Record producer

As a broad project, the creation of a music recording may be split across three specialists: the executive producer, who oversees business partnerships and financing; the vocal producer or vocal arranger, who aids vocal performance via expert critique and coaching of vocal technique, and the record producer or music producer, who, often called simply the producer, directs the overall creative process of recording the song in its final mix.

The producer's roles can include gathering ideas, composing music, choosing session musicians, proposing changes to song arrangements, coaching the performers, controlling sessions, supervising the audio mixing, and, in some cases, supervising the audio mastering. A producer may give creative control to the artists themselves, taking a supervisory or advisory role instead. As to qualifying for a Grammy nomination, the Recording Academy defines a producer:^[2]

The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire recording project, and the individual recording sessions that are part of that project. He or she is present in the recording studio or at the location recording and works directly with the artist and engineer. The producer makes creative and aesthetic decisions that realize both the artist's and label's goals in the creation of musical content. Other duties include, but are not limited to; keeping budgets and schedules, adhering to deadlines, hiring musicians, singers, studios and engineers, overseeing other staffing needs and editing (Classical projects).

The producer often selects and collaborates with a mixing engineer, who focuses on the especially technological aspects of the recording process, namely, operating the electronic equipment and blending the raw, recorded tracks of the chosen performances, whether vocal or instrumental, into a ''mix'', either stereo or surround sound. Then a mastering engineer further adjusts this recording for distribution on the chosen media. A producer may work on only one or two songs or on an artist's entire album, helping develop the album's overall vision. The record producers may also take on the role of executive producer, managing the budget, schedules, contracts, and negotiations.

Discover more about Production overview related topics

Music executive

Music executive

A music executive or record executive is a person within a record label who works in senior management and makes executive decisions over the label's artists. Their role varies greatly but in essence, they can oversee one, or many, aspects of a record label, including A&R, contracts, management, publishing, production, manufacture, marketing/promotion, distribution, copyright, and touring. Although music executives work in senior management, a number of music executives have gone on to establish their own record labels as owners themselves, sometimes being involved in the music industry initially as artists, A&Rs, or producers for a number of years and building a strong reputation.

Session musician

Session musician

Session musicians, studio musicians, or backing musicians are musicians hired to perform in recording sessions or live performances. The term sideman is also used in the case of live performances, such as accompanying a recording artist on a tour. Session musicians are usually not permanent or official members of a musical ensemble or band. They work behind the scenes and rarely achieve individual fame in their own right as soloists or bandleaders. However, top session musicians are well known within the music industry, and some have become publicly recognized, such as the Wrecking Crew, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and The Funk Brothers who worked with Motown Records.

Audio mixing (recorded music)

Audio mixing (recorded music)

In sound recording and reproduction, audio mixing is the process of optimizing and combining multitrack recordings into a final mono, stereo or surround sound product. In the process of combining the separate tracks, their relative levels are adjusted and balanced and various processes such as equalization and compression are commonly applied to individual tracks, groups of tracks, and the overall mix. In stereo and surround sound mixing, the placement of the tracks within the stereo field are adjusted and balanced. Audio mixing techniques and approaches vary widely and have a significant influence on the final product.

The Recording Academy

The Recording Academy

The Recording Academy is an American learned academy of musicians, producers, recording engineers, and other musical professionals. It is famous for its Grammy Awards, which recognize achievements in the music industry of songs and music which are popular worldwide. The Recording Academy is a founding partner of the Grammy Museum, a non-profit organization whose stated mission is preserving and educating about music history and significance. The Recording Academy also founded MusiCares, a charity with the stated goal of impacting the health and welfare of the music community. The Recording Academy's advocacy team lobbies for music creators' rights at the local, state, and federal levels.

A&R team

(Artists and Repertoires)

In the 1880s, the record industry began by simply having the artist perform at a phonograph.^[14] In 1924, the trade journal Talking Machine World, covering the phonography and record industry, reported that Eddie King, Victor Records' manager of the "New York artist and repertoire department", had planned a set of recordings in Los Angeles.^[15] Later, folklorist Archie Green called this perhaps the earliest printed use of A&R man.^[15] Actually, it says neither "A&R man" nor even "A&R", an initialism perhaps coined by Billboard magazine in 1946, and entering wide use in the late 1940s.^[15]

