The music production process from songwriting to mastering is a magical one. I couldn’t feel more delighted to welcome my producer, Bob McCutcheon, onto the show for a fantastic conversation all about music production. We always have a blast in the studio, so expect our chat to be fun, lighthearted, and insightful.
The quote for this episode is by Scott Borchetta: “The reality of recording, it’s one of the most intimate things that an artist ever does because if you do it right, you’re exposing yourself, and you’re expressing your emotions, and those are the key attributes to a big record that really connect with people.” During our amazing conversation, Bob and I talk about authentic music expressing the artist’s emotions, the producer’s job to interpret what the artist feels and their vision for the song, taking a collaborative approach to production, the songwriting process and key aspects to solidify before recording, the producer’s possible roles during the songwriting stage, choosing chords that support the melody and reflect the song’s emotion, giving attention to key and tempo, arranging a song from structure to instrumentation, determining the genre and feel of the song, bringing out emotion through instrumentation choices, the importance of reference tracks, the individual roles in the recording studio, tracking digital and live instruments, planning and understanding the song’s arc to determine where to add instruments or pull back, focusing on transitions, comping vocals and other instruments, layering vocals, the mixing process, understanding the role each aspect of the song plays in the arrangement and mixing accordingly, finding a balance and a place for everything in the song, doing tuning and timing edits to clean up the tracks, the artist sharing mix notes with the producer, the final polish with mastering and what this step entails, and much more. I’m so glad Bob joined me on the show for such an outstanding discussion about the music production process, so I hope you find it interesting and informative.
Are you enjoying Write on Track? Do you have a topic suggestion for an episode? Would you like to be a guest? Email me at writeontrackpodcast@gmail.com. Also, I’d love to connect with you. My official website is http://demimschwartz.com, and you can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/demimschwartz, Instagram at http://instagram.com/demimschwartz, and Facebook at http://facebook.com/demimschwartz.
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay “write on track!”