datamusicata

I got a post yesterday from Bobby Brogan and he wanted to know the difference between a producer and an engineer. His post was so candid, I wanted you to see it:

"James,
I've always wondered: Whats the difference between an Engineer and a Producer...I'm under the impresssion that an engineer pushes the buttons turns the knobs and moves the faders but the Producer is in charge of how the aforementioned knobs faders etc...are moved...is that close to being right?"

So what IS the difference? From my experience, a good engineer is almost transparent. You can’t hear what he’s done, you’d only know if his contribution wasn’t there or if he made the wrong choices. He knows where to place microphones to get the best sound from that instrument. He knows when to use limiters, compressors, and/or enhancers. He monitors the recording process so that there is never a recorded distortion from a live source. He knows where to place baffles and how to record several musicians at once in the same room and maintain enough discrete signal isolation from each source to allow the maximum flexibility on each source in terms of eq or effects or placement in the field. If you don’t have that isolation, then you have several instruments (sources) on the same track, say, electric guitar and bass and some drum leakage. When he goes to effect the guitar with, perhaps a delay, the delay could also be heard on the bas and the drum. If you try to place the guitar somewhere specific in the stereo field, you would also be moving the bass and drum there because it’s on that track, so the isolation is really important. The better an engineer is, the easier the recording process is.

To begin recording vocals, he listens to the sound of the voice and then puts up the microphones that would enhance the recording of that voice. He would usually put up a few mics and the artist would sing into them. He’d record each one and then let the producer and probably, the artist choose the sound that they liked. So he knows which mics would probably suit a particular voice. I usually use my AKG 414eb uls. I have used a Neumann U47, but my voice seems to cut better with the 414. I understand that Stevie Wonder used the EV RE-20 for the vocals on his classic recordings. Each mic has it’s own character and the engineer knows that.

The producer, on the other hand, let’s the engineer do what he does best. He also listens to all the material that the artist wants to present and helps the artist choose which songs fit best together. He also makes certain that they are recording more songs than they are going to use, so that there are choices if some of the songs don’t achieve the artistic vision. He listens to the lyrics and brings attention to areas that may need a little more fine tuning. He listens to the arrangements and tempos makes arrangement and or tempo suggestions or even hires a professional arranger. The Beatles Please Please Me was originally a ballad ala Roy Orbison, but George Martin suggested that they speed it up and make a rocker out of it. Good idea. The producer is the objective ear when the musicians are recording and he determines which take of a song is the best one as sometimes they will record many takes of the same song. . The producer may even decide to splice together a portion of one take with a portion of another, and he also makes certain that the proper tempo of the song is maintained throughout the takes. Miles Davis recorded forty some hours of Kind of Blue and Teo Macero went thru all those tapes and chose the takes and the edits that became forty of the most famoust minutes in recorded jazz.

When I was recording Freelance Human Being, Peter Lit, the producer, was sitting there listening, adjusting eq, and sometimes badgering me into getting more “stuff” into a take. And he listened to take after recorded take with an objective ear. That’s the big one. A producer is the Objective Ear. A producer is the Encouraging voice. A producer translates the artists vision into a reality. And finally, a producer is the final word. A big responsibility, a big headache and an even bigger joy when it translates into a realization.