Have you ever wondered what it takes to become music producer? Getting started isn’t always easy, and just going onto Google can often leave you with more questions than when you started.
What does a music producer do?
By the traditional definition, a music producer is someone who oversees, manages, and guides the process of producing and recording a song. But over the past 10-20 years, music production has become a lot more accessible. Quality music can be made on your standard laptop, and expensive hardware isn’t required.
Which leads us to the Bedroom Producer. I’m a bedroom producer (I don’t literally produce in my bedroom), I don’t have expensive hardware, and I don’t own a massive studio. The Bedroom Producer is what I’m going to refer to in this post.
So, what does the bedroom producer do?
Everything.
At least, most of the time. When recording and producing a song for an artist of high calibre (think top 40, commercial music) you’ll normally have a number of people working on the record. One person may be working with the artist(s) and training them, another may be looking for ideas, and another may focus on the sonic quality of the track, mixing it down and getting it sounding right.
The bedroom producer typically does all of this. They come up with musical ideas, arrange those ideas, and finalize them.
A few things that a bedroom producer does:
- Mixing and mastering
- Sound design
- Creating or recording musical ideas (melodies, harmonies, vocals)
- Arranging ideas
Here’s a typical set of steps that I might go through when producing a track:
- Come up with a hook or melody. Something memorable.
- Create drum section with individual samples and loops.
- Design sounds for musical ideas such as basslines, melodies, and chord progressions.
- Arrange the track, working on breakdowns, build-ups, verses and choruses.
- Mixdown the track, using EQ and compression among other effects to make the track sound clean and ready for mastering.
- Master the track, bringing up the volume to a competitive level and preparing the track for release.
Three things you should know about being a producer
- It’s difficult
- It’s diverse
- It’s rewarding
If you’re looking for an easy hobby, this isn’t it. But if you’re looking for something that will positively impact your life, cause you to think critically and artistically, and give you the joy of creating something – then it’s the hobby for you.
Being a music producer is difficult for a number of reasons. The first one is that it takes a long time to get to a level where your music is actually worth releasing. There are intricacies involved in music production that not only take a while to understand in theory, but require deliberate practice. Even if you’ve got great musical ideas, your mixing skills might not be great, or your sound design may not be up to standard.
Music production is also a very diverse field. Certain producers may excel in sound design, others may be gods at mixing and mastering. This means there are a lot of career opportunities, but it also means it’s difficult to master as described above.
Most importantly though, and despite the difficulty, being a music producer is rewarding! There’s nothing more satisfying than finishing your own music and having people appreciate it. The rewards outweigh the frustration by far.
Are there job opportunities?
There are many different career paths that are closely related to music production:
- Audio engineering: mixing and mastering music, live sound at events, etc.
- Commercial production: producing music for advertisements, games, films.
- Teaching: teaching others how to make music.
- Sound design: designing sounds for games, films, etc.
- Artist career: touring, album sales, and more.
This exert was taken from http://edmprod.com/. If you want to continue reading this article, click through the website and sign up for their 30 day free email course!
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