A Quote by Calvin Harris

From the age of 14 to about 20, I bombarded record companies and DJs with my demos. I was desperate to get it out there. Most of the time, I got nothing back. — © Calvin Harris
From the age of 14 to about 20, I bombarded record companies and DJs with my demos. I was desperate to get it out there. Most of the time, I got nothing back.
You can always pound out demos and send them to record companies, but most of the successful bands I've seen are the ones that can sustain themselves.
I don't make demos. I don't have the interest or the energy or the time. Demos are something you do in the early stages of your career, but when you get going, you just go in and record the song.
In almost any change there is 20 - 60 - 20. 20% are doing the change and we need to stay out of their way. 20% will never get there (a large percent still go into banks to see tellers vs. ATMs). 60% are in the middle. I think you will always find some companies where the head of HR is not a member of senior management team (bottom 20% and some companies where she or he has always been (top 20%).
I thought I'd be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don't forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
Yeah I'm still writing. I've got about 14 tracks now. But we've been on tour so we haven't had time to get back to a rehearsal place.
The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio... and we put down some demos... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent... He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.
To me, when you got a 20-year-old running back or 21-year-old receiver that's just coming out of college and you're out working these guys, age really don't matter. So it's easy for me to see what it is. People say it's all about age, but to me, it's mind over matter.
Don't talk age! Age has nothing to do with it. One of my guys who started out at my gym is 87 now, and he still does ten bench-press reps with a hundred-pound dumbbell in each hand. He's training to set a leg-pressing record. I put things in the guy's brain way back when, and now he'll never get away from it.
If you look at the top 20 companies of the world, 19 of them are still brick-and-mortar companies. I have nothing against tech companies. What I am saying is that if you have a car manufacturer or an oil and gas manufacturer, you won't get the supply over the Net.
That was the coolest thing about 'Baby Got Back.' The establishment didn't embrace the song, which is what kept me from being the next pop guy to fizzle out and get laughed at, get dissed on TV. That helped save me. The fact that MTV banned the record made the record, in a weird way.
Nine Inch Nails was born out of Cleveland, Ohio, with me and a friend in a studio working on demos at night. Got a record deal with a small, little label, went on tour in a van, and a couple years later found that somehow we touched a nerve, and that first record resonated with a bunch of people.
A lot of people get really seduced by demos of the next display technology. I myself fell under that spell for about 20 years.
I didn't really feel any pressure when I've made records, I haven't as yet anyway. I feel when I'm making a record that I'm so excited about making new songs that when I'm doing demos of new songs, as soon as I make one that's really different I get really excited about the record, I don't care about the last record anymore.
What has happened is that to some degree they have taken an attitude where they don't listen to demos of diverse subject matters. They're looking for demos like the record the guy on the left just did.
At the age of 12, I got free pieces of software in a box of cereal which allowed me to make music, like really early demos, and then I just never looked back.
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