When sending demos, consider these few quick tips to make sure your material is presented well:
1. Trim your audio files. Nobody likes a second or two of silence before the music begins when they hit play. Trim your audio so it plays immediately like every professional track you hear on every album you’ve ever owned. If it feels too abrupt, you can add a few milliseconds of silence, but don’t have long silences either before or after the music plays. And make sure when you trim the end of your audio files that yo do not accidentally crop the audio – make sure the endings sound nice and natural and ring out properly.
2. Manage your levels. Nobody likes to turn up the volume for one song, only to reach for the volume again because the next song is much too loud, or vice versa. If your tracks are unmastered, do a bit of self-mastering by adjusting levels so all your tracks play at relatively the same level.
3. Personalize your demos. If you’re pitching your music for a dramatic project, they don’t care about your comedic chops. Choose tracks that are relevant to what they are looking for.
4. Make custom demos if you can. If you are able, write custom cues just for the specific pitch. Create music that you think would be the perfect fit and place that music at the top of your demo.
5. Assign a cue order. If you want people to listen to your tracks in a certain order, but are just sending a link to files, or attaching MP3s to an email, start your filenames with a track number (i.e. 1 My first track.mp3, 2 My second track.mp3). That way when they save the tracks to their hard drive and listen, they will come up in order and the listener is more likely to listen in that order. If they’re streaming your music via an online player, set the order of the playlist to what you want them to hear.
6. Make your tracks downloadable. If you’re linking to an online player with your playlist, have a download option. Most producers, directors & music supervisors I know like to have the audio files on their computer. If they like what they hear, they may send a particular track to colleagues or even to a picture editor to try and cut it in as temp. Make sure they have the files and can do so.
7. Create clear and consistent file names. Make sure your track names are consistent. Don’t do this:
1m1 Main Titles.mp3
TD_M05_Chase.mp3
The beginning.mp3
Do this instead:
1 The Beginning.mp3
2 Jasmine Main Titles.mp3
3 Chase.mp3
Notice in the first example there are different extraneous things vs. the 2nd example where the titles look consistent, and the numbers also put things in order as described above in paragraph 5.
8. Clean up your metadata. Make sure your MP3 has proper ID3 tags. At a minimum have the track name & your name. As above, make sure the ID3 metadata is consistent throughout your tracks.
How you present your work is probably equally as important as the quality of your work. If you stuff sounds good but is a mess, you’ll probably make less of an impression than if your stuff sounds OK but is beautifully organized and presented.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.