A Detailed Guide to Audio Production (2020)
What is audio production? Behind every recording, there are thousands of puzzle pieces that need to be put together to paint our aural picture. As a listener, you expect to press play and hear a tune. There are hundreds of hours of audio production that lead up to the very second that the first sound wave hits your ear. From tuning the instruments or setting up foley pits to the mic selection and scratch testing, and eventually to mastering for playback, there’s a lot that goes into making an audio production that results in a great recording.
An “audio production” is more commonly found in the Music Production and Film & TV (Post Production) categories, where the end result of our recording is a tangible, deliverable product.
When talking about music production, we can think of late nights in the studio, long hours trying to get that perfect sound. That, however, is the shorter part of the overall production. The next step, where we massage the mix with the help of compressors, EQ, and automation can be a very involved process.
These are the six stages in the world of sound production; we’ll discuss them below. I should point out that these stages often overlap — songwriting tweaks, arrangement changes, and basic audio editing may happen during the recording stage. So each stage is not totally separate from the one before and after it, but this is the general workflow you’ll find yourself in.
Songwriting
There are many ways to write a song, but one thing I can tell you is that production can’t fix a bad song. Each of the following stages depends on a strong song as their foundation. No matter how many cool samples you add and no matter how much autotune you use, the song can only be as good as its foundation.
Arranging
You can actually do a good portion of the arranging during the songwriting process — at least that’s where it starts. Part of songwriting is how the song is structured, and structure is part of arranging.
Recording
This is when you take that dope song and its solid arrangement and bring it to life. This is when you put mic to voice, cable in guitar, and virtual instruments into the song.
Editing
Editing and recording overlap a lot. Right after you record, you’re often editing the tracks just enough so you can continue recording.
Mixing
This is where many Audio Producers have their fun. This is the stage where you take a dry track and make it sound vibrant and professional.
Mixing is when you make all the instruments sound good together using things like EQ, compression, reverb, delay, and a bunch of other audio plugins.
Mastering
And finally, the dark magic mystery called mastering. Well, to most of us it’s a mystery, but to Mastering Engineers, it’s second nature.
