Day in a life of a music producer

I’m a music producer, I mainly work in the composition, production and marketing of my own songs, that being electronic music. The truth is that as a music producer, each day is very different and most of the time there is no set routine.

Inspiration and Research

It depends on inspiration, outside factors like session musicians, vocalists and labels, amongst other things. There will be days were inspiration / creativity doesn’t hit and therefore will be spent doing other administrative tasks or i.e. research about production.

How I make a new song from start to finish

The process of creating a new song for me usually starts with a rough idea that I build on. This can be a cool sound, a chord progression or sometimes even a vocal. But most of the time, I make an instrumental that I send to a vocalist. This is usually pretty rough, as I like to adapt many things to the vocals I get. I almost never make the drop, which is often the main focus of the song, before I get the vocal, also because it allows you to integrate the vocal into that electronic part of the song.

The next step after I get a vocal is to deeply work on the production. This is the step that takes most of the time. If all the production elements are really good then the next step, mixing, takes way less time. For me, I do a lot of mixing as I do the production, which is just a workflow preference. After mixing, I master the song and check reference tracks in the same sort of style. It is worth noting, that most of the times I don’t work on one song at a time and go through this process without working on anything else. As mentioned in the beginning, creativity and inspiration is a big part in this, but especially in the production stage. There might be days or even weeks where you don’t feel as inspired, that can be used to instead do tasks like mixing and mastering that require more of a technical approach.

Creative zone

So all together a full day in the studio might be just 1-2 hours but when you’re in the creative zone and working on a really inspiring song it can also easily turn into a session up to 5-6 hours long. I usually start to work around 10 AM and then maybe do another session in the afternoon, evening or later at night.