A producers integrity
 

Hello,

This is just a general question to professional producers. When you give a producer a song to produce how much work should I expect he/she to put in on working with the vocals? I have had two experiences whereas people think that melodyning and auto tuning is the "it" factor. No TCE no scrubbing, no draw waves rectified no Nothing. To top it off when they are artists themselves they try to insert themselves/their instruments to drown out you and yours as if they are the performer. Where is the integrity?

Re: A producers integrity
 

Look for better producers ...

I would never give a song to a producer. I give it to a Mix Engineer and a Mastering Engineer.

Re: A producers integrity
 

What he said ^^ being a producer means not only be skilled but also being as nice and communicative with the artist. A good producer won't stop until the song is perfect and won't hesitate doing what's needed, at least that's what I repeat to myself every day. Now get your pockets ready because it takes a lot of effort and years for a producer to get there.

Re: A producers integrity
 

Even as comfortable as I am with most of the producers that I work with, I still end up doing a fair amount of "producing" without the credit. Then there are also times where if the producer accepts a take that I really don't like, I will ask for another pass under the guise of either trying something "for me", or I might say that I heard some distortion or other technical excuse to get another take. The flip side of that is, I can often tell when a singer is never going to hit the mark(but I know I can fix it) so I just say. "that's a simple edit. We don't need to burn out the singer over little stuff".

I remember the good old days when the producer would hit the talkback after a take and say, "that take sucked....do it again". Nowadays the producer hits the talkback and says, "that take sucked.....come on in and we'll fix it":p:p:p

Re: A producers integrity
 

Mybe the problem lies in getting it done on the so called 5 star rated SB. For my last production and mastering every correction that needed to be done on the vocals I had to do it myself and i don't mean re singing. I meaning simple things like TCE of a word or making sure you can clearly hear words that end in consonants or that consonants are not too pronounced. Every time i told the engineer to fix something i had to fix it myself and send him the audio. So what was i paying him for. Besides, I don't know much about working with audio and therefore would rather not have to touch anything.

Couple a years ago someone who i was studying with told us that you should get your song as close to the way you want it as possible because "they don't know squat" At the time I did not think much of it, and now as i begin to work with producers and engineers I realize he was right.



Here is a great story: when Randy Travis who wrote the song "Forever and Ever amen" first brought that song to the studio for production they told him that's not the way its done and that he should go back an re do it. Soon after he re-did it, and brought it back for production the song became a number one hit. Those producers and engineers had integrity. If my song or my singing sucks I want to be told. I don't want people taking my money just to make money. Amen!

Re: A producers integrity
 

For someone who doesn't know much about working with audio you have it all pretty clear, that's a great thing to start with!

Re: A producers integrity
 

I think you are confusing a producer and a mixer as they do different things and you mention sending songs to an engineer in one part of the post and to a producer in another place. Maybe start there and see who does what and then you will understand more what you can expect from each of those titles.

Re: A producers integrity
 

Nope the producer did not do it and neither did the mixer engineer. I thought that the mixer/ master would have done it but he did nothing, and when i pointed out a couple of things to him he didn't do it right. So I simply did them myself and send it back to him.



So I still don't know who is responsible for the vocal audio because neither the producer nor the mix master adressed it. If the producer is responsible for the vocal audio, then I have to make sure of the quality audio before I accept so that i don't keeping asking the engineer to fix things that I should have had fixed by the producer.

The mix /master engineer did not complain about me asking him, but I want to make sure this doesn't happen again. So again who is responsible for the vocal audio is it the producer or the mix master?

I thought the mixer job is really to get all the audio balanced louder and of the quality where it sounds good on all listening devices.

Re: A producers integrity
 

The producer and/or recording engineer should be doing the work to coach the vocal performance, comp a good take and perform any tuning or TCE. The mixing engineer should not have to "fix" anything. If he has to take his listening from the macro to the micro, it changes the way he pays attention. The mixing engineer should be making creative decisions with eq, compression, gating, muting, fx and automation that promote the focus on the lead element.

Re: A producers integrity
 

That's true, the mixers work is to offer a final polish and balance, most of the work should done between the producer and the artist, that's what I think the OP is talking about but I too agree that if there's something to fix and the mixer catches it, he or she will do it...unless it's a big disaster and fixing it would risk changing the original idea in which case it is better to send it back for the original authors to fix