In the 1920s and 1930s, A&R executives, like Ben Selvin at Columbia Records, Nathaniel Shilkret at Victor Records, and Bob Haring at Brunswick Records became the precursors of record producers, supervising recording and often leading session orchestras.^[6] During the 1940s, major record labels increasingly opened official A&R departments, whose roles included supervision of recording.^[15] Meanwhile, independent recording studios opened, helping originate record producer as a specialty. But despite a tradition of some A&R men writing music, record production still referred to just the manufacturing of record discs.^[6]

Record producers

After World War II, pioneering A&R managers who transitioned influentially to record production as now understood, while sometimes owning independent labels, include J. Mayo Williams and John Hammond.^[6] Upon moving from Columbia Records to Mercury Records, Hammond appointed Mitch Miller to lead Mercury's popular recordings in New York.^[6] Miller then produced country-pop crossover hits by Patti Page and by Frankie Laine, moved from Mercury to Columbia, and became a leading A&R man of the 1950s.^[6]

During the decade, A&R executives increasingly directed songs' sonic signatures, although many still simply teamed singers with musicians, while yet others exercised virtually no creative influence.^[6] The term record producer in its current meaning—the creative director of song production—appearing in a 1953 issue of Billboard magazine, became widespread in the 1960s.^[6] Still, a formal distinction was elusive for some time more.^[6] A&R managers might still be creative directors, like William "Mickey" Stevenson, hired by Berry Gordy, at the Motown record label.^[16]

Tape recording

In 1947, the American market gained audio recording onto magnetic tape.^[17] At the record industry's 1880s dawn, rather, recording was done by phonograph, etching the sonic waveform vertically into a cylinder.^[18] By the 1930s, a gramophone etched it laterally across a disc.^[19] Constrained in tonal range, whether bass or treble, and in dynamic range, records made a grand, concert piano sound like a small, upright piano, and maximal duration was four and a half minutes.^[14][19] Selections and performance were often altered accordingly, and playing this disc—the wax master—destroyed it.^[19] The finality often caused anxiety that restrained performance to prevent error.^[19] In the 1940s, during World War II, the Germans refined audio recording onto magnetic tape—uncapping recording duration and allowing immediate playback, rerecording, and editing—a technology that premised emergence of record producers in their current roles.^[19]

Multitrack recording

Early in the recording industry, a record was attained by simply having all of the artists perform together live in one take.^[18] In 1945,^[7] by recording a musical element while playing a previously recorded record, Les Paul developed a recording technique called "sound on sound".^[18] By this, the final recording could be built piece by piece and tailored, effecting an editing process.^[18] In one case, Paul produced a song via 500 recorded discs.^[18] But, besides the tedium of this process, it serially degraded the sound quality of previously recorded elements, rerecorded as ambient sound.^[18] Yet in 1948, Paul adopted tape recording, enabling truly multitrack recording by a new technique, "overdubbing".^[18]

To enable overdubbing, Paul revised the tape recorder itself by adding a second playback head, and terming it the preview head.^[7] Joining the preexisting recording head, erase head, and playback head, the preview head allows the artist to hear the extant recording over headphones playing it in synchrony, "in sync", with the present performance being recorded alone on an isolated track.^[7] This isolation of multiple tracks enables countless mixing possibilities. Producers began recording initially only the "bed tracks"—the rhythm section, including the bassline, drums, and rhythm guitar—whereas vocals and instrument solos could be added later. A horn section, for example, could record a week later, and a string section another week later. A singer could perform her own backup vocals, or a guitarist could play 15 layers.

Electronic instruments

Phil Spector producing Modern Folk Quartet, 1966

Across the 1960s, popular music increasingly switched from acoustic instruments, like piano, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and brass instruments, to electronic instruments, like electric guitars, keyboards, and synthesizers, employing instrument amplifiers and speakers. These could mimic acoustic instruments or create utterly new sounds. Soon, by combining the capabilities of tape, multitrack recording, and electronic instruments, producers like Phil Spector, George Martin, and Joe Meek rendered sounds unattainable live.^[8] Similarly, in jazz fusion, Teo Macero, producing Miles Davis's 1970 album Bitches Brew, spliced sections of extensive improvisation sessions.

Performer-producer

In the 1960s, rock acts like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,^[20] and the Kinks produced some of their own songs, although many such songs are officially credited to specialist producers. Yet especially influential was the Beach Boys, whose band leader Brian Wilson took over from his father Murry within a couple of years after the band's commercial breakthrough. By 1964, Wilson had taken Spector's techniques to unseen sophistication. Wilson alone produced all Beach Boy recordings between 1963 and 1967. Using multiple studios and multiple attempts of instrumental and vocal tracks, Wilson selected the best combinations of performance and audio quality, and used tape editing to assemble a composite performance.

