A spin-off from the Movement thread

A lot of people have been talking about the poor production on this album (however, some say it's good).

Hands up - I don't really understand the role/responsibility of a Producer - come to think of it, I don't know whay a 'mixer' or an 'engineer' does either.

That said, I have listened to tracks that are produced by someone and though "god, that really sounds like them". e.g. Pet Shop Boys produced Boy George's 'The Crying Game' and that really sounds like them.

So, can anyone enlighten me and tell me what the role of:

• Producer
• Mixer
• Engineer

is please?

Ta

Guilty Partner wrote: A lot of people have been talking about the poor production on this album (however, some say it's good).

Hands up - I don't really understand the role/responsibility of a Producer - come to think of it, I don't know whay a 'mixer' or an 'engineer' does either.

That said, I have listened to tracks that are produced by someone and though "god, that really sounds like them". e.g. Pet Shop Boys produced Boy George's 'The Crying Game' and that really sounds like them.

So, can anyone enlighten me and tell me what the role of:

• Producer
• Mixer
• Engineer

is please?

Ta

Having not listened to the album in some time I'll refrain from commenting on it's production(even though I don't recall it being bad).

A producer's role is slightly more ambiguous that the others. A good producer helps the artists acheive their creative vision on the recording. Some producers are simply there to keep the band on track and keep them from killing each other in the studio. I could type for a while on this one but don't have time right now.

A mix engineer is someone who actually mixes the record. They balance the faders, do necessary compression, eq, automation, etc. They build the mix and make a song sound like a record. A producer helps lead the way here as well and sometimes does the mix.

A tracking engineer would be someone who sets up and records the band. Tracking is always the first step and this engineer is the one who gets the sound to tape, er, hard drive.. whichever medium they are using.

Even though I've left out several details and interactions between each role, I hope this gives you some idea.

Gotta go to work before it gets too late...

Well there's obviously no such thing as objectively good or poor production, it just depends on what you like. But...one way of looking at the roles of producer, engineer is this : the producer has an idea of the sound that he wants that will make the band sound good. This might be something that is worked out as the band plays through the material or it might be a case of the producer using their 'trademark' sound. If you listen to a lot of early Martin Hannett productions most of them have that cavernous snare with a delay on it and that 'crispy' sort of guitar sound. (e.g Unknown Pleasures, Slaughter and The Dogs, U2, Magazine, The Names, Pauline Murray etc etc). You can easily tell an MH production because of these elements. Now the engineers will be people that work closely with the producer (e.g in MH's case say, Chris Nagle) and know how to set-up for that sound and get it under different conditions with different bands. They'll be the ones actually doing the mike-ing up, baffling, setting amps up etc. If the producer wants to try something out they'll make it happen with the equipment to hand. An engineer would not normally make performance or arrangement suggestions to a band, but a producer would. Depending on the relative status of a producer and his relationship with the band he might suggest anything from extra takes to rearranging a song completely. He might even suggest getting in extra musicians or replacing a drummer, say (e.g George Martin/Ringo Starr). In New Order's case that wouldn't really happen, of course. A mixer, or mix engineer, would be involved in the mixing down part of getting the sound that the producer and band want. He's going to be moving the sliders around, patching in FX etc during mixdown. Clearly there are no fixed roles here, some producers do most of the engineering, some never touch anything during recording or mixdown. The above is just a guide.

Thanks guys. It amazes me how much I can learn from this forum... :)

Bollox to you, that's a perfect answer to those questions :)

Mine woulda been funnier tho. :D

If there's no "producer" around, and the bandleader's just a singing guitarist who wants his vocal and the guitar up loud (all over NOOL, anyone who's met this guy is nodding and growling inwardly some mantra about hanging for musicians), the engineer ends up being the producer. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, it depends on one key factor. If the Engineer is a musician, he will produce well, and be sympathetic to the music. If he's not, he' pish you about from pillar to post to get stuff "right" and/or convenient for his lazy ass.

Live engineers are something between a producer and a concert conductor. While there are many who bash some faders up and get a nice noise, then see if there's any collateral minge to be scored among the groupies. There are plenty who are RIGHT in there, hands on, flying the console along with the music, sometimes awesome, like New Order in the 80's, and sometimes fucking terrifying, like New Order in the 80's. basically depends on whether the discksack knows his band's material, and how much he's had to drink. Not all bands tour a full sound crew. Very often they will take only a Front of House engineer (the guy you see) and/or a monitor engineer [1] (the poor bugger, almost always stage right, who mixes the various different wedge monitor and sidefill feeds for the band, in small venues, the FoH engineer will do that from their desk, but as rig and venue size increase, and communication gets harder, the need for a mug, I mean monitor engineer increases too). Sometimes they take neither. If you;re going to be world hopping, and you don't need your desk man to "play" with you, it's better to just use guys who come with the rig you'll hire in each country. Likewise at festivals, some bands will turn themselves over to the festival head engineer, most will have their own guy there to have fights with him over the console, it's not really a 2 man job, but they struggle through with one knowing the rig and one knowing the band.

