Well while listening to a piece of music with strange effects, you might have wondered about how such things are done, specially if you are fond of electronic music. The obvious questions are like, how did he do this? Did he really do this? How was this music produced? What is MUSIC PRODUCTION?
Well, here I would give you a simple yet appropriate explanation of what Music Production (the primary topic of this blog) actually is.
Music Production is actually a complicated yet very important technical side of music. To put it simply, as the name clearly states, it refers to the processes involved in the making of music - simple isn't it?(yet not very!)
I’m not gonna delve very deep into the subject (as it may seriously bore you if I start writing pages on this topic!), but will just give an overview of it step by step so that people new to this field can get a clear idea of what Music Production is all about.
To understand this, first you need to know the various stages of the making of a song or any piece of music and about the different people involved in it.
The people involved in the entire process are composers, performers(instrumentalists/vocalists), the record artist or the recording engineer, and the mixing engineer. Well, you may call them all musicians as all of them must have a good sense of music to successfully do their jobs. It's common these days that a single person plays multiple roles in the entire production procedure.
Now let us get into the procedure. Music Production involves the complete process of making a song starting from scratch to recording it and bouncing it down to any suitable audio file format.
We can broadly classify Music Production into three categories:
1) Pre-production - This is the stage in which the music is composed, structured and rehearsed. After this the musicians are all ready for the recording.
2) Production - This is the stage in which the music is recorded by some convenient means, for example, recording the music into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). This process is carried out in the recording studio in presence of the recording engineer who supervises the entire process including microphone positioning for various instruments and vocals. However this is not the section for which all those above mentioned questions actually crops up in the listeners' mind.
3) Post-production - This is the most complicated yet most important stage of music production. Now that the raw music has been recorded, its time to edit it. (Yeah, I'm really excited now! OK, back to work!) All of the post-production work is done in the DAW. Remember, the song was not recorded all at once. It was recorded part by part and multiple times according to the convenience of the musicians. The editing procedure includes selecting the best portions of the recorded music, cutting, stretching, and positioning of the audio and adding effects to the different tracks. Finally the tracks are mixed and mastered in an acoustically treated studio control room to make the final piece sound perfect before the audio file is rendered. A room with proper acoustic treatment is essential so that the mixing engineer can listen to the reality without the influence of room reflections as this can affect the mix very badly.
Indeed technology plays a vital role in today's music industry and the need for it in music production is ever increasing.
That ends Music Production in a nutshell. Hope you enjoyed it.
If you want know more about recording music and building a home studio at a reasonable budget, refer to my post on HOME STUDIO MADE EASY here.
If you want to know more about music production you may refer this book:
What is Music Production?: A Producers Guide: The Role, the People, the Process
What is Music Production?: A Producers Guide: The Role, the People, the Process
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