Understanding Your Music Production Terms

A professional home studio 

Music production is an ambiguous work which requires professionalism both in dealing with music software and music instruments. Music production is one which requires careful learning and perfection.

A music producer is one who puts the odds together making a wonderful beat which when voiced produces a good sound one can dance to, relax with or even sing along. A music producer is required to produce a perfect interpretation of the composed music taking recognition of the genre of the music.

According to Wikipedia.org, a digital audio workstation or DAW is an electronic device or computer software application for recording, editing and producing audio files such as songs, musical pieces, human speech or sound effects. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece. DAWs are used for the production and recording of music, radio, television, podcasts, multimedia and nearly any other situation where complex recorded audio is needed. For information on the right DAW for you please click the link. 

FL Studio- A typical type of DAW

Plug-ins are found in DAWs which function in the production of real musical instrument sound like sound of a grand piano, helps to enhance or modify the sound of a particular instrument or the music in general, like a mixer.

Beat making is the act of creating different sounds which harmonizes into a good sound sweet to the ears. Beat making is one of the most crucial parts of production because it is on the beat you would voice and edit. So if the beat is whack, the whole production would turn out whack. For more details on beat making click the link.

Audio mixing is the process of taking recorded tracks and blending them together. Tracks are blended using various processes such as EQ, Compression and Reverb. According to landr.com, the goal of mixing is to bring out the best in your multi-track recording by adjusting levels, panning, and time-based effects (chorus, reverb, delay). The aim is to sculpt your arrangement to make sense of all your tracks in relation to each other. A multitrack recording is anything with more than one individual track (also referred to as stems). There’s no right or wrong number of tracks. You just can’t have zero. The final output of a multitrack recording is also known as the mixdown. The mixdown is the final step before mastering. For more on mixing click the link.

Mastering is like photoshop for audio and studio monitors (speakers) are of prior importance here. For more on this visit the link.

Voicing is the act of singing the lyrics into the beat. This is the beauty of production and quite stressful for upcoming artistes or those doing it for the first time.

In subsequent time we will look into all these in details.