Country Cuts

"the songs are well-crafted and well-performed."
- BCMA Bulletin - Oct 2003

Inside A Nashville Demo Studio

Ever wondered how to get that song to your favourite artist? Well, it's not easy, but the first thing you need is a professional demo. Songwriter and CMP contributor Jon Philibert meets up with Gene Rabbai (pronounced like "Hawaii") who runs Studio A in the bucolic peace of Hendersonville outside Nashville.

JP: For our British readers, can you explain the function of a demo studio? What actually happens, how does it work?

GR: Well, our primary goal in the demo studio is to realise someone's dream for their song. We hope to realise that dream with our band and our singers. Our goal is to make it sound almost exactly the way the writer originally heard it in their mind, how they envisioned it. We'll initially speak to a writer about the kind of feel they would like and which direction they would like it to go, then we turn it over to the band. We sketch out the song using the Nashville numbers system, as we call it down here. If you don't know what that is, it's a way of reading what we call the chart using a numbers system in place of the chords. That's basically the process.

JP: An important question. How much does a demo cost?

GR: It depends on how much instrumentation you want, and how much work is involved. A basic demo with full rhythm section would cost $300.

JP: And most people just send you simple tapes ...?

GR: They'll send us an acoustic vocal or they'll sit at the piano and sing it from there. I will then write a chart according to the way they played it. Then we'll have the singer learn the melody as close as humanly possible.

JP: Have people every simply submitted a vocal without any accompaniment and you've had to provide the chords?

GR: That has happened. We can still do that but it takes a lot more work as we have to kind of guess a little and make sure when we do that that they are happy with what we've done. In essence, we're writing the song with them because that's part of the song also. You have a melody but you still need rhythm and chords, and if they just hand you a melody it gets a little more involved. But we have done it.

JP: Do the songwriters give you plenty of instructions?

GR: They tell us they'd like it like this artist or that. Sometimes folks will even go as far as giving us their song and immediately following that, or on another tape, they'll give us a record like, say, George Strait's Right Or Wrong and say I want it like that. So then we'll take the feel and the rhythm and employ it on the new version. That really helps.

Fortunately, we live in a town that has some of the best singers in the world because they've come from all over the world to be country artists - and pop artists, too. So, according to people's budgets, we can get pretty much any kind of sounding vocal that you want, from a Kenny Rogers type vocalist to a Tim McGraw or Faith Hill. The folks have just got to tell us how they'd like it to sound and then we cast the singers for the songs.

JP: How many singers can you cast from?

GR: Hundreds of people. To give you an example of the extent of who we can cast from - a mutual friend of ours from England, songwriter Graham Snow, e-mailed me and said he'd heard this girl online. He was checking out vocalists and he found a girl I was not aware of. Her name was Rachael Good, who I later found out is the daughter of country songwriter Karen Taylor-Good and producer and session musician Dennis Good. He said, check her out online, and I did and she sounded wonderful. He wants to use her and I called her up and we've already booked her for his session. It's as simple as that. She's in Nashville, she's a demo singer, and everything's set. That's the beauty of being in Nashville!

JP: Who are the singers you use on a regular basis?

GR: We work with many people whose singing and professionalism we enjoy and admire. For example, there's Kelly Nolf who is a great, powerful singer - she's in the vein of Wynonna Judd. As a matter of fact, she's doing a Wynonna Judd show in Nashville and she does demo work.

There's another singer, Mica Roberts, who's Faith Hill's backup singer. She's wonderful to work with and an incredible vocalist in her own right. So we use her as much as possible. She used to work at the Stockyard here in Nashville where she would be waitressing and then she would go up and sing. When people heard her, they just sat back and went, whoa!

So she started doing demos for many big producers downtown. Then she was heard by Faith Hill's people and auditioned for her, and now she's Faith's background singer. She also works with Jessica Andrews and Billy Gilman - she's done a lot of work with him and she's gracious enough to come over here and demo for us. She's just wonderful - I can't say enough good about her.

Then there's Tim Raybon -he's Marty Raybon's brother out of Shenandoah - he does demos from time to time for us. Then there's a new guy we've been using by the name of Mike Sutterfield. He's from Oklahoma - he's just got here. He does great pop and pop-country vocals. He's so easy to work with and he's so professional. He stays true to the song. A lot of times, vocalists will get off the melody and I have to pull them back. But not so with Billy.

JP: And the musicians that you use? Again, they must be from a vast pool?

GR: Yes, same thing. We have a little tight-knit group of guys that have been here for many, many years. They know how the Nashville machine works and it allows us to get our demos done quickly for you but with quality.

JP: Can you give me any names that we might be familiar with?

GR: I play keyboards on a lot of the sessions and we also have Bob Hatter on electric guitar, Donnie Skaggs on electric guitar, Dow Tomlin on bass, Williams Ellis on drums, Jim Unger playing fiddle and mandolin and Tony Paoletta on steel and dobro.

