Pre-Production Procedures for Home Recording

Series Summary

Becoming a music producer involves much more than just the desire to record great albums; working producers have had years of experience in the studio, logging many hours in recording sessions, remixing, mastering, trying things over and over until the sound is just right. Creating a professional album is a complicated team effort between producers, vocalists, musicians and engineers, utilizing talent and technology to produce an audio recording worthy of public performance.

In this free audio recording and mixing video series, learn how to produce a recording session with home studio equipment, from getting ready for the artist, to laying down vocal tracks, using auto-tune, capturing the perfect guitar tone, adding effects to the mix, monitoring and final mastering of your tracks. Get valuable advice on dealing with creative conflicts and studio burnout as well. Learn how to have a successful recording studio session both technically and with the cooperation of everyone involved.

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Jesus Cardoso, and I’m going to explain to you a little bit of the production process. The production process in preproduction, which means that someone sits in front of a page like this when it’s blank and starts filling it with music. This is how a master score looks; it has the all the different instruments. Once that is done, the composer gets together with the band, the musicians, or the producer and start pulling the rehearsals together so they can know how everything’s going to sound a perfect it before they actually go to the recording session. Once in the recording session, the production starts. That’s where the producer is in charge of getting the best takes of each musician or person that is involved in the process. Once all the tracks are finished; let’s say bass, drums, guitars, vocals, now you can move on to the postproduction. Postproduction is also referred to as mixing. Mixing is the process in which you actually put all these tracks together. You level them, compress them, EQ them until you get the final mix sounding just as you wanted. "