Record producer In the old days was someone who took care about the budget and organization of making an album without really interrogation in the creative process. In around mid-sass’s the new wave of producers were in many cases owners of private record labels or studios and they would now mostly do all the production tasks themselves, Like attending or even engineering recording and mixing sessions; or even writing the material. It also became popular to include the producer in writing on the album cover for his contribution on the record.
As well as making creative decisions, record producer also decides on the recording engineers, mixers and mastering engineers for the session. 1 Eddie Kramer Born In South Africa he had a great music experience studying in one of the best colleges of music In south Africa. In the age of 19 He has moved to England and he was recording Jazz bands in his home studio. His career started in Division Sound Studios in 62′ and in 63′ He has Joined PEE Studios which was 2 track studios, soon he was running first PEE four track studio.
In 66′ he joined Olympic Sound Studios where e recorded many great artists Including Traffic, The Battles, The Rolling Stones and limit Hendrix. He had great collaboration with Jim engineering every album from “Are You Experienced” to “The Cry of Love”. He worked with Led Zeppelin and many great artists of modern music. 2 He’s Inspiration was by Bob Auger and Keith Grant. They thought him many great techniques and how to approach recording, for example learning to record orchestras with 3 Use’s: Left, Centre, Right and letting the conductor to take care of balancing.
He then implemented those techniques in rock USIA. He is definitely one of the greatest producers and engineers alive and back In the days his mixing techniques were never heard before. He used to track live, and he worked on the best analog equipment we can imagine, starting from PEE consoles to classic outboard gear. The sound of his albums we can define as really analog sounding, with a lot of tube, and transformer sound in them. It is Just pure classic rock sound.
In the early days he worked on 3 track machine, and then when the new technologies emerged he moved onto 8, 16 and then 24 2 inch machines. In his reduction he only had 4 or 5 things in disposal, revere, tape delay, compression and phasing. He also uses dynamic panning in a way that hadn’t been done before. He admitted that when producing and mixing the tracks they TLD really know what they were doing, they were Just doing It, using Instinct. Jell and Eddie were all about instinct and improvisation, and probably that’s why they created such amazing music together.
He says “l tried to use the board as a pallet, artist would pick the colors, I would pick the colures of the sound. “His approach to producing an artist is really existing to what one want to express, and then taking his vision to create a record. In his productions is really all about the soul of the music. 1 OFF both worlds. He likes to track on a 2” machine and then transfer the tracks into Pro Tools and then mix in a hybrid system. He is known of collaboration with Waves, and he worked in development of some of their best analog emulation plugging.
He also likes to record with Neumann microphones but also with humble ass’s and ass’s because as he says the placement is more important than the microphone itself. 3 He Nas the first producer I got interested in when I started my passion in music reduction, and till this day I still learn a lot from interviews and Just from listening to his music. Rick Rubin ere second person which highly contributed to the modern music as a producer is Rick Rubin, the first thing we notice about this man is his massive grey beard, a bread of a man on a musical Journey, as he likes to describe himself.
He started in 1984 as co-founder of Deaf Jam Records and since then he became one of the most influential producers in the history of modern music. He worked on the whole spectrum of music, from classic rock albums to modern pop and hip hop albums. He likes to be minimalist in his production, he says: “there’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across. “5 He tends to strip down the sound and eliminate typical production elements such as reverbs, backing vocals and delays.
Being a great producer involves more than engineering skills and techniques, working with the artist and getting most from them is as crucial as the technical skills. Rick is loved by the artists and he can create a true bond with them allowing them to open their creative mind and let the creativity flow onto the tape. He helps the artists to find their way and he shows them how to become better in the performance. 6 Some artists say: “He has the ability and patience to let the music to be discovered not manufactured. 7 In this field Rick and Eddie are similar in their approach, which is probably part of their shared success, putting the artist and his ‘Sino in the core of their production seems to be the right thing to do and they are definitely masters in this field. As great producer as he is, there has been some controversy about his production approach. Some artists dislike working with him eying that he is overrated and overpriced, like the musicians from Slipknot which Mere very disappointed with his contribution to the album they were making with him. But probably the biggest criticism comes from his contribution to the Loudness He’s latest Black Sabbath album “13” was criticized for being completely smashed to death by distortion and compression to make it as loud as possible, not leaving our non audiophile listeners complain about this fact. 9 Rick works in a hybrid environment and because he started much later than Eddie and because of that cost of the engineering techniques were developed, and Rick himself didn’t contributed in this field that much.
Despite the fact of mixed reviews of his work Rick is definitely a star in this industry, some even call him guru. The fact is that he produced some of the most influential albums in modern music and he is not showing any signs of stopping. Ninth the rapid growth of technology there’s now many so called “bedroom producers”; they don’t have massive budgets, or big consoles, sometimes there’s not even a single live instrument; with a small midi keyboard, cheap microphone, laptop ND an interface they are able to produce entire albums and distribute them via ‘arioso online services.
This has its advantages and disadvantages, there’s definitely more music being produced and spread into the internet, but unfortunately most of t isn’t that great. The value of an experienced producer taking care of all those small aspects is really lacking in music today; in the other hand we have modern pop music Inhere hundreds of people are working on every detail of the songs of (in some cases) talents singers, there’s no more real emotions or true talent of musicians, and the ‘music” is over produced to death.