Digital production

Brian Wilson at a mixing board in Brother Studios, 1976

The 1980s advent of digital processes and formats rapidly replaced analog processes and formats, namely, tape and vinyl. Although recording onto quality tape, at least half an inch wide and traveling 15 inches per second, had limited "tape hiss" to silent sections, digital's higher signal-to-noise ratio, SNR, abolished it.^[21] Digital also imparted to the music a perceived "pristine" sound quality, if also a loss of analog recordings' perceived "warm" quality and bass better rounded.^[21] Yet whereas editing tape media requires physically locating the target audio on the ribbon, cutting there, and splicing pieces, editing digital media offers inarguable advantages in ease, efficiency, and possibilities.

In the 1990s, digital production reached affordable home computers via production software. By now, recording and mixing are often centralized in DAWs, digital audio workstations—for example, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Ableton, Cubase, Reason, and FL Studio—for which plugins, by third parties, effect virtual studio technology.^[9] DAWs fairly standard in the industry are Logic Pro and Pro Tools.^[10] Physical devices involved include the main mixer, MIDI controllers to communicate among equipment, the recording device itself, and perhaps effects gear that is outboard. Yet literal recording is sometimes still analog, onto tape, whereupon the raw recording is converted to a digital signal for processing and editing, as some producers still find audio advantages to recording onto tape.^[21]

Conventionally, tape is more forgiving of overmodulation, whereby dynamic peaks exceed the maximal recordable signal level: tape's limitation, a physical property, is magnetic capacity, which tapers offs, smoothing the overmodulated waveform even at a signal nearly 15 decibels too "hot", whereas a digital recording is ruined by harsh distortion of "clipping" at any overshoot.^[21] In digital recording, however, a recent advancement, 32-bit float, enables DAWs to undo clipping.^[22] Still, some criticize digital instruments and workflows for excess automation, allegedly impairing creative or sonic control.^[23] In any case, as production technology has drastically changed, so have the knowledge demands,^[24] although DAWs enables novices, even teenagers at home, to learn production independently.^[11] Some have attained professional competence before ever working with an artist.^[12]

Hip hop production

In the 2000s, with the advent of technology that made traditional record production accessible, especially with hip hop beatmaking and electronic music. Within these genres, the term producer is applied to a number of roles and has popularized the use of more niche terms and credits including executive producer, co-producer, assistant producer, and additional and miscellaneous production to differentiate contributions.^[25]

Discover more about Historical developments related topics

Artists and repertoire

Artists and repertoire

Artists and repertoire is the division of a record label or music publishing company that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists and songwriters. It also acts as a liaison between artists and the record label or publishing company. Every activity involving artists to the point of album release is generally considered under the purview and responsibility of A&R.

Archie Green

Archie Green

Archie Green was an American folklorist specializing in laborlore and American folk music. Devoted to understanding vernacular culture, he gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks which constitute laborlore. He is credited with winning Congressional support for passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976, which established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Billboard (magazine)

Billboard (magazine)

Billboard is an American music and entertainment magazine published weekly by Penske Media Corporation. The magazine provides music charts, news, video, opinion, reviews, events, and style related to the music industry. Its music charts include the Hot 100, the 200, and the Global 200, tracking the most popular albums and songs in different genres of music. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm, and operates several TV shows.

Ben Selvin

Ben Selvin

Benjamin Bernard Selvin was an American musician, bandleader, and record producer. He was known as the Dean of Recorded Music.

Columbia Records

Columbia Records

Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. It was founded on January 15, 1889, evolving from the American Graphophone Company, the successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the recorded sound business, and the second major company to produce records. From 1961 to 1991, its recordings were released outside North America under the name CBS Records to avoid confusion with EMI's Columbia Graphophone Company. Columbia is one of Sony Music's four flagship record labels, alongside former longtime rival RCA Records, as well as Arista Records and Epic Records.

Nathaniel Shilkret

Nathaniel Shilkret

Nathaniel Shilkret was an American musician, composer, conductor and musical director.

Brunswick Records

Brunswick Records

Brunswick Records is an American record label founded in 1916.

J. Mayo Williams

J. Mayo Williams

Jay Mayo "Ink" Williams was a pioneering African-American producer of recorded blues music. Some historians have claimed that Ink Williams earned his nickname by his ability to get the signatures of talented African-American musicians on recording contracts, but in fact it was a racial sobriquet from his football days, when he was a rare Black player on white college and professional teams. He was the most successful "race records" producer of his time, breaking all previous records for sales in this genre.