If you NEED your man, he has to go with you, and if you're playing in different sorts of venue, (say you were in pubs last week, and yer doing Wembley this week), he'll have to wrk with someone from the hire company, at least for a couple of shows til he gets the picture.

if you are U2 You block rent half of britania row, or whoever's inventory for 1 year and pack it into 747's with your entire sound and light crew. (such lower roadfilth as can't be found in the homesless hostels and drug clinics at the destination, are sent 3 to a teachests). they probably also take their own gorillas, foot rubbers, hairdressers etc.

real world, it's you and your mate who owns a mixer in a van that stinks of piss going somewhere to plug into the in house disco rig and hope the glitterball and moonbeam work.

I know, i've been that mate :)

[1]if tony Robinson ever gets that "worst jobs in history" up to the modern music industry, monitor engineer's a major candidate. it's a cruel and thankless task, and only worth undertaking if you have the temper of Buddah afer he's toked an ounce of temple ball, and skin like a chav Rhino that's been on the sunbeds. Never give the job of monitor engineer to a psychotic or someone who carries weapons, unless the band commonly carry weapons on stage, in which case put his console in a tank or only give the job to "expendables".

Oh I forgot, there's also mastering engineers and cutting engineers.

Firstly I must say, I have no idea if "cutting engineers" still exists outside DJ prudiction facilities, since analogue tape is toast and digital formats require no "cut".

A mastering engineer, is the chap who takes the final mixed tracks and does the somewhat boring task of topping and tailing them, normalizing (adjusting levels), lopping out technical howlers the twits in the control room missed, and generally making an album out of a pile of songs on tapes. He DOES have absolute power, and sometimes it corrupts. Although I listen to NO off my computer all the time, I hear many complaints here about modern mastering fashions being applied on certain NO compilations. If you've heard Ceremony on Radio1 ever you'll hear it, most radio stations have an "optimizer" which is a big-ass multiband compressor which is kind of a Dalek/Borg mastering engineer, if it can't clobber it, it mutates it, to get the most signal down those waves as possible. These days the fasion is to basically flat compress a track at the mastering stage, so that the CD sounds like a radio broadcast[1], there appears to be a genuine fear of quiet passages in current musical trends, like a terror people will statio hop.

A Cutting engineer is someone you bettwe trust, he gets the mastered work from the aster medium, onto the companded[2] media we all know and love.That's records and tapes. A good cutting engineer can make a cack track rock, a bad one can do just the opposite. I'll deal with vynil, because tape is broadly the same except they have to cope with dolby and dolby translations and i coulnd't care less, so I'm sure you lot'd just LOVE it. :D

Fact: my numbers may be a tiny bit wonky here, so factlet may be better:) for vinyl to hold the same dynamic range as CD without trickery, it would require to the smallest varitation in the groove to be on the micron scale and the largest to be a couple of KM! So a cutting engineer has to set up the RIAA (the equalisation and compansion standard used on records, if you want to hear a record without it, plug yer deck into the line-in) system to be sympathetic to the track in order to make sure that what comes out the other end is at least as good as what you handed him. He also has to make the decisions regarding the mechanical processes involved, which in turn feed back to what you can do with the RIAA gear. It's up to him (based on the amount of money you're waving at him) whether your track is grazed into the outside 1cm of a 1mm thick piece of 7" recycled mudflap, or chiselled clean accross the full face of 12" of the finest dew picked sundried vinyl 5mm thick (like BM). You can put more bang on the record the wider the track, and the thicker it is, the deeper and more stable the groove can be cut.

never upset your cutting engineer!

here endeth the lesson.

[1] or a comerical break.....dear hearts, the ads are not louder than the programs on the telly, they are just compressed flat to 0dB (actually on some digital tv stations they ARE louder cos the shows are a good 6db down as well, the volume hike can cause heart failure) check it out if you have any kind of wave editor and anyway to grab some tv audio....programs are loud loud quiet loud quiet quiet loud...ads kick in and you get a flat WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Bastards. Some of them are really REALLY badly done, you can hear the music diving out of the way when the voice over starts, schoolboy error, it's meant to do it, but u shouldn;t hear it do it. [2] Compansion, COMPression exPANSION, squeeze it in, stretch it out. dry it and soak it, zip it and unzip it. Get the sound onto the crappy media in a way it can handle, then unfuck the sound at the other end.

Oh man...my favorite subject.

The best "real-world" studio education you can get is by reading the epicMixerman Chronicles. Until then, my two cents.

The producer assists the band in making "a record." Steve Albini sets up mics and hits Record; Brian Eno writes up fictitious scenarios on notecards and hands them out to individual musicians ("You are a transsexual in a lounge band on a space station orbiting Pluto..."). The producer might say "Let's add some synths" or "Let me call in some backup singers" or "The second verse really sucks. Rewrite it."

The mixing engineer sits there over a mixing board with the band hovering over him saying, "The bass needs to be louder" (the bass player), "the guitar needs to be louder" (the guitarist), etc.

The engineer is the poor slob stuck setting up microphones, threading reels of tape, stringing cables and getting tea, usually under the direction of the producer.

