The Four Phases of a Music Producer

Introduction

It can be frustrating to experience a mismatch between the time we spend in the studio and the amount of finished material we end up with. In this article, I'll try to outline a series of techniques I've been practicing over the past few years to finish more music. I'll begin by presenting a scenario many of us can probably recognize.

I feel inspired, open my DAW, sketch my idea and follow it. I find a groove, a vocal sample, and the perfect kick. I'm absolutely certain I'm on the right track. As I start designing my bass sound, things start to slip. My flow is broken as I try to do several things at once: sound design and composition.

When I then add a snare drum to my track, it doesn't quite sit well in the mix. I know it can be fixed with a compressor and some EQ, some light saturation, and a bit of subtle layering. Maybe another EQ and a bit more compression. Or maybe some more distortion? Is this even the right sample I've chosen? Suddenly I look at the clock and I've spent two hours mixing a snare that now sounds like garbage. The project goes in the trash and I try to remember when making music was fun. Sound familiar?

Outline

In this article, I'll share some of the experiences I've had about splitting the creative process into stages, thereby being able to work more purposefully when I sit down to make music.

I've divided my process into the following four steps:

• Ideas/Sound Design
• Songwriting
• Arrangement
• Mixdown/Mastering

Each of these steps has a folder in my Ableton folder. Additionally, I have a folder with snippets and unfinished ideas that never become finished tracks. There's a huge freedom in giving yourself some time and space to mess around.

When I implemented the current version of my system, I did a major cleanup and put all my projects in the Scraps folder. To be able to use spacebar to preview files, I made a small export of each track. That way I don't need to open Ableton Live to remember how "CoolBassYeah69" actually sounds.

Then I selected the projects I wanted to finish and moved them from the Scraps folder to the appropriate folder, depending on how far I was in the process. The whole idea is that when I move into a new phase with a project, I move the entire project folder into that stage's folder.

When I'm completely finished with a project, I move it to my external hard drive. That way I don't get lost in the list of projects, and I don't start new tracks if I have 5 tracks in the arrangement phase.

Stage 0 - Scraps

We need to be allowed to mess around a bit. Not every project we open becomes a song; sometimes we don't get further than smashing two sounds together, so I have an extra folder for these fragments.

Here I save the musical dead ends, the loose ends, and interesting ideas I don't feel like working on. But who knows? Maybe that bassline can find new life as a lead in another project, so they're good to have on hand.

Stage 1 - Ideas and Sound Design

This folder is the first step in my active projects. It contains small ideas, rough sketches, and loops that have the potential to become a finished track. This stage's goal is to create musical material. Quantity over quality.

This is the phase where I play and explore. I go exploring in my presets, go through the sample library for inspiring sounds, or design new and exciting instrument patches. There's a huge liberation in opening Ableton Live just to make a cool sound, rather than feeling like I need to start writing a new song.

If I stumble upon something exciting that doesn't fit in the current track, I can use Ableton Live's Collections (new feature in Live 10) to 'remember' drum racks, samples, and presets I've made.

I can also just sit and jam on the computer keyboard while turning knobs, and record the output to a new audio track. The resulting audio file can then be saved in my sample library and played via Simpler/Sampler in future projects.

In this phase, it's a good exercise to turn off the inner critic. It doesn't need to be good and I don't need to impress anyone. I just need to play and make sound. If I stumble upon a couple of sounds or a tone sequence that I feel has potential, it's time to move into the next phase.

Stage 2 - Songwriting

In this phase, raw ideas and sounds are transformed into musical sections. If the Idea and Sound Design phase's goal was to create musical material, this phase's goal is to select and discard.

This is where I aim to make the 8, 16, or 32 bar loop that will hopefully become the main section of my track. Like an artist mixing their colors before they start painting, this phase is partly about creating a kind of sonic palette.

I choose drums and percussion, bass sounds, synths, and atmospheric pads. I write chord progressions and melodies, program beats, and chop vocals. My end goal is not an entire track! The stage is a success if it results in a nice loop or two, e.g., verse and chorus.

