Finishing a Demo

Take an eight-bar idea to a stereo demo you can send to a listener, with structure, a rough mix and a clean export.

Tool profile

Kind

guide

Vendor

本站

Form

流程

Platforms

通用

Price

不适用

Jobs

流程

Verified

2026-10-30

Related

Reference TrackPopular singing and the microphone

What you have to hand over

A demo of two and a half to four minutes: stereo, 48 kHz and 24 bit WAV, plus a 320 kbps MP3, and a lower-peak version if the listener will post it to short video. Someone must be able to tell verse, chorus and ending from start to finish. It is not a master, but the vocal must not be buried. Send the file names, lyric sheet, one reference track and one sentence about what feedback you want.

Three steps

Set the target length and a deadline. Capture the idea on a phone, then fix tempo, key and one eight-bar loop in the project, and lay out sections to the target length. Second, arrange only what holds those sections: leave the verse open, add layers in the chorus, and let placeholder sounds be ugly. Third, make a rough mix and export it: vocal centred, drums and bass anchoring the low end, 6 dB of headroom on the master. Keep a rough bounce at every stage so later changes can be compared.

Tools and pages

Any DAW can finish this. Read the site page From Idea to Finished Track first, then the glossary entry Reference Track. Put a reference track in the project for A/B, then listen on a phone speaker and on headphones; judge structure, not timbre. For delivery and loudness, read Delivering Stems and the loudness metering page. If the chorus will not arrive, return to the motif and change one variable only: rhythm or harmony.

Acceptance checks

The first vocal line arrives within ten seconds. The chorus has at least two more layers than the verse. The ending has a clear final chorus or a deliberate close. The vocal is still intelligible on a phone speaker. The file starts at 0:00, peaks no higher than -3 dBFS and contains no clipping. File names carry song, version and date. Leave it for a day, then play it again: if you can still say what it resembles and what you would change, it is ready to send.

Why work gets sent back

Sound design comes before structure, so the eight bars loop forever. The arrangement is full and the vocal has nowhere to sit. Nobody checked on a phone and on headphones, so the low end or the sibilance fails elsewhere. Version names are a mess and the listener opens an old file. The demo is mixed like a master, with time spent on limiting instead of sections.

Sources

• Demo 的结构、粗混与导出做法，依音乐制作流程通识核查，未抄文本
• 参考曲与手机外放判断的用法，依混音教学通识核查，未抄文本

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.