Music Tech Forum: Blog 2

If it’s too loud turn it down – Weezer T-shirt. The industry today is full of commercially successful tricks. There are things that a record company wants to hear, but do these actually make a good recording? Or just help force a good release?
Matching the right producer to the right artist is probably the biggest key in creating a good recording, having good songs also helps but we just need to look at Hanson’s MMM Bob to see that’s not always the case. A good release means good money, good popularity, and overall success, but in my opinion a good release of a standard recoding with nothing new to offer will only mean short term success. I think we are used to/tired of these old tricks and it seems to me that the songs that are popular for long amounts of time these days don’t necessarily chart well.

This also brings up the point of timeless vs. dated production. I’ve never heard anyone try to tell me they won’t listen to Dark Side of the Moon (1973) because it sounds dated. Poison however…. Picking the right producer for the job doesn’t seem like an exact science. You could match up people who have done similar styles of music before, or if the band liked the production sound. This however doesn’t always work. It seems to me that it’s more about matching an artist with a producer who share a common goal. Does the band just want a big album? Do they want a producer who will come in and make their songs more attractive to a mainstream audience? Do they want to just create the best album they can?

Another point we touched on in forum was overproduction. The best example I can think of of overproduction is Oasis. Not every Oasis album, they do love their reverb but it usually works. If you listen to a comparison of their early albums vs something like ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ the simple songs are weighed down by extra instruments and production effects. In my opinion they don’t work as well, and would have benefited from the simpler sounds you can hear in tracks like Wonderwall.

Links:
http://www.myspace.com/oasis (Go Let It Out from Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is a good example of the over production I mentioned.)
http://www.myspace.com/poison (Poision samples.)
http://www.australian-charts.com/ (Look up some of your favorite songs and see how well they did, you may be surprised.)

Music Tech Forum: Producers

The topic in music tech forum this week was music producers. The first thing we went through was the role of a music producer then we looked at a number of music producers in detail.

A music producer can work many jobs in the end depending on how involved they want to, or the artist they are producing wants them to be. However some basic roles a music producer may fill are:

• Being responsible for the overall sound of a record.
  
• Guiding the performance of the artist.
  
• Writing and arranging songs for the record.
  
• Song choices and layout of tracks on the record.
  
• Budget and time management.
  
• Communication between members of the band. (Often conflict resolution)
  

We then looked at individual producers and what sounds and techniques they bring to a project. The first one we looked at was Butch Yig who produced Nirvana's Nevermind album with a rather clean sound. He liked to use contrast in songs, e.g a really dirty sounding guitar line under or before a really clean one.

We then moved onto David Bottrill. After looking him up it looks like he'd producing the new Silverchair album, listen to the track Straight Lines and you can hear that very clean sound.

The next we heard about was Flood (Mark Ellis) who does things like contrast hi-fi and lo-fi sounds, distortion with clean sounds and using loops. An example of the use of loops was 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins. Also the clean trend continued, but with Flood I heard a very stylised clean distorted sound and it reminded me of the track When You Were young by The Killers. Sure enough he was involved in producing the track and at about 2:17 there is a good example of the hi-fi/lo-fi contrast with a very clean guitar and a very lo-fi sounding drum kit.

Next we heard about Daniel Lanoui who won a Grammy for getting a good sound out of Dylan's voice. In the examples you could hear why, the vocals were very clean. The samples we heard were from his own music, which while it had an awesome vocals sound, didn't really interest me

Lastly we heard from Bill Laswell who travels the world introducing artists, getting them to jam and mixes the results, the sample we heard involved a very interesting mix of jazz and metal. Then we missed out on George Martin which annoyed me, hopefully next week.

Links:

David Bottrill wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bottrill

Silverchair main page (Straight lines should be streamable from here) http://www.chairpage.com/

The Killers Myspace (When you were young should be streamable from here)http://www.myspace.com/thekillers