The steps of music production

The production of an audio track involves many technical steps: tracking, mixing and mastering.

Tracking

The first step is tracking. In this step the various instruments are recorded, and the recording techniques are many:

• The 100% live recording, where all the instruments and the voices are recorded together without any overdubbing: it is the case of some jazz and classical recordings
• The modern multi-track recording technique, where each instrument is recorded alone
• The "hybrid" approach, which combines the live recording of some instruments (like for example all the instrumental parts) and the overdubbing of other instruments (i.e. the voices)

Each approach has its own pros and cons. The live approach (100% or hybrid) allows certainly to obtain a more natural and spontaneous recording, where the "mood" of the performance can be felt in a direct way. On the other hand, the multi-track technique, despite being more "cold", allows to minimize the performance imperfections and to obtain a more detailed and clean sound for each instrument, because of the absence of interference between the instruments sound.
From the tracking step, the various tracks that compose the song are recorded.  The number of the tracks depends on the number of the instruments, the recording technique and the artistic needs.

Mixing

The second step is mixing. In this step, the sound of each recorded instrument is optimized. In fact, when we have a multi-track recording, like in 99% of the time, every single instrument can be optimized in terms of output level, equalization, compression, reverb and so on. This processing of each single instrument is the mixing stage.
This is a very long step, but it is absolutely essential for the audio quality of the final result. The outcome of the mixing stage is the "mixdown" or "downmix", which is the final track: a single stereo audio file or a single magnetic tape that contains the final track with all the instruments.
The mixdown is the input of the final mastering stage.

Mastering

Finally, there is the mastering step. In this step, the mastering engineer will try to improve the audio quality of the mixdown, and in many cases he will try to obtain also an higher output level.
The outcome of this important step is the final master, which is the final stereo track that will be commercially released. The audio mastering stage can be made in two different ways:

• Stereo mastering
• Stem mastering

For more details about the differences of these approaches please read this article.
For a detailed explanation about the stereo mastering process, check here.