Preparing a demo

Everywhere I turn, I keep hearing about the need to have a high quality demo CD. It finally took a voice from above to push me over the edge. When asking at church, how do I get involved with the music ministry, I was immediately told to submit a demo CD.

Today I started working toward a demo. I chose to work with Ben Senterfit in his studio and our approach will be to:
1) Record the guitar to a click track
2) Record the vocals
3) Add Julie's violin
4) Add other instruments later

In preparation for studio time, we started by getting me ready to work with a click track. A click track is basically a metronome. Today we identified the tempo for each song and my goal over the next week is to get my guitar rock solid with this beat.

If you haven't done it before, it's challenging playing to a click track. So I'm glad I have practice time. A few things that I noticed immediately:
- I tend to add an extra beat at the end of phrases (my guitar embellishment was throwing me off time)
- I tend to speed up going into (or during) the chorus
- The first three songs (my favorites) were at basically the same tempo (need to mix this up on the CD).

This should be an interesting process.