New to the world of music production? This article will explain the various steps involved when making music and help you organize the process in your head.
In today’s music-making world, the only rule is there are no rules. Record whatever you want and use it as a sample. Automate effects in ways never imagined before. Mix rhythms and genres to create beats and melodies that go further and create new categories of music all their own.
However, just because you can do anything in music doesn’t mean you should.
No matter what type of music you make, you want it to be good music. You want other people to enjoy listening to your tracks, to hear the message clearly and to not be distracted by a bad recording or weak playing. Like a chef with a kitchen full of ingredients, there are myriad ways to put your masterpiece together, and it’s very easy to muck it up.
The goal of this column is to help you understand the process of making music from beginning to end, so you can create tracks that meet a standard of quality by which we call “good music”, regardless of style. With each article, I’ll try and give you new ways of thinking about your approach to making music, which you can apply however you want. What’s important is that you understand the process and tools at your disposal, so it will be easier to construct a quality track that delivers your message as intended.
Let’s start by defining the process of music production by separating it into six basic stages:
- Songwriting
- Arranging
- Tracking
- Editing
- Mixing
- Mastering
These are by no means set in stone, and are based entirely on how I personally like to think about the process. The breakdown is meant to be used as a general guideline to help organize the process in our minds. Many times, we do a few of these at once (e.g. songwriting and arranging, tracking and editing and mixing, etc.). But on average, these are the general steps taken to produce a track – consciously or not – and it’s helpful to understand what goes into each stage so we can execute it properly and get the best results.
SONGWRITING
What it does it mean to write a song when so much of today’s music is wordless? This is a great question for another article. But for our purposes, let’s say that songwriting is the process of putting musical ideas together to form a larger structure of coherent melody, harmony and rhythm. It’s the process of brainstorming that results in a beginning, middle and end.
What makes a good song? This is also highly debatable, but a question I’m more willing to take on. A good song in terms of content will depend on the listener and what they’re drawn to. It’s totally subjective. However, a good song in terms of craft can be identified more objectively, and will usually have all the elements listed above (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, beginning, middle, and end) and will be put together in a way that’s pleasantly recognizable while still being creative and true to the message of the music. When it comes to lyrics, I like to think of prosody – how the lyrics and music work together to support each other. It’s not enough to have good lyrics from a literary perspective. They also need to sound musical when the singer sings them.
A good song will develop as it goes along, taking us on a familiar path littered with surprises along the way to make sure we’re listening. The melody (what the singer sings) will fit with the harmony (what the guitars, bass and synths mostly play) in a way that’s pleasing to the ear, using repetition to help the listener get used to the chord progression before transitioning to the next section and a different set of chord progressions. A good song will also have a good sense of rhythm and can make your foot tap with the groove, whether or not there’s a drummer playing.
For many people the songwriting process is tied into the tracking process as they start with a drum loop and build from there, recording new ideas on top of each other until they end up with a finished song. Or maybe they’ve got a sound library that they search through with a sample finder like Cosmos and immediately start creating new instruments to write with using the CR8 Sampler.
Even though this may be a different method than the singer/songwriter who sits with their guitar and notebook to sketch out a tune, the result should still be evaluated according to the same guidelines: Are the melody and harmony catchy enough to stay in your head after the song is done? Does the track keep your attention with new ideas as it develops? Does it groove?
Taking away all other aspects of the production, if you had to play the song bare with only one instrument and a vocal (or just an instrument), is it a good song? If not, the rest won’t matter very much. But get this one right from the start and the rest will roll out with ease.
ARRANGING
Of all the stages of music production, arranging is perhaps the least understood and most neglected. When a song has a good beat and melody but gets too repetitive after a while, this is usually a problem of arrangement. It’s the arrangement that makes a song interesting.
In very simple terms, the arrangement of a song refers to the selection of instruments playing in each section – how they’re “arranged” – and how the sections themselves are arranged within the larger timeline of the song.
If you’ve written a great verse and chorus, it’s not enough to just play them over and over, one after the other on repeat. There needs to be a buildup of some sort. For example, the 1st verse only has guitar and vocal, the 2nd verse adds the bass and drums, and the 1st chorus adds the synths and vocal harmonies. This is the arrangement of the various instruments within the song……
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