The Great Demo Purge of 2015

Okay. I don’t think this is really going to break that many hearts, but I will preface this by saying no, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Honest.

I’ve been posting demo MP3’s of my songs to this site for a couple of years now (since around the time I started recording what is now going to be Hidden Gold). It was a way to let people hear what my music sounds like, or what I want it to sound like, given my limitations as an instrumental musician. These were put together quickly on GarageBand for iPad (or iPhone), using the fairly good capabilities on that app to create progressions and arpeggiation and the like.

But posting these versions of the songs, I knew, was going to leave me with a dilemma.  I’m working with real musicians who know how to get real sounds out of real instruments, to create definitive recordings of these pieces. And them I’m going to sell those as an album, and raise money for a good cause (I’ll post about that in more detail in the near future).

Now, as that (soon to be announced) date approaches, I’m left with the realization that for many people, if all they heard was these tinny, fake-sounding recordings, they really might not be interested in the album.  Because, compared with what we’re working on now, they sound really, really poor. You’re going to have to trust me on this.

So I’ve taken the coward’s way out. I just finished purging all the song demos off the site. (Not just the links. I pulled the files.) I have left in place anything that isn’t going on this album, and all the YouTube links. (I’ve also left in place everything else about the songs, including the sheet music.) Later this year, I’m going to move the remaining files (and any teasers for the polished recordings) to SoundCloud, which has a better media player than WordPress, and where song storage is free.

I’ve also deleted the posts that were just announcements about new demos, because it seemed silly to just leave them there pointing to nothing. So that’s it. For any of you who don’t like this move, I promise you, once you hear the new versions, you’re really not going to miss the old ones.