There's only few people that really understand what music production is. So I wanna share a thing or two about it. But before we go further, I want to explain a lil bit about people at music production and their job. The first one is the artist/musician him/herself. It could be a pop singer or in a band. There also songwriter. Most of songwriter are musician it self, but there's also a songwriter who wrote a song for another artist. The next is sound engineer or recording engineer. They do their job to capture the performance of artist. Recording engineer should have to know how to threat every kind of specific sound source and record it as best as possible performance. For example while recording vocals, recording engineers should know what kind mic, preamps, positioning, etc, that suit best for singer and record it. Same example on different situation such as mic'ing drum overhead or guitar cabinet's speaker.
While every instruments and aspect has been recorded flawlessly, now its time for mixing. A person who did this kind of job is called mixing engineer or simply just a mixer. In mixing, everything that has been recorded will be mixed (hence the name!) so every aspect of sound will be heard in balance proportion. A mixer should be aware of frequencies spectrum of each instruments or voices, so they will not be fight each other in frequency wise.
After you get well balanced mixes, now you'll get into final process called mastering. Person who did this kinda job is called mastering engineer. Most people think that mastering is about loudness. Sure you need your song loud enough to be heard in radio and club, but mastering is not just about that. Mastering engineer's job is to make every song loudness same, think best for pause timing between songs, and also make it to be standard CD convertion.
There's other one person that responsible for every process, and it's called music producer. Sometimes producer double they job as a mixer, or as artist him/herself. They act as quality control. They also have a vision for every best thing on each songs and every process.
Further, I will show you an image of music production.
As you can see, the pyramid image of music production will show you every processes from very basic (song writing) to final (mastering). You may see this kinda concept was influenced by Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So you should fulfill very basic process first before you step up to next process.
In my experience, I often seeing people didn't do their best while recording for the reason "it can be fixed in mixing." Well, we couldn't fix bad recording! Also for another case, people think that mixing process is key to make great sounding record. It's not wrong, indeed, but also not completely right. In my humble oppinion, the most important process of music production is the most basic one, THE SONG!
Lately, thousand of great quality mixing out there but with mediocre song, and some of them has great song but with mediocre mixing qualities. And guess what, I enjoy much more for the mediocre mixing one, especially if the song has great melodies and deep lyrics. So I will suggest you guys for focusing make greatest song, honest with the lyrics, and make the sweetest melodies. 'Cause at the end of time it's all about the song. And if you feel that your song is good enough to be nominated in Grammy Awards, then you should entrusted the rest for me. I will glad to help you guys making great sounding records. :)
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