Generally speaking, there are no rules about this, it’s a question of your negotiations with the label. But here are a few things to keep in mind about the quantity of the tracks when sending a demo.

Insights on sending a demo

Album

Let’s say, you want to submit a 9-tracks album. Considering that most labels usually offer mastering service, doing mastering for nine tracks is quite expensive, with no guarantee that this investment will be returned as sales are very low these days, especially for the upcoming artists. Hence why label can reject your album simply because it’s too risky financially.

Mixing and mastering when dealing with labels

If you still would like to release an album, I would advise delivering fully prepared and mastered tracks. This is exactly what I did with my first appearance on JOOF Recordings with my debut album “Chronicles of the Universe” back in 2014: I provided mastered tracks, cover artworks, and even a promo text. Perhaps this played a role in the decision.

Chronicles of the Universe

Single

Now, let’s say, you want to submit a single track. If the label accepts it, be ready to deliver a second track, the so-called “B-side”. If you take a look and browse Beatport releases, you’ll probably notice that the most common format is 2- and 3-tracks EPs. Releases consisting of only one single track are rather an exception, usually for well-known artists.

Such EPs are a good way to start building an audience and draw attention to your name. Even if you’d have enough tracks to make an album, I suggest splitting them into a few smaller releases and only then making a big impact with the album.

By the time my first album came out, I had four singles, four remixes, and appearances on the various compilations, and I think it partly was the reason for the album’s success. Preparing the ground is an important part of the releasing strategy, I suggest you consider this too.

Discography

If your track is unique

Hamish, it’s hard to say for sure since I haven’t heard the track you’re talking about, so I’ll go over some general scenarios. If your track really doesn’t suit to any label, I see three reasons why it happens and what to do about it.

You invented a new sub-genre

I’m not trolling, this is possible. Although very, very less likely taking into account how many sub-genres within each genre we already have.

Hannes Klitta aka Vaishiyas was one of the first of its kind who started to make a so-called “Offbeat” Progressive, characterized by the bassline pattern. I bet at that time, 10 years ago, his music didn’t fit any label too.

Vaishiyas – “Intensity”
Spin Twist Records, 2009

So he made his own label and started to gather like-minded people around it. Today we know Spin Twist Records as a home for Neelix, Coming Soon, Interactive Noise, Day Din, and more well-known artists.

If you are very confident and think your track is fresh and strong enough, then go ahead pioneering your vision. Run a label, make a podcast, push your style at every frontier. It’s much bigger than just releasing a track, it’s about shaking the scene.

But is your music really that unique? I suggest keeping reading before answer this question.

You made an outdated track

I know producers who think they making unique music, but in reality, they do outdated music. The word “outdated” I’m using in this context can be referred to both the style and the production quality. Let me explain deeper.

Many bedroom producers sit in the four walls and make tracks solely based on their views on how this particular genre sounds like without seeing the outer world. Music always should come from the heart, this is true, but at the same time it’s good to have an understanding of what happening in the scene.

Go to a party or a festival where you would potentially like to play. Listen to what other artists playing, notice how the crowd reacts. Put yourself in a DJ shoe for a moment: would your track fit this event?

If your track doesn’t fit any labels, there is a chance you’ve made an outdated track. This is especially true for producers who download cracked software, synth patches, and sample packs on torrents that have been already used over and over for years. You just can’t make quality and competitive track using the same Vengeance packs as producers of 2000s.

Remember, that sound design is important.

Criteria of professional production. Part 1. Sound design

You did a poor research

Good research can look like this: make a list of 10-20 acting artists with more or less similar music to yours. Find labels where those artists are releasing their music. Then check those labels and see what else they do release. Eventually, you should end up with at least a few labels that would suit your music.

If you can’t name even then artists with similar music, either you did poor research or some of the two previously mentioned points above.

In that regard, I would also suggest being more like a DJ, perhaps even start a podcast. I know it may sound counter-intuitive but bear with me.

