The Steps of Music Creation

Maybe some of you know a thing or two when it comes to music creation, but my guess is that the majority of people —aka the consumer— doesn’t.

As in any body of work, there are steps involved. And in taking a song from 0 (idea) to 100 (‘radio-ready’) there are usually six of them, I would say.

Allow me to give you a brief overview:

1. Composing

— We have barely reached the first main step, and it is already necessary for us to further dissect it into even more steps…

a. You come up with the main idea (be it recording yourself for 10 seconds while humming away into your smartphone’s mic, writing down lyrics or notes on a sheet of paper, or whatever other option you see fit, as everybody’s starting step is usually different);

b. You take that small draft and begin building on top of it, usually starting with the chorus or main hook;

c. You then try to come up with all the other parts that generally make up a song (i.e. intros, verses, bridges, outros etc.).

Then it is time for the second step:

2. Arranging

— Now that you roughly have all the parts of the song, you start putting them in their ‘right’ place (i.e. wherever you feel it’s right / according to what you are trying to achieve) so that the song will have a clear structure, from start to finish.

At this step you can also add, subtract, or modify an idea to better fit (or depart from) the overall theme of the song, again according to whatever it is you are trying to achieve.

Then you move on:

3. Recording

— You are now ready for firing up your music equipment. Keep in mind that, if you are also the singer/instrumentalist, then you will have an additional step to take, apart from the aforementioned three: performing.

And if you are not the performer yourself, then you will need to hire (a) performer(s) to play the parts you have just composed.

Also, if you happen to not have the required equipment, and/or a specially designed space in which to record, there are even more steps involved, like renting a professional recording studio, which is —to put it mildly— not quite cheap.

After you have your recorded tracks, it’s time to move on:

4. Editing

— Whenever you record something, that recording is bound to have imperfections at some point during its length. Imperfections like drums played out of time, notes out of tune, unwanted sounds that had managed to bleed into the microphone(s), and so on. Editing is the step in which you get rid of all of that.

During editing you can also cut and paste whole sections of the song, if you wish to change its structure in some way, shape, or form. You can replace sounds with other prerecorded samples, tune vocals and other instruments, and do many other more-or-less creative operations.

After editing is done, it’s time for the (almost) final step:

5. Mixing

— When the final stems (i.e. individual tracks) are done, they are ready for mixing. Mixing is, to put it very simply, balancing out all the sounds within a song in such a manner that (almost) every part of every track can be clearly heard, while at the same time making sure there will be no specific part that will sound/feel out of place, or will artificially overpower any other part of the song.

If, after mixing a song, you hit play and are able to listen to and enjoy it without being distracted for even one second by a weird sound (or lack thereof) throughout its entirety, then you can say that you have successfully finished your mix.

Of course there are many other intricacies involved, like achieving the desired sound signature and energy of every track, and also of the track as a whole.

There are also creative bits and pieces (like reverb, delay, tape flutter, harmonic distortion, and many others) you can add to certain parts of the song, which can change the sound entirely, and all in a good way (if you do it right, of course).

In other words, mixing is a combination of subtle moves that add up to a not-so-subtle whole. And every move has to be done right if you want that whole to sound right.

Not at all an easy task to do properly.

6. Mastering

— And then comes mastering, the final stage in our journey.

After the mix is done, you end up with a single stereo track which encompasses the final version of the song, with all its bells and whistles attached.

Mastering is the ‘final final’ version of the song, so to say. The last step in which you polish your song from 99 to 100. It is even more subtle than mixing, and difficult in its own right.

Mastering must ensure that a song will sound the same whether it is played back on a pair of low quality headphones or on a set of high quality concert-level speakers.

Also, if one is working on an entire album they must make sure that the sound signature of each individual song will be consistent throughout, so that all the songs will actually sound as if they are coming from the same album.

Once again, not at all an easy task to do properly.

(it should go without saying that the process I have written above can be significantly different for any one individual, according to their particular workflow, but my intention was to only give you a general idea about the complexity of the whole process)

And when you realize that the elements I have enumerated above are actually separate jobs that that people get individually paid for doing, taking a song from ‘Idea’ to ‘Master’ might start to feel overwhelming all of a sudden.

If you work alone, you already have (at least) six jobs to do —and do right— in order for you to arrive at the end result.

And guess what?

It will be impossible for you to display the same level of proficiency on all six of them, so your results will suffer accordingly.

What’s more, it will take you a significantly longer amount of time to do it.

And also since it’s your song that you are trying to create out of your own accord, nobody will pay you a dime to do it.

But anyway, after all that work and you (hopefully) reaching the desired results, it’s time to go public. So how do you go about it? There are a lot of publishers and online platforms that can get the job done. But why would you chose one over the other?

What if you want to also film a video to go with your song? That will be an entire new process, all with its own steps and difficulties that you will have to go through.
It will be impossible for you to both have all the necessary equipment and also excel at every step of the way, as to achieve a professional end result that will tick every checkbox you have in mind.

If you don’t want to film anything you at least should want to create a good quality cover, an image that will go with the song, similar to an album cover. And if you’re not a visual artist, guess what… You will have to hire somebody to do it professionally.

But wait, there’s more!

What do we do about marketing, and advertising your song? Where do you even start with those?

Oh, and what if you want your song to be heard on the radio? Where do you register it? How do you get any revenue from it?

Oh, and what if you happen to be sued for plagiarism and have to legally defend your work?

So after this brief overview of the whole process, I hope you can see how much more there is to taking a song from 0 to 100, than simply ‘record, put it on YouTube & get rich overnight’.

I hope you can now even more appreciate the work of an artist who doesn’t have an industry giant to back them up, but have chosen to walk that road on their own instead.

So before you will judge a book by it’s covers, first try to read and understand its contents.

‘till then, see you on the battlefield.

It’s a tough world out there,

but we should always keep on fighting.

valah, out.