Demo it, clean it, put the words on screen

A song that only lives in your head is one bad week away from gone. Record it the day you finish it, even badly. Then, if it deserves more, build a better demo. You don't need a studio for any of this.

Level 1: the phone work tape

The voice memo app on any phone is enough. The goal is a recording where every word is clear and the form is complete. That's it.

• Room: a carpeted bedroom or a closet full of clothes beats a kitchen. Hard surfaces bounce sound around and smear the words.
• Distance: phone about two feet from your mouth, a little to the side of the guitar's sound hole so the guitar doesn't bury the voice.
• Level: do a test pass at your loudest part. If the waveform hits the top or the sound crackles, move the phone back.
• Say the details: before you play, say the title, the date, the key and the capo position. Future you will be grateful.
• Settings: if your phone's recorder has a lossless or uncompressed quality option, turn it on. Menus differ by phone and change with updates, so look in the app's settings.

Play the whole song, start to finish, every verse. Writers who record "just the chorus" end up with half a song and no memory of verse 3.

Level 2: a simple DAW demo with a click

When you want to layer a second guitar, a harmony or a fiddle part, move to a DAW. Free options: Audacity runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and is open source; GarageBand comes from Apple for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Any USB microphone or a basic audio interface with one mic will do.

Set up the click first

1. Pick the tempo you worked out in lesson 1. Play the song to a metronome before recording to make sure it feels right; most writers find their natural tempo is a few BPM slower than they think.
2. Turn on the DAW's metronome (or generate a click track) at that tempo and count in for one or two bars.
3. Wear closed headphones so the click doesn't leak into the mic.

Record in this order

1. Guide track: guitar and voice together, to the click. This is your map.
2. Guitar alone, the keeper take, listening to the guide.
3. Lead vocal, listening to the guitar. Mute the guide.
4. Extras: harmony on the chorus, a second guitar, a simple bass line.

Because every take sits on the same grid, you can cut a bar, move a chorus or swap a verse from take 2 into take 5. Without a click, every edit is a fight.

Cleanup in SoundStudio

SoundStudio runs in the browser. Export your DAW mix as a WAV and open it there. The audio theory page explains each step in detail; here's the short order of work:

1. Listen all the way through on headphones and write down the times of anything that bothers you.
2. Clicks and pops: Noise tab, Find Clicks, then review each mark and use Fix This Click on the real ones. Repairing beats deleting, because deleting even one millisecond shifts everything after it and can leave a new click at the seam (theory: clicks).
3. Room hum or hiss: capture a noise profile from a half second of silence and apply it gently, 50 to 70%. Stop as soon as the noise stops distracting you; a little room sound is natural (theory: noise).
4. A held note that runs long: select part of it and use Smooth Cut, which lines up the waveform and blends over 20 ms so there's no bump (theory: clean edits).
5. Loudness: Enhance tab, target -14 LUFS with a -1 dBTP ceiling, then check the report. That matches Spotify's default normalization level as of October 2026 (theory: loudness).
6. Export a 24-bit WAV master, then an MP3 at 320 kbps or a FLAC for sharing.

AI versions in MusicStudio

MusicStudio generates songs with AI. For a songwriter it's a fast way to hear your lyric in a full band arrangement, test a different genre or tempo, or give a co-writer something better than a phone memo.

Use it like a session band that never rehearsed:

• Feed it your finished lyric. Paste the words exactly, each sung line on its own line, with sections labeled (verse, chorus, bridge).
• Describe the sound plainly. "Acoustic Americana, fingerpicked guitar, fiddle, male baritone, 92 BPM" works better than a paragraph of adjectives.
• Check every word. AI singers drop lines, swap words and stretch syllables onto the wrong beats. That last one is a prosody check for free: if the AI keeps stressing the wrong syllable, your line may be the problem.
• Keep your own work as the source. Your lyric sheet and your work tape are the record of what you wrote. The AI track is a demo of it.

Cleaning AI output

AI generators sometimes leave tiny broadband ticks in their output. SoundStudio has a recipe for exactly this on its theory page, Cleaning up an AI-generated song. The short version:

1. Download the best format offered, WAV if possible.
2. Noise tab, Find Clicks with the Detector set to Suno ticks, then run it again set to Spikes above the outline. Fix the real ones, strongest first.
3. For a click buried in a loud chorus, separate stems in the Helper tab, fix it on the vocal stem where it stands out, and mix the files back together.
4. Go easy on EQ. AI songs arrive already mixed. A gentle low cut at 30 Hz is usually all.
5. Same loudness target: -14 LUFS, -1 dBTP.

Put the words on screen: Lyric Bench

A lyric video is the cheapest way to get a song in front of people on video platforms, and for a protest or story song the words are the point. Lyric Bench builds lyric videos from your audio and your words.

Prepare the lyric the way it's sung: one sung line per screen line, no run-together sentences, repeated choruses written out every time they're sung. If the words on screen don't match the words in the audio, viewers notice in about four seconds. Check spelling twice, and check that each line appears before it's sung, not after.

[Verse 1]
November on the county road, the beets all in the ground
my brother backs the flatbed up against the shed

[Chorus]
and the lights go off at five o'clock
they pull the blinds and turn the lock