Top music producers

Famous singer, famous band, famous musician, and composer. Who stands behind all these people?

Behind all this, there is a mysterious person called a music producer! But while musicians become famous and millions of people like them, the glory of the producer rarely goes beyond the narrow circle of close people.

The work of a producer is not only a search for sponsors for a musician, the person is also responsible for controlling the sound quality, determining the image and musical style of the performer, and selecting professionals for recording. Often it is the producer who helps talented guys from the club to enter the big stage.

It’s quite difficult to say who was the very first producer in history, but we can have a look at some of the best producers.

What is included in the work of a producer?

The work of a producer starts far beyond the studio. Namely, from listening to the artist’s demo material. This is an important moment when a producer decides whether he will work with a given artist. This decision is most often based on how interesting the music material is to the producer, how promising the artist or group is, whether the producer can add something new and useful to the project that will make the final product better, etc.

The next step is to attend a rehearsal. Here the producer receives very valuable information about the level of the musicians’ skill, the degree of readiness of the material, and much more.

This is usually followed by a detailed discussion with the artist: what, according to the producer, needs to be corrected, what to work on.

George Martin

If George Martin didn’t try so hard, would the infamous quartet from Liverpool have turned into the legendary Beatles? As we know, their influence on music, art, and culture, in general, persists to this day. Of course, this transformation, most likely, would not be so rapid, effective, and comprehensive, but it would surely have happened.

But what did the producer do? He considered the strengths and weaknesses of the group and in less than a year turned them from immensely talented amateurs into brilliant professionals. At the same time, he created the standard of the producer in rock music.

His principle was not to encroach on the creative freedom of the artists, become a friend to them, teach them, but learn from them yourself, and most importantly – live in unison with them. These principles guided him when working with America, Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, and UFO. They have expressed gratitude many times.

Andrew Oldham

Unlike The Beatles, The Rolling Stones at first did not feel the slightest desire to write music, and only when the producer Andrew Oldham locked Jagger and Richards in the studio and threatened that they would leave it only having written the masterpiece, they managed to do it. They wrote the masterpiece called “As Tears Go By”. And when there was a creative crisis in the group, he dragged Lennon and McCartney into the studio, and they helped Mick and Keith with a new version of their “I Wanna Be Your Man”, which became a breakthrough single for the Rollings.

Fleming Rasmussen

“The producer of our first album, John Zazula, didn’t know anything about music,” James Hetfield recalled (Metallica), “but he was the owner of Megaforce, so his name is on the cover of“ Kill Em All ”. We worked on the second disc ourselves, and only with the arrival of Fleming Rasmussen (a Danish sound engineer and producer), we realized what a real producer is.

Rasmussen offered to arrange counterpoints in “Battery” and recommended the bassist of the group – Burton – to overtake the drums. As a result, Master Of Puppets went six times platinum, and the song” One “from the next disc brought the band and its producer the first “Grammy” in the history of the music of this kind.

Phil Spector

Prominent American producer Phil Spector (he has a Grammy for “Let It Be” by The Beatles and “Concert for Bangladesh” by Harrison) invented the recording technique called “Wall of Sound”. It supposes that the musician performs the same part several times in unison, then the phonograms (they, of course, differ from each other) are superimposed, sometimes reverberation is added – the output is a powerful sound. When all the instruments are recorded in this way, the “total” sound is perfectly reproduced on the air and sounds perfectly in stereo. Nowadays, this invention is widely utilized.

Marty Munsch

American producer Marty Munsch was nicknamed “Phil Spector of punk”: he introduced the principle of “post-production” – processing and editing of the finished phonogram without the participation of the musicians themselves. It was similar to a revolution Spector did. KMFDM, Ministry, US Chaos, The Rejects, and Holy Rape albums were prepared using this method, and the mixed-use of digital and analog sound processing took root on concert stages.

Famous musicians, when asked by a journalist about those who had the greatest influence on them, frequently say it was Marty Munsch.