The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire recording project, and the individual recording sessions that are part of that project. As to qualifying for a Grammy nomination, the Recording Academy defines a producer:
The record producer's roles include, but may exceed, gathering ideas, composing music, choosing session musicians, proposing changes to song arrangements, coaching the performers, controlling sessions, supervising the audio mixing, and, in some cases, supervising the audio mastering. Īs a broad project, the creation of a music recording may be split across three specialists: the executive producer, who oversees business partnerships and financing, the vocal producer or vocal arranger, who aids vocal performance via expert critique and coaching of vocal technique, and the record producer or music producer, who, often called simply the producer, directs the overall creative process of recording the song in its final mix. In the 2010s, efforts began to increase the prevalence of producers and engineers who are women, heavily outnumbered by men and prominently accoladed only in classical music.
By now, DAWs, or digital audio workstations, like Logic Pro and Pro Tools, turn an ordinary computer into a production console, whereby a solitary novice can become a skilled producer in a thrifty home studio. After the 1980s, production's move from analog to digital further expanded possibilities. In popular music, then, producers like George Martin, Phil Spector and Brian Eno led its evolution into its present use of elaborate techniques and unrealistic sounds, creating songs impossible to originate live. Īdvances in recording technology, especially the 1940s advent of tape recording-which Les Paul promptly innovated further to develop multitrack recording -and the 1950s rise of electronic instruments, turned record production into a specialty. Record producers' precursors were "A&R men," who likewise could blend entrepreneurial, creative, and technical roles, but often exercised scant creative influence, as record production still focused, into the 1950s, on simply improving the record's sonic match to the artists' own live performance.
Some producers are their own engineers, operating the technology across the project: preproduction, recording, mixing, and mastering.
Conversely, some artists do their own production. If employing only synthesized or sampled instrumentation, the producer may be the sole artist. Varying by project, the producer may also choose all of the artists, or openly perform vocals with them. The executive producer, on the other hand, enables the recording project through entrepreneurship, and an audio engineer operates the technology. The music producer, or simply the producer, is likened to a film director. Music executive, recording engineer, executive producer, film producer, A&RĪ music producer or record producer is a recording project's creative and technical leader, commanding studio time and coaching artists, and in popular genres typically creates the song's very sound and structure.