How important is it to have all the bells and whistles on a demo?
I think it’s different for every song. Some songs are great as guitar/vocal. I love to get guitar/vocal demos myself. But then there are songs when I fell totally in love with the demo and did my very best to try to capture what the demo made me love about the song and maybe I wouldn’t have heard it if it were just done as a guitar/vocal. I do think that it’s always the stuff in the middle that’s the worst the stuff that’s trying to be a real produced demo and it’s got a bunch of junk stacked all over it and you constantly have to tell the guys while you’re working on it, “Hey man, I know that they did that on the demo, but forget about that. I don’t wanna hear a guitar sound that’s anywhere near like what that guy did I can’t stand that.” Then it’s a distraction, it’s something that you have to overcome.
