How to Produce Music

Video Transcript

"How to produce music. Obviously you can go down any number of ways of what a producer is, how to produce music. I'm going to take it from this perspective. The producer is the facilitator of the recording, of the session. The producer will book or make arrangements for the studio recording space. He will organize rehearsal sessions so that the musicians when they come in are ready. There's nothing worse than wasting time on a band who's not ready to record and doesn't have it all mapped out. Doesn't have their songs arranged. It's important that all the preparations are made. The producer should be in charge of making sure that's the case. The producer will also bring in the engineer. Obviously or hopefully you find an engineer who is talented, who is experienced, knows what they're doing, what they're listening for and that usually you'll find a producer that either has people that they know. Different engineers for different genres of music, different rates even. Obviously the producer will also take care of finding space to record as I said. The engineer as I said. But also direct the overall flow. Basically your role in the room wherever you're recording and wherever you're working is that's the first fan. That's the person who's listening to it and saying, "Yes that does it for me. Or not it doesn't." "Yes that's a good take, No it's not a good take." Who might have ideas in terms of arranging music, in terms of putting different parts in different sections of music. In a hip-hop sense the producer was the one made the beat. And that's where it started with and a lot of hip-hop producers came in, left their drum machines out, the engineer recorded them and got producer credit. I think that's the way it was in working with a lot of different people. Even hip-hop producers now they're trying to get all they can out of performances. Making sure the performances are tight. Making sure the timing's right, the intonation on the instruments is right. If the person is singing, that they're telling the story, that they're executing the notes, that their pitch is on. They're basically quality control, first fan, organizing, managing the session, and making sure that everything is taken care of in terms of if people need to eat, people need to take breaks. Where you're going to record, how much it's going to cost, and usually a producer will take a piece of profits from the record, will be paid partially up-front. In business it's all what you negotiate, but might even look for publishing on the record."