking sites, online pitching services and myriad other outlets. Whether the publisher pays for it or not, the full demo will probably be tracked, overdubbed, mixed and mastered overtime by a variety of people in different locations, most likely starting with the songwriters’ home studios. In addition to producers, A&R reps and artists on Music Row, film and TV music supervisors, music libraries, small independent labels and countless other artists will likely also be pitched — not just in the United States, but all over the world — via the Internet.
Here’s a sampling of just some of the new demo-related resources that have become available to everyone, from DIY entities to the established, traditional music-industry giants.
Infrastructure and Communication
Laptops and the Internet are ubiquitous in most contemporary songwriting sessions. Nashville-based songwriter Victoria Banks, whose credits include Sara Evans’ “Saints & Angels” and Jessica Simpson’s “Come On Over” and “Remember That,” says that she and virtually every co-writer she works with brings an Apple MacBook to every writing appointment. If they happen to be in different cities while co-writing, they’ll run Skype’s free audio/video conferencing software to see and hear each other in real time. They also often use the Internet to access online rhyming dictionaries and thesauri. “I get really aggravated if there’s no Wi-Fi available,” Banks quipped.
Other writers use the MasterWriter program for near-rhymes, cultural idioms, basic recording and other songwriter-specific features. Some use apps on their smartphones, such as Sonoma Wire Works’ StudioTracks multi-track audio recording program, to capture musical ideas and create work versions.
To share larger, full-resolution audio files with her co-writers as well as recording studios and other parties, Banks uses Internet-based file-transfer services, including www.YouSendIt.com. Most of these services offer a free option that allows transfer of individual files up to 100MB and a limited number of downloads. Paid options allow for much larger files — for example, up to 2GB — as well as more downloads, longer storage time and file-delivery features.
In addition to e-mailing MP3s, many modern songwriters use multiple social networking sites to pitch their songs. Banks regularly uploads her demos to her Facebook and MySpace sites, which she refers to as “business cards that play music at you.” She finds them to be a convenient place to send potential clients because they can hear her songs instantly, in part because Banks uses iTunes to organize them by style, tempo, male/female vocal and other criteria.
Music Production
Nowhere is affordable, high-quality technology more readily available than in music recording and production. In addition to GarageBand, which is Mac-only, numerous recording programs that run on Mac, Windows and Linux, such as Audacity from www.SourceForge.net, are available for free. Today’s versions of Apple’s Logic, Cakewalk’s SONAR, MOTU’s Digital Performer and Steinberg’s Cubase provide unrivaled power and sound quality to home-demo recordists and professional studios alike.
In addition to loops and beats that facilitate both song creation and song recording, one of the biggest advancements in sonic quality in recent years has been among effects plug-ins and sampled “virtual instruments.” Besides pristine-sounding reverbs, pianos, organs, guitars, basses, horns and strings, users can access high-quality, real sounds of everything from banjos, didgeridoos and exotic Indian drums to full orchestras and choirs recorded in some of the most acoustically perfect spaces on the planet.
Remote Tracks
The Internet is also bursting with sites that specialize in providing remotely-recorded tracks from professional session players. Looking for a real string section to add to your demo? Just click on www.TimLorsch.com and check out samples from this Nashville-based musician. How about top-notch drums? Visit www.DrumsOnDemand.com or www.DrummerWavs.com. Need killer guitar tracks? Go to www.CustomGuitarTracks.com. What about a great demo singer in any musical style? Visit www.DemoSinger.com. And for a little bit of everything, there’s www.eSession.com. This type of collaborative tracking and overdubbing has become so popular that even the Nashville local of the American Federation of Musicians has bought into the idea by creating a very progressive, affordable, sliding-rate scale specifically for tracks recorded over the Internet. (This scale has been cleared for use nationwide as well as Nashville.)
At Your Service
Some people just aren’t comfortable with, or don’t want to bother with, the technical or logistical details of recording a demo. No problem. There are thousands of studios and music producers online, ranging from one-man-band operations to large, well-known commercial recording facilities, that specialize in managing high-quality, affordable song demo projects. In fact, if there’s any piece lacking in one’s arsenal of demo production resources, from custom beat creation through mixing and mastering, you can be sure it’s available remotely via the Internet for a very reasonable price.
Being There
One intriguing, technology-driven phenomenon in recent years is the shift from traditional “mail-in” demos to what Michael Laskow, CEO of the independent A&R service TAXI, refers to as “phone-in” demos. With the advent of cheap or free real-time audio and video conferencing over the Internet, demo clients can now be “present” at a demo session no matter where they’re located, hearing everything as it happens and providing immediate feedback to the demo producer and musicians.
Producer Cliff Goldmacher uses this kind of technology to produce demo sessions at his Nashville studio — in real time — from his second studio facility in New York City via his Web site www.NashvilleStudioLive.com. “I live in New York, but with this setup I can work with clients all over the world who write Country songs and want to demo them with the session musicians and singers who do this every day,” he explained.
It All Ends with the Song
So does universal access to these great tools result in better demos? Not necessarily, according to songwriter Sara Light. As a co-founder of www.SongU.com, a songwriting education site offering online courses, feedback, mentoring and pitching opportunities, she believes that while the sonic and production quality of demos — especially home-produced demos — continues to improve steadily, the rate of improvement in song quality and music business knowledge isn’t happening at the same pace. In her view, it’s a given that today’s demos must be “master” or “broadcast” quality, but no matter how much technology one throws at a demo, it won’t help if the song isn’t up to par or the person pitching the demo doesn’t know how the publishing business works.
Luckily, anyone who wants to learn to write, record and promote their songs more effectively can find that information online. “There’s no excuse anymore for anyone to say ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t understand,’ because you can find everything you need by sitting down in front of your computer to research and discover,” Light insisted.
“I think it’s still about the song,” Laskow of TAXI concurred. “If anything, we’ve now come full circle, where people have relied too much on the technology and the ready availability of A-list session players and thinking that that’s going to carry the song, when it really boils down to the same thing that it always has, which is that the song has to be great — ‘good’ isn’t good enough.”