During our very first Friday class of this week, we were tasked with answering what we had originally thought was a simple question that turned out to have a very open-ended answer. We were split into small groups with around 3-4 people and given a short amount of time to discuss amongst ourselves before presenting a conclusion to the rest of the class.
What is music production? Well, in my eyes the first thing that came to my head was someone like Butch Vig or Nigel Godrich. From my thought process, they were the quintessential examples of your average producer. What their job entails is to bring in bands with song ideas/demos and bring those ideas to life. This involves producing, mixing and mastering, engineering, and occasionally even helping out the with arrangement and structure of songs to a certain extent. Someone in the class had an excellent analogy for these producers, describing them as ‘bringing nothing to something’, creating ideas, and bringing them to fruition. Other people in the group had a different understanding of the term ‘music producer’.
Another producer that was discussed was Rick Rubin. His production style is completely different, taking a far more reserved role within the studio focusing more on guiding the artists into shaping their sound rather than someone like Butch Vig and Smashing Pumpkins, who had a clear idea of what they wanted to sound like so Butch focused on engineering the record and letting the artist choose the sound they wanted.
With our discussion concluded our group virtually came to an agreement that defining a music producer was too vague to answer and that almost everything we came up with could be considered correct in this decade.