Process of music production

Let’s start by defining the process of music production by separating it into six basic stages: songwriting, arranging, tracking, editing, mixing, mastering. What does it mean to write a song when so much of today’s music is wordless? This is a great question for another article. But for our purposes, let’s say that songwriting is the process of putting musical ideas together to form a larger structure of the coherent melody, harmony and rhythm.