Play It Yourself – Or Get A Remote Session Musician?

If you have a killer tune in your head that you just can’t get down to disk, you may need to improve your playing skills, or even learn a competely new instrument. On the other hand, it may be quicker and more effective to hire someone else to do it for you…

Learn From The Songwriters

If you want to craft the perfect demo, the first option is to learn to play your instrument better. If your instrument is a guitar, there are plenty of guitar tutorial sites out there that can help you improve.

However, ivideosongs takes this old concept and puts a slightly new twist on it – here, you can learn to play songs by watching video tutorials of industry professionals, and in many cases you can actually learn to play the song through a tutorial by the original songwriters themselves.

There are varying degrees of complexity in the videos, from basic acoustic guitar strumming to full rhythm-and-lead guitar parts, each receiving their own sub-tutorial. This is a very saturated market, but if the site can draw in enough well-known artists to teach their own songs, ivideosongs could well prove to be a hit.

Hire A Virtual Session Musician

If you don’t have the time or inclination to learn how to play piano, sax, drums etc., then you can try hiring somebody who already can.

The Missing Track is an online recording studio that can bring your singer-songwriter recordings to full-production life. Basically, you send in a recording of your song with the basics in place – such as backing guitar and vocal – and the session musicians will create a multi-instrument arrangement around it.

This is an interesting model, and will surely appeal to many solo artists just beginning their careers. The artist can set how many extra instruments they want, and can specify an arrangement, or just let the studio provide the arrangement. There is a sliding pricing scale in place depending on the complexity of the request – simply adding a drum track to a song may cost $45, whereas a full instrumental arrangement could cost $269.

However, considering the price of hiring a studio and session musicians to record a song in ‘real life’, this seems like a reasonable deal for having a professionally recorded demo.