Since 2011, I host a radio show, Rave Podcast. Although I started it just to spread the music I love, later I realized one more beneficial effect: it keeps me in a good “shape”, just like fitness for the body.

Rave Podcast is broadcasted on DI.FM every first Tuesday of a month

It forces me to constantly searching for new music and practising with DJ skills. As a result, I’m always aware of all new releases, know all labels etc. It gives a great understanding of what happening in the scene.

If none of these works and you still not sure where your tracks fit in, send it over, perhaps I could help :-)

Benjamin, earlier I shared my favourite synthesizers — be sure to check this out because it answers the half of your question.

And since I’ve already written about the synths, in this post I’ll go over my favourite processing plugins.

First of all, I’m a happy Ableton user, and most devices I use are built-in: compressor, limiter, equalizers, filters, delays, chorus, beat repeater, bit crusher, and more. Ableton team did an amazing job on making most of their built-in devices so good, and this is yet another reason why I love Ableton.

This is why the list of the 3rd-party plugins I use is really short compared to what I see on other producers.

Replika by Native Instruments

Replika by Native Instruments. Reverberator and delay hybrid. Price — $49. I’ve downloaded this plugin for free when NI gave as a Christmas gift, just to check how it sounds like. Turned out it has a really nice potential especially for some creative kind of reverb and delay. Love it. Although it’s not free anymore, the quality of the reverb is very decent.

Supercharger by Native Instruments

Supercharger by Native Instruments. Price — $49. Tube compressor. This plugin has a very similar story to me as basically downloaded it for free at some of the NI’s giveaways. In general, I’m not a fan of such simplified plugins with a big “make better” knob, but in this case, it works pretty well when you don’t want to tweak attack and release of the compressor for too long and just quickly get a result.

Pro-Q by FabFilter

Pro-Q by FabFilter. Price — €149. Equalizer. This is probably the most profound equalization tool I’ve seen so far, it’s useful for both production and especially for mastering. I have to admit that I still use Ableton’s built-in EQ more often, but when I need some more precise and complex equalization, I use this one.

Saturn by FabFilter

Saturn by FabFilter. Price — €129. Saturator and distortion. Yet another great tool from FabFilter, I like that it allows saturating the signal very gently.

Oszillos Mega Scope by Ben Schulz

Oszillos Mega Scope by Ben Schulz. Price — €20. Oscilloscope. Great tool for finding conflict frequency areas, especially handy in a kick and bass combination. The best thing about this plugin is the ability to work on multiple channels without any routing.

SPAN by Voxengo

SPAN by Voxengo. Free. Spectrum Analyzer. Pretty much the same as Ableton’s spectrum, expect one thing — SPAN can have up to 8 signals at one instance, which is very handy for finding conflict areas. Although, it requires some quite complicated routing to make it work properly.

BitterSweet by Flux

BitterSweet by Flux. Free. Transient shaper. A tiny tool that you probably won’t use every day, but it can be handy on some occasions.

Added in 2017

LFO Tool by Xfer

LFO Tool by Xfer. Price — $49. A multi-purpose waveshaper. I discovered this plugin very recently but it instantly became one of the favourite ones.

That’s pretty much it! Most other plugins I use are Ableton built-in devices.

Fellow producers, what’s your favourite processing plugins? What would you recommend and why? Post in the comments below.

Alex, before jumping into your question I would like to make a little detour and talk about the difference between Pitch shift and Frequency shift because this is might be the reason why you keep getting inharmonic sounds.

Understanding Pitch shift vs. Frequency shift

Let’s take some simple Saw wave playing at A1 note, and put a Spectrum analyzer to get a visual representation of that sound. It looks like this:

Picture 1. Saw wave playing at A1 note with the fundamental at 110 Hz with all the harmonics being multiplied by that number

Sound is a vibration. Note A1 wiggles 110 times per second, in other words, its fundamental frequency is 110 Herz. All other wiggles on top of the first one are called harmonics, and they are multiplied by the fundamental frequency: the frequency of the second harmonic is 220 Herz (2×110), the third — 330 Herz (3×110), the fourth — 440 (4×110), and so on.

