Music Tech Forum: Phil Ramone, or Phil and the Ramones?

This week in Music Tech Forum we finished off the producer presentations. We had a mix of old producers this time Seb started off with Steven Wilson. He talked mostly about his work with Opeth, we was very interesting. I've always been a fan of Opeth but never really looked at the production on their records. He mentioned also that he is a member of Porcupine Tree, which are very similar to Opeth in style and would be worth checking out if you liked what you heard of Opeth. Lisa talked about Trent Reznor and I realised I'm not really a big fan of industrial music. The interesting thing about both these talks for me was that both these producers were part of a band themselves. This got me thinking about the benefits of disadvantages of that scenario. At least in these cases it seemed that they really only produced bands that were of a similar sound and style to themselves, like Lisa said 'He go to Trent Reznor when you want to sound like Nine Inch Nails.' This also got me thinking about Bob Ezrin who I talked about and how it seemed he wanted to turn everything into a 70's rock and roll record because that seemed to be where his passion lay (He had enough writing credits on Kiss and Alice Cooper albums to almost be considered a member at times.) Simon talked about Phil Spector. Interestingly enough it seems just before his murder trial he had plans to work with The Vines, which would've been well, um... interesting. Dan talked about Groove Terminator and taught us quite a lot about some of the different tricks that can be used to sell a song. I had to throw my headphones on the second I got out of there just to get that stuff out of my head. Finally Josh did Phil Ramone. Must be cool to lay claim to have the first CD ever printed being something you worked on. Unless of course you really hated the idea of CDs at the time, then it would've been awkward. This brings me to something that popped up a couple of times during the talks, some producers not embracing new technology. I wonder what advances are coming ahead that this generation will be scared of?

Links
http://www.philramone.com/Informational/Biography.htm - Phil Ramones website
http://www.porcupinetree.com/ - The official Porcupine Tree webpage, with audio and video samples.