Promoting yourself with a demo can mean all kinds things, from selecting a couple of tracks to help connect with a collaborator to getting yourself a composing gig or record deal. Producer/musician Quantazelle herself has seen plenty of demo discs and has assembled some tips for how to make them work. If you’ve got ideas or questions of your own, be sure to sound off in comments. But the best idea of all may be getting people together for an in-person event to share music and visual reels. -Ed.

A demo is short for “demonstration,” and its purpose is to show others what you can do, musically. In the past, a band with major-label aspirations would scrape together a bit of cash for a few hours in a studio and crank out a few copies of their best songs on a tape or a record and then send it off to various A&R departments, hoping for a record deal and a contract with a fat advance. These days, technology has made the concept of a demo and its applications somewhat different, but we’ll always need to share what we’re capable of with others.

If you’re in Chicago this Tuesday… During my time at Modsquare a few years back, I organized a Demo Swap at a club in Chicago, where guests would get in free if they showed up with a stack of 10 or more or their demos on CDR. Not only did I discover talented local acts who I featured on our free online compilations, I met artists that I would later book at events, and learned that fellow attendees who had met at the night ended up collaborating on projects. Since I had so many people asking me to do another one, we’ve reincarnated the night at Ramp Chicago. So if you’re close to Chicago, show up at Sonotheque on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 9pm with a stack of demos or promotional material, get in for a reduced cover, and start meeting your fellow musicians and industry types (Peter Kirn of CDM will be there!). Read more about it here: Demo Swap July 17 at Ramp Chicago.

Where’s it going?

Figure out your intentions with the demo. Is it to get signed to a label? To book gigs? To find like-minded potential collaborators? To get work scoring a film? Similarly, determine the audience. Is it the A & R people at a label? The talent buyer at a club? Other musicians? Each of these requires a different approach.

We’ve already been exchanging some great tips for organizing your life, both musical and mundane. On the musical side, one of the most compelling software tools just got a big update today:

Minim: Music Management for Musicians

This elegant, very Mac-like utility organizes your songs, storing lyrics and audio/MIDI files and letting you track metadata about what songs are on what albums and work in what venue and are in what state and require what musicians … you get the idea. Basic features:

1. Metadata and lyrics
2. Albums and album art
3. Audio and MIDI files, images, and videos
4. Collaboration via iChat (nifty!)

The update features a slick new interface and the ability for songs to live in multiple albums. You can even upload directly to the community site iCompositions.

It looks really nice, but I’m also enjoying the wiki approach for content, since it allows the app and data to live, cross-platform, on a flash stick. Anyone know a good, TiddlyWiki-style wiki (or TiddlyWiki plugin) with multimedia support? And anyone using Minim for your music? I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.

FreelancingThingsDone (FTD): Where Your Next Action May Be Your Last.

Here in the US, it’s almost tax time for anyone who lacks an accountant and procrastinates. That’s all the more reason to consider tools for keeping your life together, from mundane stuff that has to get done to musical and creative materials that keep you inspired and artistically productive. It’s a huge volume of information.

My recent solution has been to un-tether myself as much as possible from traditional, platform-specific, offline applications. I’m not one of those people who believes music software will someday all be online, Web 2.0-style. Music DSP and complex music creation software loves to be tied to a platform, running locally, performing advanced sonic marvels on your local CPU; end of story. But that’s all the more reason to have less to deal with for everything else. With licenses for Ableton Live, Reaktor, Max/MSP, and various plug-ins to worry about, live musical sets to backup and organize, visual programming code and patches and video files and everything else, and four machines in the house, three of which regularly go out for gigs with me in alternation — well, you get the idea.

I plan to do a full writeup on this soon, but here’s a quick peak, because I’d like to get some of your feedback before I do a full feature. My organizational toolkit right now is:

1. Gmail for email, with the Greasemonkey Gmail scripts to speed things up.
2. Google Reader for RSS reading, which I’ve found bar-none is the fastest way to get through RSS feeds thanks to its latest update.
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets for mobile document reading and sharing, though I do still rely on NeoOffice for Mac and Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows for everything else. And, of course, a local text editor (TextMate for Mac and SCiTE for Windows) is still essential.
4. del.icio.us for bookmarks, plus the Firefox extension, though I am looking for a better tool for online research — when I actually want to clip and take some notes.
5. Basecamp for organizational stuff, which is now running CDM, basically — definitely a must to have separate “groupware.”
6. Flickr for photos.
7. New — TiddlyWiki for taking notes.