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
No comments:
Post a Comment