JP: Do you only deal with country music?

GR: No. The beautiful thing about the demo studio is that it's not limited to any type of music. We can handle anything from hip-hop, programmed stuff to a live band with vocalists. I would say probably about 75% is country music and the other 25% is of other formats. We've done gospel, we've done hip-hop, rock'n'roll, heavy rock like The Scorpions, but primarily it's country.

JP: Have any of the songs you've demoed gone on and achieved success?

GR: There's one particular story I can tell you about. There's a friend of mine, Dave Nowlen. He demoed several songs here. We did one called A Broken Wing. He sent the CD to LeAnn Rimes' father who played it to LeAnn. She fell in love with the song and cut it on her Unchained Melody album in 1997.

However, the interesting thing is, when we demoed it, we gave him the tracks, too. That's another service that we provide at Studio A. When we give you a song, we give you the song with the vocal, then the track with just background vocals, so you can have your favourite singer sing to it and they have background support, and we also give you just the track so you can go from scratch with the vocals.

Anyway, after LeAnn heard Broken Wing, to her great surprise immediately following the song was the backing track. So she had just heard the song, it was still fresh in her mind and, as the track started playing, she started singing along and she just fell in love with the song because she could sing along with it immediately using the track following.

She cut the song and the rest is history! It's a great idea! So now I can tell everybody, you might want to add the tracks too, when you're pitching to an artist. Just a single song - you don't want to pitch too many songs. The rule of thumb in town is two or three and don't bore people. Give 'em your strongest things, bang, bang, bang, but you might want to throw the tracks in, too.

JP: Is there anything you have rejected because it was too weird for you to do?

GR: We don't ever reject anything, the reason being that if these people have been nice enough to contact us we want to do the best job possible. Very occasionally, it does get a little testing when you're sitting listening and you say, what on earth do they want?, what is this all about?! But our guys are so incredible and so inventive, and that's why I love Nashville.

So I'll play the crazy demo and say, guys, we gotta do something here, and we'll chuckle a little bit, but then we get down to work and something amazing happens and even though it's hard to understand what the client wants, wonderful things happen. My point is, we've never had to turn anything down - we've always produced a demo.

In the past 20 years we've only ever had one lady who was outraged because she claimed we didn't do what she wanted. I called her on the phone because I was terribly hurt because I take pride in what I do for people. She argued with me tooth and nail. I said, but, Phyllis, we did your melody exactly. No, you didn't, you did not do it, she said, and I even went so far as to play it over the phone. I played hers and I played what I thought was close. That's not my melody at all, she insisted. I beg to differ to this day, but you can't win.

JP: In the UK we have readers who are also artists. Could you offer a custom service whereby you cut the tracks here and they could add vocals back in the UK?

GR: It's funny you should mention that. A mutual friend of ours, Lorna Flowers, is in town to do some recording for a band she has discovered in England, two girls named Blue Orchid. She asked me if it were possible to cut tracks here and send them to England. Not in the normal way that everybody does where they get a two-track stereo mix and you have the artist sing over the tracks. That's not a bad way to record them, but if you really want to make a record, you should have the freedom to lift a high-hat or an acoustic guitar, and the only way you can do that is with separate tracking.

Now you can do this using computers, sequencers and with the OMF file system. It's now a whole different format and you can record 24, 32, 48 tracks of instruments and bounce them down to a DVD. Then you can take the DVD to any compatible studio that has a computer and an OMF application and they can open it up and you can record more over the top.

So with Lorna, we get the musicians, we interpret her songs the way she likes, and she produces the album with us. I'm going to make an OMF file. She's going to take the tracks back to England and her singers are going to come in and record vocals which they will mix in England.

So it's opened up a whole new avenue for writers which will allow them to get the Nashville sound, the Nashville machine to work for them, have their songs interpreted, and then they can take it to their favourite studio in England or Europe and cut vocals over the top, and they can mix it right there in the way that they would like.

JP: I understand you had a stint as an artist, Gene Austin.

GR: Well, Gene Austin and my band Nevada are still selling CDs in Switzerland and to some extent in England and also Brazil. My wife Yoko is actually from Brazil and we were down there visiting, and I left a couple of demos with a friend of mine who took them to a record label and I actually got a record deal there on the strength of those and cut a couple of albums in Brazil.

We had a hit there. It came from a client who wanted to co-write with me. She sent lyrics and she said she wanted it to be a line dance record. Boot Scootin' Boogie was a big line dance success at the time, so I patterned our song, Make Your Body Move, after that, and it became a big line dance rage in Brazil!

JP: So what does the future hold for Studio A?

GR: The future plan for the studio is to get cuts for our writers. As simple as that. To make our demos so appealing that someone in the industry downtown will want to cut them. We just want to provide the best product for our clients. That's our goal. It always has been and it always will.