Demo Quotes

I got a call from my manager who told me Diplo was working on a country project. I put my vocal on the songwriting demo and my team sent the song to his team. Evidently they fell in love with it… and the rest is history.

I wasn’t the kind of guy who was like ‘here’s my demo,’ or ‘listen to my demo.’ I just never thought it was that good.

I walked into a demo session one time, and a guy said, ‘I’m thinking kind of like a Trace Adkins thing.’ And I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Man, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m gonna have to fire myself. You’ve got to hire somebody else.’

Fun is when you’re writing a song and you’re trying a rough shot at a demo and… it works. That’s when it’s fun. After that, it’s work.

If you put a demo on the net and people say it was the finished version then they’re going to say it sucks. I really hate that.

Getting to prove yourself in a room that’s not your typical demo is an experience every comic should try. It makes you better.

I always do very detailed demos. I feel that it’s better to show the director a demo that sounds as close to the final thing as possible with samples. It takes time to create, but I feel that it’s better to get the director on board very early on in terms of the sounds that I have in my head.

I’ve realized that, as the years have gone on, I have become completely impatient with the demo process.

I took temp jobs, recorded a demo in the evenings and eventually shopped a record deal. All I knew was that I wanted to write songs; thankfully, I also got to sing them.

I was in Studio 54 one time; it was great. But I’m not a discotheque guy. Sometimes, if I had a new demo, I went to some discotheques to check it out – see how the reactions of the people were. But just to dance, I rarely did that.

Back in the Seventies, we bucked the trend. Instead of going to London and handing in a demo tape, we insisted the record labels came to Glasgow to hear us.

When Dad heard ‘The One and Only,’ he said: ‘That’s a smash.’ Dad played the demo through the speakers at Abbey Road, where we were recording. I was a huge Nik Kershaw fan and was desperate to meet him, but everyone else hated the song.

Some people remaster their records six, seven times, remix it three, four times, spend a million hours, then they always go back and hear a demo of it and they’ll say, ‘Aw that sounds so much better than the final mix.’

When the script was written, it was sent to me with asterisks marking where he felt a song would be appropriate. Before the film was shot, the score was written. I made a demo of it, so they lived with the music as they were making the film.

I’d do a demo recording by myself, layering instruments on top of one another, and while that’s fun, it doesn’t have the same impact as getting some great players together in a great studio with a great engineer and producer, then waiting for the magic.

I listen to everything that comes in. I’m not real worried about demo sound quality. I can hear through that sort of thing. If a band can play, then they can play.

I remember being given a demo of the ‘World Wide Web’ at Peter Gabriel’s studio in the early 90s, and I had zero comprehension that I was staring into the future. I was just happy with my pager and teletext on the TV.

If you are recording, you are recording. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.

Our demo tape we got signed on was composed of three songs, ‘Wham Rap,’ half of ‘Club Tropicana’ and a verse and the chorus of ‘Careless Whisper’ and we thought that was good enough.

I learned a long time ago to be honest when I’m talking to other artists. Up-and-coming artists used to come and say something, they would have a demo reel, and I would try to tell them the truth. I don’t go up and say something unless I really feel it.

I’d been trying to do this since I was 15, sending out the demo tapes and doing all the things that everyone told me that I should be doing. But no deal – like, never.

There was a jingle house called Lucas/McFaul in New York, and they called me ‘the demo king.’ I almost never had the big final – in jingles, you have the big final, and then you sing on it, and you make a good deal of money.

We call it ‘demo therapy.’ We’re therapists on top of designers and contractors and real estate agents and we really sometimes have to push people past their comfort zone and show them what they like, they just didn’t know that they like.

I had been writing songs for other people for a while, and I made a demo and I put it on my Myspace, which Perez Hilton found and blogged about on his site.

I was living in London with my brother, and he was a friend of Matt Marshall, who signed Tool. So we were the first people over in Europe to get the first Tool demo in 1991, and me and my brother immediately cottoned on to it.

I wrote ‘Lakeside View Apartment Suites’ with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room.

I know I can’t do everything myself. So I know I specialize in my melodies and I do some of my demo work. I pass it on to my producers who are much better at the production level.

Mutineer is the first album of mine without a demo stage.

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends’ bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record – the first thing I did that was an actual record.

I used to make demo tapes with cats that rocked with Russell Simmons and people like that. The history goes so far back; I’ve always been really focused on writing dope rhymes.

I never record anything like a demo, I just go for it.

Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too.

When I realized that you can’t necessarily be cast in a really great part living in Austin, even when Hollywood comes to town, I got a demo reel together and headed out west.

I think the true test of a pop song, for me, and I’ve talked to a lot of other writers about this, is you take your demo, you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica, and that’s the Hollywood car test.

With ‘Rage,’ it was a little bit different because this was going to be the public’s first interaction with the ‘Rage’ IP. Early on, right after the tech demo, there was some marked concern internally how much of a bad thing it would be if the game went out and it wasn’t well released and people got a bad taste off it.