What is sound

Now let’s transpose the oscillator within the synth for +2 semitones up, which will produce the sound at B1:

Picture 2. Saw wave playing at B1 note with the fundamental at 124 Hz with all the harmonics being multiplied by that number

The fundamental frequency of B1 is roughly 124 Herz, and as we can see at the Spectrum analyzer, all harmonics are multiplied by this number: 124 Hz → 248 Hz → 372 Hz → 496 Hz.

Now let’s reverse the oscillator’s transposition back to its initial position and put a Frequency shifter instead. The difference between A1 and B1 is roughly 14 Herz, so we can assume that shifting our sound at these 14 Herz will produce B1, right? Well, it’s not. This is exactly where many producers fail.

Musical scale frequencies chart

Picture 3. Saw wave playing at A1 note and shifted for 14 Herz up, producing a weird, inharmonic sound

Take a look at these peaks: 124 Hz → 234 Hz → 344 Hz → 454 Hz... what a mess! You see, they are no longer multiplied by the fundamental frequency, and hence, no longer sound harmonically, or musically.

What Frequency shifter really does is add a constant value to each harmonics, +14 Herz in our case, producing these weird sound and graph. It literally shifts the harmonics, making it out of sync with each other.

Choosing the right warp mode

Let’s get back to your question. Now you know that in order to tune a sample and keep it sound musical, you have to transpose it using a pitch shift, not frequency shift.

For example, if the sample’s note is A, and your project’s root key is F, then transpose that sample to -4 or +8 semitones.

I don’t know what DAW you’re using, so I’ll assume you’re an Ableton user. Ableton Live has six different warp modes, or algorithms, each suits best for a different kind of sounds. It’s important to choose the right mode depending on your sample type:

Ableton Reference Manual: Audio Clips, Tempo, and Warping

Picture 4. Transposing a sample

That’s pretty much it! Make sure to choose the right warping mode and tune sample using the Transpose knob, and you’ll always get a nice harmonically tuned sample to your project.

I hope it helps.

3 tips how to organize projects, files, and folders

Well spotted, Ewan! Yes, I use colour labels for all channels in my projects indeed, it saves time and helps a lot. But not only that.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to share my 3 tips for organizing projects, files, and folders.

1. Use colour and text labels

My very first Ableton project had absolutely random colours, channels positions, and no text labels at all. It was such a mess! Although there were just about 20-30 channels in total, so it was kinda okay.

Laidback Luke is trying to find a bass in his project; “So funny because I keep everything gray as it just looks nicer, but I will always be searching for my channels”

On a contrast, my current projects usually have around 90-120 channels, so I would spend nearly half of my studio time scrolling and looking for a right channel if I’d keep being such irresponsible to this chaos.

So I’ve set myself a rule: whether I create a new Audio or MIDI channel, I always add colour and text labels first before putting any plugins or devices, and same applies to Audio and MIDI clips.

I divide all channels into larger categories and group them together, even if they don’t have any common processing. In other words, those groups are mostly used just to keep things clear. Usually, my groups and color labels will be like this:

These colours don’t have any hidden meaning in it, although someone may find a similarity with chakras where red is also the base colour and violet is on top :-) The point is I always know where is my bass, lead, and even “that peeeeow sound”. No more wasting time of scroll through the project window!

Going further on the previous point, I also suggest naming your channels properly. Imagine if you would open this project one year later, having a hundred of channels named like “New Audio Copy 2” is certainly not the best way.

Make yourself’s life a bit easier by naming it like this:

2. Name project files and folders properly

Quite often I see funny pictures in social media and blogs about music producers who name their project files like “New1”, “FinalFinal” etc.

