Doing it For The Exposure... Do's & Don'ts!

'It's good exposure'. The single most horrible phrase in the music industry. It's the one people use when they've just asked you to spend thirty or forty hours working on a remix for no cash, or to trek down to London, DJ at their club night and then get the first train home in the morning, all without the promise of even the train fare. Nightmare, right? Well, it's not always a bad thing. So read on, as we take a closer look at this thorny issue.

If you just look at the principle, there's really nothing wrong with the idea of doing something for no upfront payment, if the fringe benefits (usually publicity) can be significant. Indeed, a lot of artists and labels spend good money trying to drum up publicity in a variety of ways. So spending your time and energy in return for exposure is, on paper, no worse than spending your hard-earned cash.

The problems come when 'the exposure' is out of proportion to the effort that you put in. This normally happens when a label or promoter don't want to pay someone. It can occasionally be tempting, but few landlords will accept exposure in lieu of rent, and it should really set alarm ringing. Why don't they want to pay? The most common reason is usually that they're just trying to bulk out a product in the hope of bringing in a spot of extra cash for themselves. As such, you need to get a little mercenary in your thinking.

What exactly is the exposure you'll be getting? Can you do better? If you're being asked by some no-mark label for free product, you'll likely resent the process, do a poor job, and they'll not bother promoting it too hard because they didn't have to invest in it. It's a lose-lose all round. Instead, try hitting up a label you like and asking to do a remix 'on spec'. This means that you work for free, with no obligation to the label to pay you or even use the mix, but that if they like it then hopefully you can work something out later. Most labels are open to the idea of free stuff so it's often possible to get some remix stems. This way you are much more motivated – it could be your big chance, imagine getting a remix out on this great label – so more likely to spend time and do a good job, which increases the chances of the label liking it and wanting to release it. A much better result than being remix 7 out of 8 on some tiny label that doesn't want to pay its artists.

Free tune giveaways can be useful too, but again, are best off done on your own terms. Far too often a free tune is given away via some small blog or inconsequential website and garners no attention. Disclosure, on the other hand, kickstarted their whole career with a free tune giveaway; managed via their Facebook page, it required a 'like' to be downloadable. As it was such a good track, it proved very popular; and several thousand 'likes' later they were suddenly flavour of the month. A much better result than a few thousand downloads from a magazine site where people may not even click through to their fan page.

DJ gigs are a little more complex – most nights will have plenty of budding DJ's queuing up to play, but you should still exercise a little discretion if you're asked to play for free. Again, what's in it for you? It doesn't have to be anything big - the promoter owing you a favour perhaps, or, and this would be the most common reason, the sheer fun of it. A good set in front of a decent crowd, with a few beers and some taxi money home can be one of the best nights out you can have. Conversely, playing a backroom to no-one on a broken P.A. isn't a good, or fun, use of your time. Anything involving travelling should, however, be treated with great caution. If you're spending money on trains and staying overnight, there's more to lose – so try to make sure you're getting something back in addition to playing out; for instance coverage on the promoter's blog or a mix on their radio show. It's not always plain sailing; your author recently spent a hefty wedge travelling across the country to play a free show for a famous fashion magazine, in return for a feature in the print mag. As soon as the gig was over, however, the magazine stopped returning calls. Very frustrating.

Overall, doing things 'for the exposure' can be a great way of putting your name out into the world, and getting yourself onto releases or into press that you would not otherwise get. But it can also be a great way of letting people casually rip you off, without getting much in return! So make sure that before you do anything in return for exposure, you're clear about what that exposure is going to be, how you're going to get it, and make sure that there isn't a better way of doing it yourself!

Fine Tune Your Perfection!

We always hear about the importance of getting tracks to sound just right - spending time in the mixdown and arrangement to ensure that every detail is perfect. Everyone wants their beats to sound as good as they possibly can, of course - but can this approach work to your detriment? Join us now as we take a look at the tricky area of being a perfectionist...

Conventional wisdom would have it that we should all take whatever measures we can to make the best tunes possible. It's a reasonable starting point, but of course the meaning of this changes depending on what kind of tunes you're writing. If you're working on clinical techy D&B then the goal will be highly polished mixdowns, space-age effects and searing bass. Artists like Teebee or Reso famously spend weeks on every tune, finely tweaking every detail until the mix shimmers. If you're writing loose, jazzy beats then the mixdown will be much further down the list of priorities - but you'll need to be pretty solid with the harmonies and chords, for instance. Someone like Hyetal, known for his more lo-fi approach, spends hours perfecting his aesthetic; making sure it's lo-fi but interesting. The hiss and grunge in his tracks is by no means accidental, or a result of poor technique. It too has been slaved over, layered, re-sampled, EQ'ed and filtered.

This much may seem obvious. But in fact it's something you need to keep in mind at all times - what is the point of the track?

So, we should spend ages on every track to achieve perfection, right? Well, this is where it gets complicated. Of course, if you can see an obvious flaw in your track, then fix it - a breakdown that doesn't really grab the attention like it should, a groove that just doesn't flow nicely, a click that shouldn't be there. But it doesn't always help to go looking for things to tinker with. Some tracks simply don't benefit from endless tweaking - if it's not a great track to begin with then the world's best mixdown won't cover that up. Equally, some tracks are simply beautiful in their simplicity, and trying to overproduce, or embellish the basic idea, just makes it worse.

Many producers and songwriters will insist that their best tracks came together in a day. It's true that inspiration can strike quickly but it doesn't negate hard work! Most of these producers will go on to say that they then spent another two days trying to add to the track before deciding - and this is the crucial point - that it was best in the original incarnation. So in these cases, perfectionism is manifested in knowing how to spot when a track is at its best, and knowing when to stop adding more parts.

Of course, spending a long time on a track has other downsides. For a start, it takes ages! This goes double for those of us with day jobs or kids, for whom a track can already take weeks anyway. In this case, a great way of identifying what really needs changing is to hear the track on a club soundsystem. Add the pumelling subs and crunching tops of a big system into the recipe and you'll find that most of the fine details in the track are somewhat obscured, leaving you no choice but to focus on the main issues of groove, structure and melody. Do they work? Does the melody come through? Does that bassline need to drop out for an extra 8 bars somewhere? Get these simple factors right and the rest of the track will fall into place fairly easily.

One last aspect of perfectionism is not in the melodies or mixdowns, but simply in the methods you use to produce. Legend has it that Burial took only a fortnight to write his iconic second album. But he didn't just sit down with a blank canvas and wonder what to do; over the preceding three years he had perfected his methods of production, so that he could write quickly within certain parameters. The layers of hiss, the pitched-down R&B vocal samples, the atmospheres, the garage swing, the unquantised beats - these were developed over a long time and contributed as much to the unique ambience of the album as the melodies and basslines themselves.

So perfectionism in production is actually much more than endless fine-tuning. It's about identifying the essence of what your track is about, and then working towards that - which could mean polishing up the mixdown, leaving the production raw, or adding a huge keyboard solo. But whatever it is, make sure you're improving the track and focusing on what's important!