Music production can be a subjective experience but there are certain stages of producing music that remain the same. What is good music is also something that is subjective and depends on what the listener is aiming at.
Music production includes all the processes or stages of producing a song or a musical piece, from songwriting to the whole produced final piece. Some of the stages of music production include writing lyrics, arranging, tracking, mixing, editing, mastering. A music production degree teaches that there’s no one right way to produce music but this breakdown is fairly observed in all sorts of music production.
This is a basic guideline an artist can follow while creating new music. It helps to organize the whole process for the artist. Producing good music, like any other art form, entirely depends on practice and trial and error.
Without trying multiple things one cannot know what works. While certain concepts may sound great, they may not play well together. Producing music, similarly, is about finding the right notes that are in sync and harmony with each other.
Let us go through each stage of music production in this article.
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Stages of Music Production
Songwriting
From an objective perspective, a good song will have all the elements— melody, rhythm, harmony— in a fine balance. Usually, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, all three put together also may have one or more meaning or a message.
In music production, the lyrics are not read with a literary point of view but rather if it brings a fine balance in which the words mean great and sound great when sung..
Arrangement
A very crucial part of music production is the arrangement of lyrics and musical instruments. The arrangement makes a song sound interesting and prevents sounding repetitive.
In different arrangements, musicians can use different instruments, beats, or introduce changes to the tunes. It makes the overall song sound harmonious but uniquely melodious.
Tracking
Writing a song and performing a song are different processes. Performing the lyrics or musical notes and recording them at a point in time is called tracking. A live song is not a tracked song, as it ceases to exist. When captured, it is tracked.
Editing
With the many possibilities of digital editing, soundtracking can be improvised and edited several times and to almost anything. There are a plethora of editing tools available today through which you can add or manipulate sound to hear like anything.
Editing can be performed at any stage, but it is ideal when done at a later stage and not during the middle of creation. Edits help to get to the final draft. You can decide to keep and omit certain parts, bring about changes to make a full song production.
Mixing
Mixing is a vast world in the music production process. It is where an artist decides what each thing will sound, lyrics and instruments both. In mixing, musicians decide which musical instrument to use and what will sound louder than the others.
A thousand decisions are taken in the mixing process, like what sound effects to use and where they should be placed on the stereo.
Mastering
Often while an album is recorded, artists work with different producers, engineers and studios to make different songs. While each song sounds different, mastering makes all the songs sound coherent so that they sound like a part of the same album.
It takes a great mastering engineer who has impeccable hearing and sound deciphering qualities. They are responsible for fixing minor errors in the mix alongside the mixing engineer. They also raise the levels of the tracks to make them even in volume.
Learning makes music perfect too. Only knowing all the techniques do not assure great music, practice does. Enroll in a music production program today and keep producing great music.