In the
music industry, a
record producer has many roles, among them
controlling the recording sessions, coaching and guiding the
musicians, gathering the ideas of the project, directing the
creativity, and supervising the recording,
mixing and
mastering processes. This has been a major
function of producers since the inception of sound recording, but
in the latter half of the 20th century producers have also taken on
a wider entrepreneurial role. These activities comprise
record production.
Today, the recording industry have two kinds of producers:
Executive Producer and
Music
Producer; they have different roles. While the executive
producer has the financial role of the project, the music producer
is responsible of the entire music of an album.
The music producer could, in some cases, be compared to the film
director in that the producer's job is to create, shape and mold a
piece of music in accordance with their vision for the album.
In the UK, before the rise of the record producer, the A&R Man
would oversee the recording session, assuming responsibility for
creative decisions relating to the recording.
History
Early record producers
During the 1890s,
Fred Gaisberg ran
the first recording studio and provided the closest approximation
of production by guiding an opera singer closer or further away
from a
gramophone's horn to match the
dynamics in the score. (Citation: Gronow and Saunio 1998,
p. 8; Moorefield 2005, p. 1).
However in the first part of the 20th century the record producer's
role was similar to the role of a film producer in that the record
producer organized and supervised recording sessions, paid
technicians, musicians and
arrangers, and sometimes chose material for the
artist. In the mid-1950s a new category emerged, that of the
independent record producer. Among the most famous early
independent producers are the famed songwriting-production duo
Leiber & Stoller, "
Wall of Sound" creator
Phil Spector and British studio pioneer
Joe Meek.
Magnetic
tape enabled the establishment of independent recording studios in
major recording centres such as London
, Los Angeles
and New
York
. Unlike the old record company studios,
which were effectively a "closed shop," these new studios could be
hired by the hour by anyone who could afford to do so.
The biggest and best commercial studios were typically established
and operated by leading recording engineers. They were carefully
constructed to create optimum recording conditions, and were
equipped with the latest and best recording equipment and
top-quality
microphones, as well as
electronic amplification gear and musical instruments.
Top-line
studios such as Olympic
Studios
in London, United Western Recorders, Fine
Recording in New York City, and Musart in Los Angeles quickly became among
the most sought-after recording facilities in the world, and both
these studios became veritable "hit factories" that produced many
of the most successful pop recordings of the latter 20th
century.
Evolution of the role of the producer
Prior to the 1950s, the various stages of the recording and
marketing process had been carried out by different professionals
within the industry –
A&R managers found
potential new artists and signed them to their labels; professional
songwriters created new material; publishing agents sold these
songs to the A&R people; staff engineers carried out the task
of making the recordings in company-owned studios.
Freed from this traditional system by the advent of independent
commercial studios, the new generation of entrepreneurial producers
– many of whom were former record company employees themselves –
were able to create and occupy a new stratum in the industry,
taking on a more direct and complex role in the musical process.
This development in music was mirrored in the TV industry by the
concurrent development of
videotape
recording and the consequent emergence of independent TV production
companies like
Desilu, established by '50s TV
superstars
Lucille Ball and her then
husband,
Desi Arnaz.
These producers now typically carried out most or all of these
various tasks themselves, including selecting and arranging songs,
overseeing sessions (and often engineering the recordings) and even
writing the material. Independent music
production companies rapidly gained a significant foothold in
popular music and soon became the main intermediary between artist
and record label, signing new artists to production contracts,
producing the recordings and then licensing the finished product to
record labels for pressing, promotion and sale. (This was a novel
innovation in the popular music field, although a broadly similar
system had long been in place in many countries for the production
of content for broadcast
radio.) The classic
example of this transition is renowned British producer
George Martin, who worked as a staff producer
and A&R manager at EMI for many years, before branching out on
his own and becoming a highly successful independent
producer.
As a result of these changes, record producers began to exert a
strong influence, not only on individual careers, but on the course
of popular music. A key example of this is of
Phil Spector who defined the gap between Elvis
and the Beatles (1958–1964) with such acts as
The Ronettes,
The
Crystals,
Darlene Love,
The Righteous Brothers and
The Paris Sisters. Spector's
Wall of Sound production technique also
persisted after that time with his select recordings of
The Beatles,
The
Ramones,
Leonard Cohen,
George Harrison,
Dion and
Ike and
Tina Turner. This tradition has been kept in motion by
Marty Munsch who, ironically, has been called
the Phil Spector of
Punk Rock.
Some producers also became
de facto recording artists,
often creating records themselves or with anonymous studio
musicians and releasing them under a pseudonym. Examples of this
phenomenon include the records by fictional groups
The Archies and
Josie & The Pussycats,
produced by Don Kirshner and Danny Jansen respectively, who were
contracted by TV production companies to produce these records to
promote the animated children's TV series of the same name.
Similarly,
Jeff Barry and
Andy Kim recorded as
The
Archies.
Modern production technology
Nowadays, with computer web applications like Facebook, YouTube and
MySpace, "
Indie" record producers
can now serve in very non-traditional roles, using these "social
networking" sites. They can produce via the internet by having
their clients email .mp3 or .wav files to them. In this way the
producer/Artist can be located in a different geographic location
and still accomplish their goal.
With digital audio workstations like Digidesign Protools it is not
uncommon for the producers to seldom meet the clients but rather
share the project files. These new technologies have also sparked a
variety of "do it yourself" producers.
References
- Hewitt, Michael. Music Theory for Computer Musicians.
1st Ed. USA. Cengage Learning, 2008. ISBN 13-978-1-59863-503-4
- Gronow, Pekka and Ilpo Saunio (1998). An International
History of the Recording Industry. ISBN-X. Cited in Moorefield
(2005).
- Moorefield, Virgil (2005). The Producer as Composer:
Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music. ISBN. 123
External links
Record Producer Video Interviews,
http://www.recordproduction.comAmerican Music Producers,
http://www.imusicproducers.com