We need your help producing our next EP (Prize for best production idea!)

Published: Fri, 05/22/15

Imagine this scenario:

A band walks into your studio and needs help producing their EP or album.

The common scenario is that they have just enough songs to hit the quantity needed for their release.

If they have four songs they'll record an EP. If they have 10, they'll record an album.

Unfortunately that's not the best way to do it. Having just enough songs to warrant an album is not be the best route because you're not putting your best foot forward.

You're putting "whatever you got forward."

So maybe there's only 3 good songs on the album and the rest is filler or simply not strong enough to be on an actual album.

In my opinion this band should've gone back and written more songs so that the pool of songs is greater than the actual track list on the album. That way you can cherry pick the best songs and leave the rest to b-side purgatory.

That's actually what we need your help with.

As you may know, my band The Long Wait is pretty busy gigging these days and we've been working on releasing singles every few months on our Patreon page where you can how we record and produce all of our songs.

This summer we want to record an EP because we finally have a full line-up again (it used to be just me and my vocalist Liz for a while). We are the only remaining members of the band that recorded our old EP so we thought it was time to showcase the band in its current form.

But we have too many songs that we want to record.

That's where you come in.

We've created this video with snippets of each of the 12 songs so you can hear a preview of what they all sound like. Some of them sound a little stripped down but try to imagine them as a full band production.


Now, put your producer hat on and think which songs would be good on an EP.

Find the voting poll below the video on this page: http://thelongwait.com/vote/

Things to think about:

  • Commercial appeal (is it catchy?)
  • Production appeal (can it be taken to the next level in the studio)
  • Emotional appeal (does it speak to you in any way)
  • Which songs sound good together
  • Just because (sounded good...couldn't my finger on it...just liked it...)

Even though these are our songs I think these are still valid ways to approach any production job. The songs in the video are live takes that are rough and need produced. So as a producer, which songs would you pick and how would you take these demos to the next level?

Prize for the Best Production Idea

Once you're done voting for your favorite songs please take a minute and comment below the voting poll and tell me your production idea for one of the songs.

The best idea will win:

Please comment on the post here: http://thelongwait.com/vote/

And while you're at it, take a second and share the post on Facebook or Twitter.