Written by Dan Freeman – Director, BKDigiCon (The Brooklyn Digital Conservatory
PART 1: What Does A Music Producer Do?
A music producer essentially is a person that can hear an musical idea in their minds and realize it through speakers. If we define a bass player or violinist as people who can hear ideas in their minds and realize them through instruments, it is really important to remember that the instrument of a music producer are the speakers. Music producers learn music software (like Ableton Live), instruments and synthesizers, audio effects and plug-ins, recording techniques etc. with the idea that they can better realize what they hear through the speaker medium.
A music producer must always remember that it is very important to remember where the music will be played. For example, a music producer will use one set of techniques for music that is played in a dance club and another set of techniques for music that will be used in a film. In music production, the context, of where the track will be heard is so important.
Of equal important is the medium of playback – records, tapes, CDs or streaming. All of these mediums of playback have profoundly shaped how songs and albums are made and the sounds that producers used.
PART 2: A Brief History of Music Playback Machines:
1857 – The Phonautograph: In March 1857, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created a machine that recorded sound onto a glass plate. Scott was fascinated by the workings of the human ear and he believed that sound could vibrate a membrane (as it does within our ears) and he attached a needle to this membrane. He essentially was looking for a way to photograph sound and produced glass plates with the sound waves etched on it. The biggest problem with the device was that there was no way to hear the recording back. Scott believed that he would be able to “read” the sound wave to discover what was said.
In 2008, using software, a team of engineers in France managed to playback and record some of the etchings that Scott made, making them the oldest known recordings: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune-05-09.ogg
1877 – Edison’s Phonograph: It was an American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, who first devised a machine to record and play sound, in 1877. As he later recalled, his invention came about, as is so often the case, quite by accident. “I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone when the vibrations of the wire sent the fine steel point into my finger. That set me thinking. If I could record the actions of the point, and then send that point over the same surface afterwards, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.” He set to work.
By speaking loudly into a mouthpiece, the vibrations of his voice were carried through a diaphragm to a stylus, which indented a spinning disc of tin foil with small marks. This was the recording process. Playback was achieved by simply reversing the process – so the stylus, when placed on the spinning foil, picked up the vibrations created by the small marks and sent them back through its diaphragm to a loudspeaker. Simple, but so very effective.
In the early days of sound recording, the focus was on improving the audio quality. The aim was to achieve a recording so clear that the listener might close their eyes and imagine that the singer or musicians were performing live in their own living room. Fidelity was the watchword. (From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/chairman-of-the-boards-how-producers-shaped-our-sounds/)
1887 – The Gramaphone: In 1887, German-born American inventor Emil Berliner invented the record player that we still use today – a flat disc known as a record with a needle (the stylus) moving across it.
Berliner also invented a method for manufacturing records and the record industry began to be born. Berliner used shellac records that lasted much longer than Edison’s delicate wax cylinders.
1890 – The Jukebox: Beginning in the 1890’s, machines that played a record after a coin was placed in it were invented. By 1928, jukeboxes allowed for patrons to select from multiple records and had built in loudspeakers. From 1940 – 1960, three quarters of the records produced in the U.S. were made for jukeboxes, making them the main playback machines of that time.
After the early 1960’s, most records were played on home stereo systems.
1920 – Radio: On November 2, 1920 the first commercial radio station, KDKA, went online in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first music broadcast on radio was from the Metropolitan Opera House in NYC. Radio quickly became an important part of the music industry and the large radio broadcast companies like RCA (The Radio Corporation of America) and CBS (The Columbia Broadcasting System) began broadcasting live music from their studios.
At the beginning, radio didn’t sound very good, but by the mid 1920’s, it sounded better than the records of the time.
1920’s – Record Companies Merge With Radio Corporations: In the 1920’s the music industry exploded, particularly with the birth of Jazz which became the first form of recorded popular music to reach a mass audience. In this period, many radios were sold with record players which were now electrical. Radio and record players did not compete with each other since radio mostly broadcast live music in this period and records allowed people to play the songs that they wanted to hear.
In the early 1930’s the big radio companies bought up the record companies and RCA Records and CBS Records were born. These would remain major labels’ until the present.