John Hammond (record producer)

John Hammond (record producer)

John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, civil rights activist, and music critic active from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century popular music. He is the father of blues musician John P. Hammond.

Mercury Records

Mercury Records

Mercury Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. It had significant success as an independent operation in the 1940s and 1950s. Smash Records and Fontana Records were sub labels of Mercury. Mercury Records released rock, funk, R&B, doo wop, soul music, blues, pop, rock and roll, and jazz records. In the United States, it is operated through Republic Records; in the United Kingdom and Japan, it is distributed by EMI Records.

Mitch Miller

Mitch Miller

Mitchell William Miller was an American choral conductor, record producer, record-industry executive, and professional oboist. He was involved in almost all aspects of the industry, particularly as a conductor and artists and repertoire (A&R) man. Miller was one of the most influential people in American popular music during the 1950s and early 1960s, both as the head of A&R at Columbia Records and as a best-selling recording artist with an NBC television series, Sing Along with Mitch. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester in the early 1930s, Miller began his musical career as a player of the oboe and English horn, making numerous highly regarded classical and popular recordings.

Frankie Laine

Frankie Laine

Frankie Laine was an American singer and songwriter whose career spanned nearly 75 years, from his first concerts in 1930 with a marathon dance company to his final performance of "That's My Desire" in 2005. Often billed as "America's Number One Song Stylist", his other nicknames include "Mr. Rhythm", "Old Leather Lungs", and "Mr. Steel Tonsils". His hits included "That's My Desire", "That Lucky Old Sun", "Mule Train", "Jezebel", "High Noon", "I Believe", "Hey Joe!", "The Kid's Last Fight", "Cool Water", "Rawhide", and "You Gave Me a Mountain".

Mixing console

Among female record producers, Sylvia Moy was the first at Motown, Gail Davies the first on Nashville's Music Row, and Ethel Gabriel, with RCA, the first at a major record label. Lillian McMurry, owning Trumpet Records, produced influential blues records. Meanwhile, Wilma Cozart Fine produced hundreds of records for Mercury Records' classical division. For classical production, three women have won Grammy awards, and Judith Sherman's 2015 win was her fifth.^[12] Yet in nonclassical, no woman has won Producer of the Year, awarded since 1975 and only one even nominated for a record not her own, Linda Perry.^[26] After Lauren Christy's 2004 nomination, Linda Perry's 2019 nomination was the next for a woman.^[26] On why no woman had ever won it, Perry commented, "I just don't think there are that many women interested."^[12]

Across the decades, many female artists have produced their own music. For instance, artists Kate Bush, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, and Lorde have produced or coproduced^[11][27] and Ariana Grande who produces and arranges her vocals as well as being an audio engineer.^[28][29][30] Still among specialists, despite some prominent women, including Missy Elliott in hip hop and Sylvia Massy in rock, the vast majority have been men.^[11] Early in the 2010s, asked for insights that she herself had gleaned as a woman who has specialized successfully in the industry, Wendy Page remarked, "The difficulties are usually very short-lived. Once people realize that you can do your job, sexism tends to lower its ugly head."^[11] Still, when tasked to explain her profession's sex disparity, Page partly reasoned that record labels, dominated by men, have been, she said, "mistrustful of giving a woman the reins of an immense, creative project like making a record."^[11] Ultimately, the reasons are multiple and not fully clear, although prominently proposed factors include types of sexism and scarcity of female role models in the profession.^[12]

Women producers known for producing records not their own include Sonia Pottinger, Sylvia Robinson and Carla Olson.

In January 2018, a research team led by Stacy L. Smith, founder and director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative,^[31] based in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism,^[32] issued a report,^[33] estimating that in the prior several years, about 2% of popular songs' producers were female.^[13] Also that month, Billboard magazine queried, "Where are all the female music producers?"^[12] Upon the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's second annual report, released in February 2019,^[34] its department at USC reported, "2018 saw an outcry from artists, executives and other music industry professionals over the lack of women in music" and "the plight of women in music", where women were allegedly being "stereotyped, sexualized, and shut out".^[32] Also in February 2019, the Recording Academy's Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion announced an initiative whereby over 200 artists and producers—ranging from Cardi B and Taylor Swift to Maroon 5 and Quincy Jones—agreed to consider at least two women for each producer or engineer position.^[13] The academy's website, Grammy.com, announced, "This initiative is the first step in a broader effort to improve those numbers and increase diversity and inclusion for all in the music industry."^[13]

Discover more about Women in producing related topics

Gail Davies

Gail Davies

Gail Davies is an American singer-songwriter and the first female record producer in country music. She is the daughter of country singer Tex Dickerson and the sister of songwriter Ron Davies. Gail's son, Chris Scruggs, is a former co-lead singer and guitarist for the roots-country band BR549 and is currently on tour with Marty Stuart as a member of his Fabulous Superlatives.

