A guest blog entry from Tim Rosser, writer of The Boy Who Danced On Air to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.
Everything
about making a demo takes an extraordinary amount of time. Writing the
orchestrations, rehearsing the singers, doing take after take, mixing it all
together. Hours and hours and hours of your life. And it can always
take longer. It's basically up to you - how many hours and
dollars are you willing to put in. You want it to be perfect because in
some cases you need to sell your show with a song or two and the better
technology gets, the more perfect it can be. And if you are a product of
the catholic school system like me, you never think you're trying hard enough. It's the perfect storm. And then there are the practical decisions
that make me want to pull my hair out. Who should sing the song? Who should play? How many people does it take to sound like a
chorus? Like an orchestra? Will a click track make this song sound
super tight or squeeze the life out of it? To use computer generated
sounds or acoustic? How much money are we really willing to spend on a
track of a song that could very realistically be cut from the show in a month? I have a heart-breaking story (my heart!) for every one
of these variables and even so I still don't feel like I'm in control most of
the time Charlie and I go into the studio. I'd like to think I'm a little
better at recognizing when we have a real problem on our hands and knowing how
to fix it efficiently. But even then, I don't actually know how much
people care when the drums aren't tuned right or there's a mysterious purring
sound on the guitar track or the tempo is too slow. Maybe no one notices
any of those things. Or only some of them. That's the thing with
writing music and recording demos, I guess. It's all
taste and guessing.
I'd
like to think that you can't make a bad song sound like a good one with a good
demo or a good song sound like a bad one with a bad demo, but I don't believe
that. I don't necessarily believe that
the average listener can tell when
a piano/vocal performance of a song has potential to be extraordinary in the
future with a full band and a killer singer -- probably because I don't
necessarily believe that I can tell. Especially now with
contemporary musical theatre, where musicals can look and sound like virtually
anything. I think musical theatre lovers are pretty adapted to imagining
a full orchestra when they hear a pianist play Rodgers
and Hammerstein -- we know when a piano lick is meant to imply a woodwind solo
or a lush string passage. Guitars and active drum parts are game
changers. Pianos often don't do good, clear impressions of these things
and they can impact the nature of a song in a gigantic way. Nothing is
more bland than a pop-rock score played on solo piano. It's a style that
relies much less on the rich harmonies and variable dynamics that pianos are
fantastic at producing and much more on timbre and overlaying of parts. Pianos sound like pianos and overlaying lines on top of other lines with
one hand is generally out of the question.
The
Boy Who Danced On Air
has been an adventure as far as figuring out the most effective and basic
ensemble needed to get the songs across. When we first started writing
the show, I would send Charlie demos of me singing over a large array of
electronic sounds. Faux-rubabs and domburas, a multitude of drums,
auxiliary percussion, harmonium, piano, flutes, loads of things. I was
experimenting, trying to see what worked and what didn't. Looking for
something special and transportive. We recorded our first set of demos
over those original tracks with professional singers because it was less
expensive and time-consuming than writing
charts and bringing in players. Then, every time we performed any of the
songs in concerts, I had to soul-search to decide what instruments we needed to
re-create the essential sound. At different points I had a synthesizer
playing dombura parts, strings pizz-ing to meagerly simulate rubabs, a real
dumbek, a djembe pretending to be a dumbek, glock, electric bass, acoustic
bass, no bass, a tambourine, leg strap jingles that I still don't know the real
name of... After lots of experimenting, it boiled down to an acoustic
guitar (because the amazing Eric Davis proved to me that it's actually possible
to play the lute stuff I wrote on an acoustic instrument. And it sounds
way better than synth. Surprise, surprise.), an assortment of percussion
instruments and a hybrid hand drum, a piano and maybe harmonium. Admittedly, we probably need a bass. And maybe an actual rubab. Or maybe not. All subject to change with the wind... We
eventually made new, acoustic, demos because we think they come
across better -- again, and ever, that question of what comes across better. I still listen to my original demos sometimes and wonder if anything has
gotten lost in all paring down and acoust-ifying. And then, sometimes I
wonder if I can save myself a lot of trouble, and just perform the songs with a
piano. I can't tell you the answer, but I'm functioning under the belief
that a solid demo really matters and it's better to leave as
little as possible to the imagination.
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