After a session in the songwriting phase, it can be a good idea to do some cleanup. If I name and color-code my tracks and clips, collect drums in one group, synths in another, etc., and delete empty tracks, I make it easier for myself to return to the project.

Stage 3 - Arrangement

I wrote my sections in the Songwriting phase and they now need to be chained together into a coherent song. The goal at the end of this stage is a 90% finished song - something you're comfortable playing for your friends.

At this point in the process, I've listened through my loop hundreds of times, and now it's time to place the various musical elements over time. Whether you work with verses, choruses, and bridges, or buildups, drops, and breakdowns, is often dictated by what style you're producing, but it's a good idea to make a form skeleton (see the horizontal row of 'white' MIDI clips below).

A good exercise can be to drag a favorite song in the desired genre onto an audio track in Ableton Live, and then make a track with empty MIDI clips showing the order of sections. Finally, you can save your MIDI track in your User Library and later use it as a template to arrange a new song. Over time, you'll build experience in arranging and won't need the templates anymore.

It's also usually in this phase that I insert transition effects. Noise sweeps, crash cymbals played backwards, and synthetic blip-blop sounds with lots of delay can clarify a transition from one section to another.

When there's nothing more musical to add or remove, it's time to move the project into the next (and final) phase.

Stage 4 - Mixdown/Master

This is the final destination for my project. The goal at the end of this step is to make the track sound so good that it's ready to be uploaded to my Bandcamp, played in a DJ set, sent out as a demo, or sent to a mastering engineer.

First, I export all tracks as individual audio files. This ensures that I don't constantly go back and make small changes to the composition, because otherwise I would never finish.

In the mixdown phase, I turn all tracks completely down, and then turn up the tracks one by one. When you've listened to your song for a long time, it's easy to lose perspective, and you get used to the balance between the different elements. That's where it can feel easier to turn everything down and then work layer by layer. I usually introduce the layers in this order:

• Kick/Bass
• Snares/Claps
• Percussion
• Hats/Shakers
• Vocals
• Synths/Harmonies
• FX

This is called a groove-based mix, but the order is of course up to you and your style. In other genres, a prioritized mix would make more sense, e.g., you can start with the vocal and synth pads, and then mix the rest of the song up around the most important elements.

Additionally, I can use all kinds of different mix techniques to make my song sound as good as possible. For example, I can use compressors to control dynamics, saturators to emphasize overtones, and EQs to remove unwanted frequencies so the different elements don't fight for space.

Conclusion

As music producers, we have many roles, and these roles require different skills and mindsets. We are songwriters, we are sound designers, and we are mix engineers. We are composers, instrumentalists, programmers, and social media managers. There's not necessarily anything wrong with this, but it can lead to a lot of frustrations - and making music should be fun and rewarding.

I've found that with this system, I get time to sink into the individual roles depending on where I am in the process. I tried at first to follow the system to the letter, but I've learned that it was important for me not to be too rigid. Some links in the process are sequential - i.e., they come one after another. It doesn't make sense for me, for example, to mix or master when I've only written an eight-bar loop.

Other links are iterative. That means that when I'm in the arrangement phase hearing the music in context, I can get new musical ideas. I can also do some sound design in the songwriting phase if I can hear an idea in my head. If you can hear that there's some sub on the vocals that's disturbing the listening experience, or if your snare is 12 decibels too loud, you should of course be allowed to adjust them.

Remember, these are just guidelines that have helped me, not fixed rules you must follow. The most important thing I've learned from this system is awareness of which hat fits which job. If we save the mix for the mix phase and don't make arrangement changes while we're mastering, we give ourselves the best ground for finishing our music and sharing it with the world.

Om forfatteren

Gavnlig

Gavnlig is an Icelandic-Danish electronic music producer and DJ based in Copenhagen. Gavnlig's music spans parties and colors, wonderful breaks often with a focus on hard beats in atmospheric and danceable productions.

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