As industry insiders, we sometimes forget that when discussing the recording process, the rest of the world really has no idea what we are talking about. Hopefully this will provide an explanation of the song formation process in layman's terms so that there may be less disconnect between the professional and the consumer.
As with any creative process, there is no absolute hard and fast procedure that must be followed stringently, but there is a logical development that all recordings must go through, which includes:
Composition
Arrangement
Recording
Editing
Mixing
Mastering
That being said, this is an explanation of that general process and what takes place during each of these steps.
Composition
Composition is really where a song or piece is born. Preceding this step may be brainstorming and idea formation, but the song actually begins to take a real form and become an entity in itself during this stage.
This is what separates ideas and melodies floating around in the air from actual well-formed songs. There isn't a whole lot to be said concerning Composition, other than it consists of forming a melody (and often basic accompaniment) that flows chronologically from a start to a finish. Lyrics (if applicable) will also likely be written at this time.
Arrangement
Arranging is taking the Composition that has been created and determining what instruments will be used for the recording, writing the parts that those instruments will play, and the tempo (speed, beats per minute) that the song will be played in.
To best illustrate this point, think of the song "What a Wonderful World." The most famous version of this song is arguably the one sung by the great Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong. Compare this to the Ramones version of the same song. Both are based on the same Composition, but with entirely different results based on the fact that they are Arranged differently using very contrasting instrumentation and are at vastly different tempos. (You can use any number of examples to illustrate this principle; "Yesterday", "Happy Birthday", etc.). Arrangement, as with Composition, may range anywhere from informally assigning parts to instruments to drafting the parts using musical notation, all dependent on the preferences of the arranger and the formality of the project.
Recording
Now we start to get a little more technical.
The term Recording is often used to refer to this and the following three steps as a whole, but for simplicity's sake, the term Recording is used here to mean "putting performances to tape" (or as is the case now, a digital format). This is also referred to as Tracking, Cutting Tracks, etc.
Recording Studios have long been somewhat of a mystery to industry outsiders, but basically what takes place during Recording is microphones and various (expensive) sound altering equipment are used to capture a sound being produced in an acoustically tuned room or environment and storing that sound information onto some sort of media (be it magnetic tape, a computer hard drive, or, in the old days, acetate discs).
Generally, a process called Multi-Tracking is used for commercial recordings in which each microphone (and hence, each sound, be it vocals, guitar, or cello) is printed discretely to the storage media to be manipulated at a later time.
To simplify it a bit, the 'normal' stereo recording that a consumer would hear is comprised of two tracks or channels, the Right and the Left. During the Recording or Multi-Tracking stage, there are virtually innumerable quantities of tracks or channels that can each be controlled separately from the other tracks. For instance if you have recorded a vocal part on one track and a guitar part on another, because they were recorded discretely in a Multi-Track setting, the volume of the vocals can be increased or decreased without affecting the sound or volume of the guitar track whatsoever.
In a typical session, what you would be left with after completing the Recording stage is any number of discrete tracks each containing an instrument. An example of a track listing for a rock song might be:
Track 1: Kick Drum
Track 2: Snare Drum
Track 3: High Tom
Track 4: Low Tom
Track 5: Overhead Left
Track 6: Overhead Right
Track 7: Bass Guitar
Track 8: Electric Guitar
Track 9: Acoustic Guitar
Track 10: Keyboard Left
Track 11: Keyboard Right
Track 12: Lead Vocals
Track 13: Background Voc
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