I like Mr. Campbell's descriptions better, but I can't stop myself from talking about studio work.

Gnu Odor wrote:

The mixing engineer sits there over a mixing board with the band hovering over him saying, "The bass needs to be louder" (the bass player), "the guitar needs to be louder" (the guitarist), etc.

At which point the band is removed from the control room... ;)

That depends on how much they're paying, whether they're picking up the bill personally, and whether they have groupie;s beds or party's to go to. you try getting rid of some metal 5 piece putting together their demo of slayer covers to send to kerrang, when all that's waiting outside this little oasis of rock and roll is the dirty dishes and a ragin mum cos they aint been done yet.

I can however tell you with total certainty, that the nervous, plying, kneading hands appearing on the back of my "picard chair" have NEVER been followed by the phrase "the bass needs to be louder" (unless it's my own bass, I get all shy when i'm mixing myself with others :) )

the phrase "see those 6 guitar tracks we recorded, where are they?" is more common.

Never seen that mixerman chronicles before, was sondering....tosser or knows the score.

Line one, day one of the gig......

According to most of the world, the crack of dawn would be just about the time the sun peeks above the Eastern horizon. In studio terms, however, the crack of dawn is approximately 10 a.m

knows the score then :)

its also all very subjective... sometimes the producer is the main creative force and in total control, like Quentin Tarentino in Pulp Fiction... other times nothing more than like an "adult" prescence to keep things in order and running

a song could really be 95% band input and 5% producer, or in the case of most pop and rap acts there is almost 100% producer control with the "artist" being used as a tool. most pop acts start out with virtually no say in their sound, its all the "producer's" music

I think the beef with Movement is not that it is bad production but that Hannent had too much control over the band, trying to make it sound like a requiem to Joy Division... thou to be honest when I first heard Movement I was not terribly excited even thou I loved Joy Division, was not inspired at all...

should have said this on the main thread but I think Movement was made under a cloud, it sounds like it was made under a cloud, and if I were a member of New Order, I'd not be tremendoulsy overawed with the bugger.

And errr I don't think anyone was attempting to be exhaustive in theie answer.

LOL, that's about that. Although, I don't do the tea, even when I'm the assistant engineer, unless tea is being made democratically. i will however make the morning cardiac initiator cup of coffee, 100g between 6 if instant.

TBH I'be never worked with a seperate producer, either there's one guy who runs the band (or thinks he does, awkward days those), or they all just sit there like first years and listen to me, those are the days I like.

Don't think I ever ran a session I didn;t end up "producing" to some extent, even if it was only explaining the laws of phyics to a singing guitarist. Not to say I aint done my share of tape rat duties of course.

pumped full of drugs wrote: its also all very subjective... sometimes the producer is the main creative force and in total control, like Quentin Tarentino in Pulp Fiction... other times nothing more than like an "adult" prescence to keep things in order and running

a song could really be 95% band input and 5% producer, or in the case of most pop and rap acts there is almost 100% producer control with the "artist" being used as a tool. most pop acts start out with virtually no say in their sound, its all the "producer's" music

I think the beef with Movement is not that it is bad production but that Hannent had too much control over the band, trying to make it sound like a requiem to Joy Division... thou to be honest when I first heard Movement I was not terribly excited even thou I loved Joy Division, was not inspired at all...

But, to some extent, what else could it sound like? They *were* Joy Division and it was too soon after Closer to expect a clean break. I agree that he had lots of control over the final sound, but Hannett was clearly trying to move them AWAY FROM a JD-type sound. That's why all the wierd experiments. Maybe they're not to everyone's taste, but the tension between what the band were and what they were yet to become is exactly what makes it such a great, great album.

i'm not going to lie because Movement is an amazing album. it's just one of those albums of a bands first that deserves more credit than it receives.

Exactly, it's got some beautiful music on it. Like I said, the band don't like it very probably cos they recorded it while they were all still fucked up from one of their best friends killing himself. I dunno about anyone here, but if i had a 30 year back catalogue, the album I made just after such a tragedy would not be high onmy most loved list.

EDIT: And welcome BTW liz :)

Gnu Odor wrote:

The producer assists the band in making "a record." Steve Albini sets up mics and hits Record; Brian Eno writes up fictitious scenarios on notecards and hands them out to individual musicians ("You are a transsexual in a lounge band on a space station orbiting Pluto...").

and yet, steve albini's records sound very similar. the guitar sound is always brutal and the drums are always dominant, yet there is always plenty of space for the bass. jesus lizard is the same as nirvana is the same as shellac. that's not a bad thing. albini is one of my favorite producers, and one of america's most creative individuals.

eno's records change from album to album, band to band: think of u2's joshua tree (spacious americana,) and achtung baby (urban claustrophobia) vs talking head's more songs (electro-acoustic near funk) and remain in light (world-psychedelia)... and then think about the no new york comp... and what about devo... or david bowie (i know he didn't produce...)

i think both are more involved in the process than you let on here, although eno has been known to use the "oblique strategies" you mention.