What is music production? Such a tough question. It’s just similar to “What is art?”. Since it’s broadness, the answers always tend to be so vague. Those vague, indeterminate answers like “music production is to make nothing something” all seem to make sense. But they are pointless, they are not making any progress in finding out what production of music, this unique modern process of creating music really is.
What is music production? It’s a thing that doesn’t come with a long history. It is about art, of course. It is also about technology. The technology of audio and sound especially. And, it’s about the music industry. In today’s music industry, the cycle of publishing music contains 5 main procedures: Composing Music, Producing Music, Mixing Music, Mastering Music, and the Distribution of Music. After the fourth procedure, the final product has been made, and the specific name for the product is called Music Records. Yes, music production is exactly the process of making music records, which did not exist before the advent of music production technology. Hundreds of years ago, no one would have heard the music of Ludwig van Beethoven in the form of music records. Today, one can record concerts on their cell phones and send them to friends or upload them to the Internet. Suddenly, he was a music producer, but only the worst and most unprofessional kind. Sounds funny isn’t it? Imagine if a person recorded all the instruments of a concert separately, and balanced the volume of each of the audios containing the instruments playing so that they sounded good when played simultaneously, and then he recorded them all playing together in one audio by whatever means. He’s definitely the undisputed producer now, isn’t he?
He is doing a completely similar thing compared to the person who just recorded and distributed a live concert. They all use their own methods to transform sound into a music record.
This is what music production is.