Making a Song At Chicago Recording Studio - Untold Stories Recordings: Step Two Producing (VIDEO)

Welcome to Untold Stories Recordings, the premier Chicago recording studio for musicians. At Untold Stories Recordings, we take pride in offering professional services to bring your music to life. Our four-step process, including recording, producing, mixing, and mastering, ensures that your songs reach their fullest potential. Today, we'll delve into step two of this process: producing.

At Untold Stories Recordings, we want all artists to understand the distinction between an audio engineer and a producer. As an audio engineer, my role is to ensure that your sound is clean and radio-ready, while producers focus on songwriting. To bridge this gap, we empower you to make artistic choices for your track after the recording phase and before the mixing stage.

During this critical step, you, as the artist, become the producer of your track. You have the opportunity to select and customize various artistic effects, such as the desired type and level of distortion on guitars, the perfect amount of reverb or delay on vocals, and even special effects like DJ skips or speaker-like sounds. Additionally, you can explore creative techniques like vocal chopping and screwing, or blending effects with the beat. By taking charge of this process, you retain full ownership (110%) of your track, and there's no need to credit me as a writer. The duration of this step can range from a quick 30 minutes for a simple track to an entire day for more intricate and in-depth creative exploration.

Once the producing phase is complete, we will provide you with a rough draft of your track before we proceed to the next step: mixing.

It's important to emphasize that producing and mixing are distinct processes. Be cautious of studios that claim to mix your track in a mere 20 minutes immediately after producing it. Such rushed approaches often result in tracks that may sound impressive within the studio but fall short when played on different sound systems.

Mixing is an art form that requires time and expertise. A true engineer knows that dedicating at least two hours to perfecting your mix is essential, and depending on the complexity of the track, additional time may be needed.

Even for a simple rap mixtape, which typically includes at least 12 vocal tracks and a single-file beat, our meticulous approach involves the application of various techniques. Through the precise use of gain staging, panning, subtractive EQ, compression, additive EQ, saturation, de-essers, gates, stereo imagers, effect automation, volume automation, fade-ins, fade-outs, multi-band compressors, limiters, and more, we ensure that each sound complements the others. Each element requires individual attention since every sound is unique and dynamically changes throughout the song, often requiring automation. Adjusting one element may impact others, necessitating further fine-tuning to maintain overall balance and quality.

In our upcoming article, we will delve deeper into the art of mixing during the third step of making a song. If you have any questions about producing your track at Untold Stories Recordings, please don't hesitate to give us a call. We're here to assist you on your musical journey at our top Chicago recording studio.