ABSTRACT
During the tracking process, professional music producers will use signal processing devices to color audio material and impart unique sonic signatures. This chapter investigates how coloration and various forms of distortion are introduced to audio signals and through a series of interviews, explores how producers exploit these processes in their work. The discussion has a particular focus on the use of microphone preamplifiers, mixing consoles, compressors, and other signal processing devices. Also, the chapter illuminates how decisions made during tracking can affect the overall production aesthetic.
Research into the career development of the music producer is becoming well documented, in part, by the excellent works of Howard Massey’s Behind the Glass, and other interview books in the area. Naturally, the interviewees are typically established production professionals with an often highly celebrated track record. Within the UK, in particular, it is common for the same few names to present themselves. This chapter presents a number of working professionals at various stages of their careers, each with growing track records. Discussions around the production landscape in the late 2010s and progression routes to the industry are explored in addition to their views of the future of the studio and their practice.
This chapter sets out a framework for the study of collaborative practices in music production by identifying a series of types of practice that occur from the operations of a few individuals working closely together to the contribution of the whole world to the entirety of produced music. It begins by discussing the dominance of the singular producer in the literature and iconography of recorded music and progresses to suggest four overarching types of collaborative practices (types of coproduction) that break with this ideology of the singular producer and demonstrates the various ways in which joint authorship operates.
The theoretical frameworks encompass collaborative typologies developed by Vygotskyan theorist Vera John-Steiner and the postmodern milieu of Deleuzian rhizomatics. In this way, the chapter aims to move between a grounded and pragmatic approach to the observation of collaborative practices in recorded music and a philosophical reframing of the ground itself, where the territory is in a state of destabilizing and re-stabilizing up to a hypothetical point where production itself must cease.
