If you’re working on a song and you’re not sure whether it’s really there yet, that’s exactly the point where another experienced set of ears can be useful. Send it my way.
One thing I always liked about the early rounds of American Idol was how exposed the singers were. No band. No production. No effects. No place to hide. Just somebody standing there singing.
Whatever the television reasons were for doing it that way, it demonstrated something I think matters enormously in making records: strip enough stuff away and you find out what’s really there. That applies to singers. It applies to songs. It applies to bands. And it absolutely applies before you start piling production onto something.
When I’m producing a song, or helping the artist pick the songs to record, at some point I need to hear the basic thing work.
For a singer-songwriter, that might be piano and vocal or guitar and vocal. For a band, it might be everybody playing it together in a room without a bunch of overdubs and production tricks. For a track-based artist, it may mean stripping the production down enough that I can clearly hear the melody, groove, lyric and basic musical idea.
How to Tell If a Song Is Actually Good
I want to know: Does the melody work? Does the chorus actually feel like a chorus? Does the lyric connect? Does the singer sound believable? Does the song go somewhere? Is there something here that makes me want to hear it again?
Those questions come before a lot of the fun studio stuff. The smartest production decision is figuring out what the song needs before you start producing it.
It’s Also a Test of the Artist
The Bare Bones Test isn’t only about the song. It tells me something about the artist too.
Can the singer actually deliver it? Do I believe them? Is there personality in the phrasing? Energy? Charisma? Emotion? Does something happen when this particular artist sings this particular song?
That’s part of what those stripped-down American Idol auditions exposed so well. There wasn’t much around the singer to help create the moment. The singer had to create it. A great song and the wrong artist can still be the wrong record. The song has to work, and the artist has to connect with it.
I Needed to Hear Her Sing the Song
I had an artist recently where we had finally gotten through writing a verse, chorus and bridge. At that point I asked her to sit down at the piano and sing it.
She balked.
She wanted me to build the production further first.
But I wasn’t ready to do that. I needed to hear her sing the song. I needed to hear whether the melody worked coming out of her mouth, whether the phrasing felt natural, whether the chorus landed and whether she could actually deliver the thing we had just written.
For some reason, she had a problem with doing that. But from a producer’s standpoint, I needed that information before I could intelligently take the production further.
Before I build the record, I need to know what I’m building around.
That doesn’t mean every song in every genre has to sound amazing with somebody sitting on a stool playing acoustic guitar. That’s not the point. Plenty of great music is created from tracks, beats, sound design and production from the beginning. The point is to strip away enough that you can identify the thing carrying the song.
Production Should Make Something Better, Not Create a Distraction
Production is incredibly powerful. You can make things bigger, wider, deeper, stranger, more exciting and more emotional. You can create sounds that would never exist naturally. That’s what makes producing fun. But production can also make it very easy to avoid answering a basic question:
Again, is the song actually good?
You can pile on another synth. Another guitar. Another harmony. Another drum loop. Another effect. Another ear-candy moment.
But at some point, somebody has to listen past all of that and ask whether the melody works, whether the arrangement works and whether the artist is delivering something worth hearing. Sometimes the answer is yes, and now we get to turn it into a record.
Sometimes the answer is, “Not yet.” That’s useful information too.
A Producer Has to Be Willing to Stop
Part of producing is knowing when to move forward. Part of it is knowing when not to. If the chorus isn’t strong enough, I’d rather deal with that before we record twenty tracks around it. If the melody isn’t sitting comfortably in the singer’s voice, let’s fix that before we spend hours perfecting background vocals. If the song feels too long, let’s find out now instead of discovering it after everything has been recorded.
That isn’t slowing the process down. That IS the process. The studio should amplify the good decisions we’ve already made, not bury the decisions we haven’t made yet.
And Sometimes, Scrap the Song
There’s another kind of stopping that artists sometimes have a much harder time with:
Maybe this just isn’t the song.
Not the right song for this artist. Not the right song for this record. Not the right song right now.
Or maybe it just isn’t working. Period.
There’s no rule that says because you spent two days, two weeks or two months writing something, you now have to make a record out of it. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is take what you learned from the song and move on.
Personally, I’ve never had a shortage of song ideas. Starting over doesn’t scare me. I’d much rather chase another idea than spend endless hours trying to force life into one that simply isn’t happening.
Knowing when to fight for a song is part of producing. Knowing when to let one go is too.
The Magic Part: There are no rules
And part of the process is knowing that any of those decisions may need to be revisited at any time. The music, all by itself, may suddenly want to go in a different direction.
That’s the magic of producing music.
You can have the song worked out, the arrangement planned and know exactly where you think you’re going. Then something happens. Somebody plays something. The singer phrases something differently. A sound changes the entire feel.
OR..I’ve seen it happen…something is accidentally left out / deleted / altered…serendipitously. Suddenly the music is telling you it wants to go somewhere else.
And if it’s screaming loud enough, we should listen.
Not Every Record Has to Be Made This Way
Let’s be clear: not every record or every song has to go through this kind of process. The world is full of records made to a much lower standard than what I’m talking about here. We’re all well aware of that. Some of them even become successful.
That doesn’t change the standard I want to work at. I’m always aiming for the highest standard I can possibly reach. Period.
That means questioning the song. Questioning the arrangement. Questioning the performance. Being willing to rewrite something, record it again, change direction, or scrap the whole thing when it isn’t good enough.
A lot of artists simply aren’t willing to go that far.
They want to finish the song. I want to know whether we’ve made it as good as we reasonably can.
There’s a difference.
Which kind of artist are you?
Pass the Test, Then Make the Record
So before you obsess over studios, sounds, plugins, microphones and production tricks, strip the song down enough to hear what’s actually doing the work. Maybe it’s the vocal. Maybe it’s the melody. Maybe it’s the riff. Maybe it’s the groove. Hopefully it’s several things working together.
But find it.
If the song still grabs you when the distractions are gone, now you have something worth building around.
That’s the Bare Bones Test.
And if you’ve got a song that’s close but you’re not sure what it needs, send it my way. Sometimes one objective listen before production gets deep can save a hell of a lot of time, money and wrong turns. And give you insights you would never ever think of. I’m happy to give it a listen at no charge.
Get the song right first. Then make the record.