Produce your album: stages of pre-production and rehearsal.
Producing your album is a lot of work, and often you tend to underestimate the time and energy required. The key is that the better prepared you are and the better you know where you are going, the faster and more efficiently you can get there. Here are the first two essential steps to produce your album efficiently and in the best possible conditions.
Pre-production / preparation
Before going to record, you have to know exactly what and how. This is the goal of this step.
This is simply the phase during which you will choose your titles, determine the tempo of each title, their instrumentation, fix their arrangement, etc ... You will probably also record guide or witness tracks which will allow the musicians who are recording to find their way aroundin each piece.
It's super simple: if this phase is sloppy, you will have problems because you will find yourself in the studio having to decide in a hurry if you are going to record a second rhythm guitar, if you record backing vocals and how many, etc. … You will find yourself chatting with yourcolleagues about the arrangement, arguing over the instrumentation, and ultimately wasting precious time.
If this phase is neglected, you will have to think about it. And to think is not good! At least not when your time and money are on the line and you're there to save.
To stay productive, you have to separate decision-making from action. This phase is purely a decision-making phase. From the moment you step into the studio, you stop thinking (at least a lot less) and you execute: you are there to record what you set out to record.
Rehearsal
Once the arrangement is fixed, the instrumentation decided, it is time to work. Again.
If you arrive at the studio without having really prepared, it will show. You are going to be tense, you are going to get your notes, you are going to be hesitant and therefore performance will suffer.
For this phase, it is best to practice with the witness tracks in your ears. This helps to avoid surprises during the actual recording.
In conclusion, these two stages contribute to the success of the work that constitutes an album. It is essential not to rush them.