Ethel Gabriel

Ethel Gabriel

Ethel Nagy Gabriel was an American record producer and record executive with a four-decade career at RCA Victor. She produced over 2,500 music albums including 15 RIAA Certified Gold Records and hits by Elvis Presley, Perry Como, Al Hirt, Henry Mancini, and Roger Whittaker among others.

Lillian McMurry

Lillian McMurry

Lillian Shedd McMurry was one of the earliest American female record producers and owner of Trumpet Records. She was influential in the development of blues music, particularly through her recordings of Sonny Boy Williamson II and her discovery of the guitarist Elmore James.

Blues

Blues

Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes, usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

Judith Sherman

Judith Sherman

Judith Dorothy Sherman is an American audio engineer, and record producer. She has been nominated for 18 Grammy Awards and won 14 including for Producer Of The Year, Classical seven times. She has worked with contemporary composers on recordings including Steve Reich, Elliot Carter, John Adams, John Corigliano, and Philip Glass. Notable artists she has worked with include the Alexander String Quartet, Kronos Quartet (Nuevo), Pacifica Quartet, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and the Cleveland Quartet.

Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical

Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical

The Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical is an honor presented to record producers for quality non-classical music at the Grammy Awards, a ceremony that was established in 1958 and originally called the Gramophone Awards. Honors in several categories are presented at the ceremony annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to "honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position".

Lauren Christy

Lauren Christy

Lauren Christy is a British singer, songwriter and record producer. Originally a solo artist, she found success as part of the writing production trio the Matrix. The Matrix received numerous Grammy nominations including best producer.

Linda Perry

Linda Perry

Linda Perry is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. She was the lead singer and primary songwriter of 4 Non Blondes, and has since founded two record labels and composed and produced hit songs for several other artists. They include: "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera; "What You Waiting For?" by Gwen Stefani; and "Get the Party Started" by Pink. Perry has also contributed to albums by Adele, Alicia Keys, and Courtney Love, as well as signing and distributing James Blunt in the United States. Perry was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015.

Kate Bush

Kate Bush

Catherine Bush is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and dancer. In 1978, at the age of 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song. Bush has since released 25 UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", "Babooshka", "Running Up That Hill", "Don't Give Up", and "King of the Mountain". All ten of her studio albums reached the UK Top 10, with all but one reaching the top five, including the UK number one albums Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985) and the greatest hits compilation The Whole Story (1986). She was the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at number one.

Madonna

Madonna

Madonna Louise Ciccone is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Dubbed the "Queen of Pop", Madonna has been widely recognized for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting, and visual presentation. She has pushed the boundaries of artistic expression in mainstream music, while continuing to maintain control over every aspect of her career. Her works, which incorporate social, political, sexual, and religious themes, have generated both controversy and critical acclaim. A prominent cultural figure of the 20th and 21st centuries, Madonna remains one of the most "well-documented figures of the modern age", with a broad amount of scholarly reviews and literature works on her, as well as an academic mini subdiscipline devoted to her named Madonna studies.

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. Referred to as the "Songbird Supreme" by Guinness World Records, she is noted for her five-octave vocal range, melismatic singing style, improvisation skills, her signature use of the whistle register, and songwriting. Carey is famous for the enduring popularity of her holiday music, particularly the 1994 song "All I Want for Christmas Is You", and she has been dubbed the "Queen of Christmas". Carey rose to fame in 1990 with her debut album Mariah Carey. She was the first artist to have their first five singles reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, from "Vision of Love" to "Emotions". An inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, she is credited for inspiring several generations of pop and R&B artists, and for merging hip hop with pop music through her crossover collaborations.

Janet Jackson

Janet Jackson

Janet Damita Jo Jackson is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer. She is noted for her innovative, socially conscious and sexually provocative records, as well as elaborate stage shows. Her sound and choreography became a catalyst in the growth of MTV, enabling her to rise to prominence while breaking gender and racial barriers in the process. Lyrical content which focused on social issues and lived experiences set her reputation as a role model for youth.