General Production Workflow
Here’s a birds eye view of a very common musical writing and production process that many musicians use. Your process can certainly be different-whatever works for you! This is just a standard process that works for a lot of people, so it’s good to know about as you figure out how you want to work on your music.
These stages often take place in this order, and we proceed from sketches to final product in a way similar to a visual artist: starting quick and loose, and getting more granular and refined as we move towards the finished piece of work.
First, here’s the complete process in a graphic format. We’ll then discuss each individual stage in more detail:
The music production workflow
Sketching
Loose, free, and quick. A time to experiment with the most basic ideas that define your music: melodies, chords, sounds, theoretical structures, and more are all fair game. Poetry, artwork, and other creative items may be undertaken as well, depending on the artist.
Demoing
A similar stage to sketching: loose and free, and many things will change as we continue through the process. It’s not unusual for an early demo to sound very different from the final recorded product. A demo is different from a sketch in that our loose ideas are now beginning to be placed together into context. A demo should sound like a complete piece of music when finished, with a beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes, the demo is the final step of the writing process, other times the writing is allowed to continue into the recording stage. Your ability to finish your creative writing in the recording studio is often determined by your budget, these days.
However, once the writing is done, it’s still quite common to choose some sort of professional recording solution over trying to professionally record your music on your own. Whether you choose to hire the recording out or not will depend on your individual interest level and comfort in the recording process, as well as your budget.
Tracking
Tracking is the first step in the formal professional recording process. Now we’ve moved on from loosely assembling rough ideas, and have started making more polished recordings of these ideas as “tracks” in a Digital Audio Workstation, or other recording medium like analog tape. It is common for the first formal recording to sound at least a little bit different from the demo. Exactly how different will depend on your preferences, combined with how the tracking sessions go.
Mixing
Once your ideas have been written and recorded to your satisfaction, we need to make sure everything plays nicely together in the mix. The many technical processes that achieve this take place during the mixing stage. A great mix can either extend and expand upon your recorded musical ideas, or be a more transparent window into them, depending on the preferences of the artist, engineer, and the project at hand. Achieving a great mix is an obvious sonic signature of a professionally done recording.
The mix is your final chance to make creative adjustments at the individual instrument level. So, it’s important to take your time to get the mix exactly right-the music should sound exactly like you want it to sound in every respect, with the exception of final volume level. We’ll be adding additional volume in mastering, so if your mixes are a little bit softer than you’d like, don’t worry. Just turn up the volume on your speakers when you’re evaluating, and if you still like the sound, we’re all good.
Your mastering engineer will help bring everything up to full level in the next stage of the process, and a dedicated mastering engineer also has the ability to achieve a sonic consistency and polish across tracks that your mixing engineer might not.
Mastering
Mastering is the the last stage of the formal recording process. After the final mixes are complete, the mastering engineer comes in and processes the stereo files of your finished mixes to further prepare it for distribution.
A mastering engineer handles many bigger picture items that can bring a project more cohesively together-how songs flow together across an album, achieving consistent and competitive overall level and loudness between songs, the sonic “color” of a record, etc.
There are specific technical considerations involved with making sure your music sounds consistent across the many different playback mediums (streaming, compact disc, cassette, vinyl, etc), and the mastering engineer specializes in knowing these items.
A well-mastered recording that sounds compelling and consistent across mediums is another sonic signature of a professionally done recording. You will often notice a significant difference between a final mix and a finished master, but those differences should be transparent to the original mix, rather than heavy-handed. The difference between a final mix and final master is significant enough that some record labels will not accept submissions of unmastered tracks. This is because the label often wants to hear the finished quality of your work, not something still in-progress. This can vary by label.
Expecting to fix a mixing specific item during mastering can lead to unsatisfying results. Because the mastering engineer is working with a stereo file, any changes they make will affect the entire song, not only an individual instrument or one specific sound. This means “fixing” an item unique to a single instrument (making only the bass guitar less woofy, for example), often leads to unflattering and unintended consequences elsewhere (like also thinning out the kick drum).
When mastering is done, it’s exciting! We’re finally hearing the finished music as we’ve been imagining it all this time!
But, we still have a ways to go to complete the recording process. Once the technical production is complete, you still have 50% of your work left: getting your music out there, and making sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of a billion other releases happening at the same time.
Promotion
The type, quality, and extent of your promotional efforts varies widely by individual artistic preference. Sometimes, a label might handle most or all of your promotion for you, or you might be doing everything yourself, or something in between.
No matter where you’re at in your career, and no matter how big or small your support team is, promotion should be given the proper space and time. Rushing to release work, dumping material onto the Internet with no promotion, and expecting people to just find your music “somehow”, are all leading causes of your music not being heard. That’s always a frustrating experience! Respect the time and effort you’ve spent up to this point, and leave yourself the proper time to do your promotion in the right way.
Promotion is a great place to apply creativity! Promotion that is boring, spammy, or the same stuff that everyone else is doing, is usually not as effective as an interesting and original idea executed well.
Sometimes, innovative and fresh promotion might mean ignoring all of the above advice and releasing an album without doing any promotion at all! But, this is all contextual-dumping an album out there with no warning usually only works if you’re already quite strongly established as an artist, and have lots of fans (many thousands of them) actively looking for your new music every day, on their own time.
And, you’re not going to get your career established to that point without some consistent and highly organized promotional efforts first.
Release and Distribution
Your music is recorded and sounds awesome, you’ve built up some momentum with interesting and creative promotion, and now the big day is here-release time!
Again, exactly what you do here will vary both by artist, and the specific project at hand.
I’d suggest that the actual release date you pick for your album should not be the end of your release cycle. Releasing additional items after the official release date is a great way to continue to maintain momentum. Post-release music videos, merchandise, press interviews, tours, remixes, etc, are all fair game. Pick what you like, or come up with your own fun idea!
