Source: giphy.com

You lay the cornerstone of your piece in the first phase — composition and songwriting process. Here, you are drafting individual parts of your song such as verse, refrain and bridge. Furthermore, you define the key, the tempo and the beat of your track as well as the sequence of chords, the melody and things like bass lines in this phase. All in all, you are building the basic framework of your compostion.

The second step is the arrangement. Here, you take your musical ideas generated in the composition phase and build your instrumentation upon them. You decide on which instruments play and when in your piece in this part of the process. One can compare this to the construction of walls, ceilings and the roof of your “musical house”.

Once you have composed and arranged your song, the production phase begins. You tinker on synthesizer sounds, record real instruments or program your virtual orchestra. Sound design can also take place in this phase of music production which is small gimmickry in order to fill out holes in your arrangement.

When you have completed the production, the mixing phase starts. Here, you adjust the volume of individual tracks to each other and make sure everything works and sounds well in your track.

The last step is the mastering process. The mastering exists to fine-tune the sound of the individual songs of an album or soundtrack in order to make them sound like a cohesive whole. It is common practice to let somebody else do this step for you, as another person has a fresh view — or better: a fresh ear — on your own work.