“Every producer in the world have this problem”

I always thought it’s just a geek’s humour, but after speaking to fellow producers, it turned out that this problem is real: some people really struggle to find their own project files because of this! I never had this issue because, intuitively, I’ve made myself a system keeps things clear.

So, basically, I have two folders on my disk called “Drafts” and “Finished”.

When I create a new project, I save it in the “Drafts” folder and name it by the current date, e. g. “2016.08.24 Project”. This helps me to see when I started this project to make sure I don’t work on this for too long. If during production I do some significant change, I save it as another version with the incremental numbers, like v2, v3, v4 etc. So usually each project folder has several files (versions) in it.

Once the project is done, I rename it to the final track name and move to the “Finished” folder, which groups tracks by release title — albums and EPs.

These manipulations are so simple, yet makes all projects easily accessible. At any time, I know exactly where to find a project folder of “Enuma Elish” or “that track which I started a month ago”.

Enuma Elish, 2015

The drafts folder. Note the files names the path bar

3. Put your project folder in the cloud

We used to think that everything lasts forever, including our computers and disk drives. In reality, I often see how music producers get lost the results of their hard work for very various reasons: the DAW had crashed and not saved the last session, or the neighbour accidentally shut down power in your apartment, making your HDD died.

To keep your projects and nerves safe, I highly recommend get yourself cloud storage and put your entire project folder in there. Google Drive, Amazon, Dropbox, Apple, whatever.

Personally, I use Dropbox. Every time I save the project, it gets instant and continuous backups, automatically. And if something goes wrong, I can download it back to another computer or even restore from a different version (Dropbox has “Version history”, not sure about other services).

Another little tip is to use “File → Collect All and Save” function to make sure all of the samples used in this project are gathered in the project folder, and hence, get a backup in the cloud. This way you won’t open your project with a “missing audio” warning.

Recap:

1. Mark all channels and clips with colour and text labels. Wrap channels into larger groups to easily navigate through the project
2. Make yourself a system to name project folders properly. Current date can work.
3. Put your entire projects folder into Dropbox or Google Drive to get continuous backups. Still, do manual backups to external disk from time to time.

Craig, I’d like to discuss the topic of “messengers vs. email” in general, regardless whether you want to reach out some artist to speak about remixing, or send a promo to a DJ, or send a demo to a record label. And obviously I can’t speak for everyone, so I’ll tell you about myself.

Every time someone sends me a private message on Facebook, SoundCloud, HearThis, Google+, Twitter, Skype, VK, or Linkedin, one of the two things happens. Either I don’t see this at all because the service hides it from me, or I don’t have time to reply right now, as a result making this message lost forever.

That’s the general problem of all instant messengers. They demand your attention here and now, and you never know for sure how long this chat will take especially when you see a message with nothing but a “Hi, how are you?”. I do chat on Facebook and Telegram occasionally, though, it’s rather an exception for very few persons.

Telegram me

Also keep in mind that having all important conversation on Facebook or any other website is very risky. If your account gets stolen or blocked, you’ll lose access to all of your chats as well. If the person with whom you had a conversation with decided to remove his account, you’ll lose that chat as well (that happened to me once). That is why I have a principle: don’t rely on social networks.

A website vs. Facebook for musicians

Email is different.

I can read a message and mark it as unread to reply back later without getting “read” status by the person on the other side, making him think I’ve read it and ignored.

I can write a draft while offline and it’ll be sent automatically as soon as I get the internet. I can set a reminder to reply to that particular email using third-party apps like Wunderlist or Apple’s built-in Reminders. I can add inline pictures in the message body, and add a hidden recipient in BCC if needed.

And at last but not least, I can flag, label, and organize messages by folders wherever I like. When you get a hundred incoming messages per day, email is the only realistic way of keeping them organized. All of these things make email a clear winner for business communication. Remember, time is the most valuable resource.

So next time when you would like to send me a demo or just say hi, please drop me an email, I read every single one.

Get in touch

On cover image: a slightly exaggerated example of a typical conversation over instant messengers.