In my opinion, music producers can be put into one of the following categories: The Operators, The Captors, The Middlemen, The X-Men, The Wizards, and The Charlatans.
We are starting with The Operator, and you will be forced to return to read my blog to hear about the rest! Ha-zah!
The Operator
When I was sixteen years old and enamored by Led Zepplein, GN’R, Queen, and pretty much all the legendary rock bands in the history of rock, I booked myself a couple of days at The Refuge, a local recording studio in Reading, near where I went to school.
A strange man who looked like Spike from Notting Hill’s identical twin owned the Refuge. He also had the strange habit of collecting his own shit and using it as fertilizer to grow his vegetables (which tasted much like the fertilizer).
Anyway, The Refuge was armed with Jim “The Tree” Warren. At the time Jim wasn’t “The Tree” yet but due to his height Thom Yorke purportedly gave him the nickname while Jim was working on The Bends.
What made Jim special was that he was in absolute control of the equipment he operated. He had the ability to “dial” in a recording or a mix so it sounded just right. Just right might sound ominous but there is no other way to put it. The Refuge was a small studio with only a few mics and a few pieces of outboard gear, an old Akai sampler, an even older 16 track Raindeer desk which ran with a two inch tape and used Notator as a sequencer. Most producers couldn’t imagine working with such an old and unsophisticated set up, but the Operator knows exactly how to make the equipment sound great, and relies heavily on his own ear.
When an Operator works on your recording it sounds professional and you basically cannot fault the recording and mix quality. Now, note I am not talking about the song writing, or the performance, or even the artistic merit. I am simply talking about the sonic quality of the recording.
The Operator cannot polish a turd. In other words, as Jim explained to me when I was sixteen, “Don’t come in here and tell me you want to sound like Eric Clapton – you have to play like Eric Clapton first”.
If, like me at the age of sixteen, your songs suck, your arrangement is crap, your performance is even worse, then working with an Operator will leave you with a sonicaly perfect fart. A fart that has been recorded perfectly and mixed to sound huge, is still a shit bubble.
An incredible recording of a slightly musical shit bubble is exactly what my recording session with Jim Warren ended up being. I was basically a teenage douche bag.
Not only I was a terrible singer and a horrible guitar player, when I played the drums I sounded like the Energizer Bunny…
So the first moral of the story is the first “shark” you will encounter when looking for a producer is your own ego. If you can’t look past your own ego and see that you might not be good enough or ready enough yet to get in the recording studio, then your recording will most likely sound like anal acoustics, or a great sounding one cheek sneak– remember what I said about polishing the ol’ steamer? So, be honest and true to yourself, put your ego aside, and don’t be a shit-head like I was.
The second moral of the story is that you should never be fooled by the size of a producers studio or the amount of equipment they have because The Operator knows exactly how to work a few pieces of equipment and make everything sound just right.
