Music production is simple and complicated at the same time. At its core its simple, you play, you record it and whala you have now produced music. I feel too many people do it this way. It gets complicated when you are trying to convey an artist’s idea from emotion and passion and make it fit into today’s really complicated business of music. There is a craft to making a great product and no one philosophy will work. As a producer you need to take the initial song and completely break it down to its rawest form and build it back up. You need to analyze every part to see if they all work as one cohesive unit. Sometimes a completely new song arises from that process and some times it is no different than when you started. Being a producer with an engineering background I am at an advantage in getting to an end result quickly. I can pick the instrument best suited for the job; pick the recording mics and gear to get to the finished sound quickly as to not interrupt the creative flow.
I feel some producers don’t think about the creative flow. Too many producers are really engineers posing as producers and they, muck about with the knobs too much and lose the creative flow. I try and know what the song needs before we record so we can get to the sound without wasting lots of time figuring out what we need to get there.
Everything I have talked about so far is irrelevant without the most important part of the production, A GREAT SONG! And that’s where you need to start; with a great song everything else will usually fall into place rather quickly. This is so subjective it’s hard to talk about. Every artist has a vision but I think most lack an overall vision of the project as a whole. The world we live in has pretty cut and dry lines marked out for where your music needs to fit. I do not agree with this but that’s what we have to deal with so we adapt and move forward. I think it is important for artists to sit down with themselves and make a mission statement for what they are setting out to achieve. If they have a master plan it makes it easier to fit the project into the master plan. Whether its to do Disney Pop music or Indie Alternative music it does not matter, you just need to make sure you are on the same page throughout the project. That does not mean you can’t mix it up a little here and there but if you are planning on releasing your music to the masses they are going to want cohesiveness. It’s the facts that are in front of us now weather we like it or not. It’s been like this for a while.
Take a band like Extreme in the late eighties they released a great folky ballad called “More Than Words”, which sold tons of singles. When the average pop consumer bought the full-length album they were disappointed to hear all this heavier rock music on it and returned the album. I know I worked record retail when that album came out and took back a lot of albums to exchange for singles. On the flipside all the Hard Rock fans were like what’s all the soft folk crap and they lost a lot of cred with their core fans. I think that was the demise of the band. They tried to mix it up too much. Now if they were a pop/singles oriented artist this would have been a home run and it showed in their bank accounts but the band pretty much ended after that album. They tried to continue but they could not reproduce what “More Than Words” had done. These are my opinions and may have some of it wrong but I doubt it.
So if you have good plan, great songs, a strong team, and a clear vision you have a really good chance at doing something with it. Good Luck with your journey and I hope I can be involved in it somehow.