1920’s – Electrical Recording: In the 1920’s amplifiers and microphones were developed. This changed the sound of recorded music. Before the 1920’s, instruments generally had to be loud to be recorded, so the medium favored loud instruments like brass and loud singers like Enrico Caruso. After the mid 1920’s, relatively soft instruments like the guitar, piano and bass could be recorded with microphones and the sound of music changed. The electric guitar, a guitar with pickups that convert sound to an electrical signal, was invented in 1932. Singers, like Billie Holliday, could now sing softly and expressively. The quality of records improved and by 1935 disc jockeys (DJs) were playing records during radio broadcasts and became important in determining if records were successful.
1930’s – Tape: In the 1930’s, magnetic tape was developed in Germany. Magnetic tape allows an electrical signal to create patterns of magnetic particles that could then be played back by converting the pattern into an electrical signal and then through a speaker. We still use this system in many hard drives for computers. Tape became the primary medium for music producers from 1950 – 2000 and pretty much all records during this period were recoded to tape.
1950’s – Multitrack Recording: In the mid-1950s the Ampex corporation created the first 8-track recording machine and sold it to the guitarist Les Paul who had been developing the technique on his own. Now producers could record different instruments onto different ‘tracks.’ Most music producers, however, like Phil Spector used three tracks tape recorders and created a ‘wall of sound’ by overdubbing parts onto tape, recording multiple takes to a single track and recording over those.
Producers in the 1960’s, like George Martin of the Beatles and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys used 4 track recorders By the late 1960’s when the Beatles made The White Album8 track tape recorders were installed in the Abbey Road studios.
1960’s – The Rise of Star Producers and Mix Engineers: Before the 1960’s, the job of a record producer was really to oversee the recording. They worked for record companies and were responsible for booking a studio, choosing songs for the artist, hiring musicians, overseeing the rehearsals and recording sessions and then delivering the record to the record company.
In the 1960’s, with the advent of multitrack recording, music producers began to have a big impact on the artistic creation of records. Producers like English producer Joe Meek and American Phil Spector used the recording studio as an instrument. George Martin had a great impact on the sound of the Beatles and Brian Wilson became one of the first examples of an artist who began to produce their own records with the revolutionary 1966 album Pet Sounds.
Another production team that pushed the technological envelope of music in the 1960’s was Berry Gordy and the Motown team of producers who created a factory of hits, recording records by Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson among many others. Similarly, Stax Records, based in Memphis, Tennessee produced records by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave and Rufus Thomas, while Rick Hall’s FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama produced hits for Aretha Franklin, Etta James and Wilson Pickett.
1970’s – The Height of Analog Recording, The Birth of Records For Dance Clubs, Cassette Tapes
By the 1970’s, the record industry had become a global, multimillion dollar enterprise. Records were now mostly stereophonic (stereo) and the ‘hi-fi’ home stereo system with two speakers, an amplifier/receiver and record player was the primary way most records were heard in this period. Records in the 70’s by groups like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac had budgets that were millions of dollars (adjusted for inflation). For the first time since the 1890’s, a new way of playing back music, the cassette tape became widespread and were increasingly found in home stereo systems and cars. Record producers like Quincy Jones were highly paid and in demand.
In the 1970’s DJ and club culture was born in New York City with venues like David Mancuso’s Loft, The Paradise Garage and Studio 54. For the first time, producers began making records specifically to be played on the dance floors of clubs and disco became the first genre specifically invented for this purpose. Producers like Quincy Jones, Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder sought to make recordings, often using the new synthesizers that were appearing in this decade, that could work on the big sound systems of dance floors.
DJs themselves, like Larry Levan, began to remix songs, creating versions that could be extended for play in a dance club.
In this decade, several forms of music that would have a profound impact on production culture were born: Hip Hop, Electronic Dance Music, New Wave and Punk. In Jamaica, the producer King Tubby began using the mix console to perform live remixes using delays and reverbs, creating Dub. These techniques of the artist use of audio effects would play a significant role in music production in the coming decades.
