The production process of the music industry

Pre-production

Pre-production is a process where a recording artist spends time creating and refining their music ideas and producing a practise recording or rough draft of a song in order to establish ahead of time if the ideas are promising. This saves time and money wasted in expensive studios. The goal is to enter into the major recording phase of production with the basic and most promising ideas already established.

Production

This is the actual making of the music:

• First, an idea is thought of, and imagine what it will sound like once you have completed it and which instruments you'll use to create the sound you want.
• Recording, tracking and arranging Dance music producers will build the track up from samples, loops and MIDI. Music producers who work with bands and musicians will record the different parts of the track to disk.
• Editing- You will in this stage drag, drop, cut, trim, copy, paste and nudge the various programmed or recorded parts to fit together well and produce the completed raw song.
• Mixing- Mixing or mixing down is the final stage in which you use volume, EQ, panning and effects to create the stereo image and final sound you want.
• Mastering- A good mastering engineer will take your final mix and finalize it into a master ready for public use.

Post-production

Post-production is part of film-making and the video production process. It occurs in the making of television programs, advertising, audio recordings and photography.

It occurs after the actual end of shooting and/or recording the completed work.

Post-production is in many different processes. These typically include:

• Video editing of the picture of a television program using an edit decision list.
• Writing, (re) recording, and editing the soundtrack.
• Adding visual special effects - mainly computer generated imagery (CGI) and digital copy from which release prints will be made (although this may be made obsolete by digital-cinema technologies).
• Sound design and sound effects, known as sound re-recording or mixing with professional audio equipment.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-production - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-production - http://www.renegadeproducer.com/music-production-process.html.