The process of music production
Music production is a complex process that requires many different steps to eventually arrive at a pleasing end product. I like to compare making a great record to making a great movie or television show; it’s all about making sure different departments work well together as a team, and ensuring high quality is maintained through each stage of production.
Here’s a bird’s eye view of how the music production process works, from writing to release:
Each stage of the music production workflow.
Let’s examine each stage of music production in more detail.
The writing stage
Sketching
Writing music starts with sketching, similar to how a painter might make loose pencil drawings before setting paint to canvas. Musicians can sketch working by themselves at home, collaboratively in rehearsals with bandmates, during writing retreats, and by making informal recordings of promising musical material. A jam session, where musicians experiment by combining their different ideas together in a group setting, is a popular and effective form of musical sketching.
Demoing
Once you’ve sketched a bit, and have found some promising material you want to develop further, the next step in writing music is making a demo: a slightly more formal recording of your ideas.
Demos are different than sketches. Whereas a musical sketch might contain only some loose, unconnected fragments of musical ideas, a demo starts to connect your ideas together into a timeline, making a complete creative statement that has a beginning, middle, and end.
A demo does not need to sound like a professional music production. Demos are informal recordings meant to help develop promising ideas further, and artists have many partially or fully completed demos sitting on a hard drive somewhere that might never see the light of day. Overly focusing on recording quality at the demoing stage of music production can sometimes interfere with the most important parts of the writing process: finding your best ideas, and placing them together.
A demo is the musical equivalent of inking in a few of your favorite informal pencil sketches, when painting a picture. At this stage, we still haven’t touched paint to canvas, but our picture is becoming clearer.
My Songwriting articles contain lots of information and resources on musical composition, sketching, and music theory.
The production stage
Once you’ve finished a few demos and have made some complete creative statements that you really love and want to do more with, you’re ready to consider moving into production on one or more of your songs.
Tracking
The production stage begins with tracking, often referred to simply as “recording”. During the tracking stage, you’re formally recording all of your different musical ideas from your demos into individual tracks. You can record your tracks using a computer, or a more old-school recording medium like magnetic tape. When tracking is finished, you should have a complete set of tracks containing all of the different ideas that make up your music, and you should be happy with the performances and the recording quality of those tracks.
Back in the day when The Beatles were recording music, technology limitations of the time meant musicians often only had 4 or 8 tracks to work with on a given song. In our modern era of affordable digital recording and powerful computers, the number of tracks you can record on a good laptop is effectively limitless.
Be aware that less is sometimes more, when it comes to combining lots of different tracks inside of a musical composition. Hundreds of tracks stacked up to make your song might not sound much better than limiting yourself to, say, “just” 20-50 tracks.
Once you’ve got a bunch of amazing performances recorded at high quality, you’re ready to start mixing.
Mixing
The mixing stage of the production process applies recording studio techniques that aim to help all of your recorded tracks sound their best when played back together. The purpose of mixing is to combine 2-100+ recorded tracks into a 2-channel stereo file that can be played back on your stereo, computer, or phone, all while respecting and creatively enhancing the musical choices of the artist.
It’s common to start out with a rough mix and then develop it further into a finished mix through a revision process.
Continuing our visual art analogy, mixing is the equivalent of touching paint to canvas and working to complete your painting in full color, based off of your inked-in sketches. Visual artists might iterate through several different full color versions of the same painting, before deciding on a final version for public display.
The equivalent position in film production to the audio mixer is the film editor.
At the end of the mixing process, you should have a stereo audio file of your completed song that sounds exactly as you’d like it to sound in every way, with the only exception being the final volume level. Don’t worry about final delivery volume at this point: we’ll handle that next, during the mastering process.
Mastering
Mastering takes the stereo file provided by your mixer, and works to prepare your finished work for distribution. Mastering is the final creative step in the music production process. The goals of mastering are different than mixing; while mixing aims to make your individual recorded tracks sound their best, mastering aims to make your completed songs sound their best.
Mastering engineers take the final steps to prepare your music for distribution, and work to make sure your music sounds great everywhere. The difference in quality between a final mix and a finished master recording can be significant. Mastering is an enhancement process, more than a fixing process. Waiting to fix a mix issue during mastering can lead to results that aren’t as good as they could be.
Continuing our visual art analogy: mastering is very much like the varnishing and display of your finished painting. The most amazing, colorful painting can be ruined by applying a cheap, yellow varnish, or by hanging in the wrong setting. Mastering engineers work to ensure that your completed songs are displayed to the public exactly how you’ve intended them to be shown.
The equivalent position in film production to the mastering engineer is the film colorist or color grader. A colorist is in charge of making sure all of the shots across your entire project look cohesive, working from a final edit sent to them by the editor. While some mixers also master, just as some video editors can do basic color grading, mastering requires a specialized gear setup and skill set, so it’s best performed by a qualified and experienced specialist inside of a dedicated mastering facility.
My Home Recording Basics articles can help you learn more about the production phase of music creation.
The release stage
By the time you’ve reached this part of the process, congratulations are in order! When mastering is complete, you’ve finally got the finished creative product you’ve been working on for weeks or months in your hands, and it’s all ready to go. We’re not done, just because the song production is finished. There’s more work yet to be done making sure that your music gets the ears it deserves, when you release your work to the public.
Promotion/Distribution
Music promotion can take many forms, and should always be customized to a given artist and their goals. Maybe it’s a press tour, maybe it’s a live concert tour promoting your release, maybe it’s music videos, maybe it’s social media posting, maybe it’s physical flyers for your show posted at a local venue. It’s probably a combination of all of these things.
Maybe, it’s simply telling your closest friends about your work and showing it to them informally. This also counts as promotion; though it’s not likely to result in a large number of people hearing your music, writing and recording music just for yourself and your immediate friends and family is great! Not everyone who makes music wants to be a pop star, and that’s ok.
Generally speaking, the more time, effort, and coordination you apply to the promotion and release of your work, the more ears you can expect to get on it. A 3-6 month promotional cycle for an album release is not uncommon to see, even for the very smallest artists. For larger, label-signed artists and pop stars touring internationally, the release, press, and touring cycles of a given album might take as long as 12-18+ months.
While it’s up to you to choose exactly how (or if) you want to present your finished work to the public, my advice is always to not rush the promotional process. Even if you’ve never released music before, give it at least one full month to do a proper promotional cycle with intention, and more time is probably better. Your work deserves to be heard!
My Release Time articles and case studies are a great place to learn more about how to release your music effectively.