1980’s – The Digital Revolution and Portable Music: In the 1980’s, the artist and music producer merged into one as new digital technology for the first time allowed for records to be produced in bedrooms. Japanese corporations like Roland, Korg and Akai, developed drum machines like the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 that could be synced with bass machines like the TB-303 and synths like the Juno 106 or Jupiter 08 to create hip hop and electronic dance music.
Digital synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7 and samplers like the Emu Emulator II were used for pop music, dance and hip hop, making the 80’s the first decade where synthesizers were heard by a mass audience. These could now synchronize with each other via a new programing language known as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) which was born in 1982. Computers like the Atari ST came equipped with MIDI ports, so sequences could be made on a computer and sent to a synthesizer, sampler or drum machine. The first sequencing programs like Logic and Cubase emerged in the mid-1980’s.
Portable music, like the Sony Walkman allowed people to carry their music with them at all times and became so popular that for a couple of years in the 1980’s, cassette tapes outsold records, but these were quickly overshadowed in the late 1980’s by a new format – The CD.
CD’s were first manufactured in 1982 as were the first CD players. By 1988, they outsold vinyl records and in 1991, they became more popular than cassettes. By the late 80’s records were being specifically made for the CD format which had a much greater frequency response than cassettes and records. This allowed for much heavier basses and more high frequency.
1990’s – ProTools and the Home Studio Producer
The 1990’s were a golden age for the music industry, The record labels made huge profits as consumers converted their record and tape collections to CD. As consumers got rid of their vinyl collections, hip hop producers like J Dilla collected huge amounts of records and sampled them into samplers like the Akai MPC60 birthing what is often known as the ‘golden age hip hop.’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_hip_hop). Electronic dance producers also used samplers to created styles of music like jungle and drum n’ bass.
Many of the records made in this period for CDs were extremely high fidelity and records by pop stars like Michael Jackson had budgets of 50 million dollars (in 2023 dollars). CDs cost the consumers $15 – $20 in 1995 which would be the equivalent of $30 – $40 today, and if there was only one song on an album that the buyer liked, they still had to purchase the whole record.
In 1990, the program ProTools was born which essentially turned computers into samplers and allowed music to be directly recorded and mixed onto a computer. In 1999 ‘La Vida Loca’ by Ricky Martin became the first number 1 hit song in the U.S. that was completely produced and mixed ‘in the box’ or on a computer using ProTools.
2000’s – Laptops, Phones, Ableton Live, MP3’s
The 2000’s were the decade that broke the music industry. By digitizing music, the music industry essentially paved the road to its own collapse. In the mid 1990’s, the MP3 which is a digital file that plays a WAV (CD Quality) file at a lower quality, but also takes less digital information was born. WAV files could easily now be converted into MP3 files. These were perfect for sending over the internet which had emerged in the mid 1990’s. In 1999, Napster, a website that allowed users to share MP3s with each other, was born and rather than go to a record store and buy an expensive CD for a single song, music fans began downloading the songs for free from the site. Napster was quickly shut down because of copyright violations, but MP3s had been born and would become the dominant format.
Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. revolutionized the music market by launching the portable ipod and a online platform, the iTunes Store which allowed consumers to download MP3s online for .99 cents.
In this decade DAW’s (Digital Audio Workstations) were born. These allowed producers to record audio, sequence MIDI, and contained synthesizers and audio effects. Ableton Live was born in 2000 and was the first DAW specifically designed to turn the computer into a live performance instrument. In this decade, the laptops became powerful enough that it could be used with a DAW to do a live performance or make a record.
Increasingly, global pop music consisted of styles like electronic dance music and hip hop that were largely created within DAWs and artists like Skrillex, Calvin Harris and Kanye West were performers, DJs and producers.
2010’s – The dominant form of music playback currently is streaming. Services like Spotify became hugely popular after 2011 and a huge amount of music is listened to on phones or small speakers via lossless digital audio on streaming services. A music producer can now create a track in their bedroom and upload it to Spotify for the whole world to check out. Social Media has become the dominant form of musical promotion. This has given the producer and incredible amount of power, since a laptop using Ableton Live can be a whole studio, however, it has completely changed the old economic model of how producers and musicians earn money.