What a Record Producer Does

This past semester I had the chance to produce a recording with Derek Wright, who graduated this semester with his DMA in horn from Arizona State. His project was one which involved in part a recording of Friedrich Gumpert’s transcriptions of Mendelssohn and Schubert Lieder.

This photo was taken at the session and it shows how I was set up off to one side as producer. Which brings up the question, what does a producer do? Why have one?

What I did for Derek was very similar to what Sam Pilafian did for me when I made my two solo CDs. Basically my job was to follow a score closely and listen carefully. Use those ears! While any take was going I would mark any mistake or flaw I noticed and be sure that it was fixed and covered in other takes and to keep a running log of what each take was and what bars it covered. This is all extremely helpful in editing later.

You might be tempted to self produce a project such as this but for sure that will waste time; ears that are independent of the actual performance in progress can hear the big picture of the performance much better.

As to the results, Derek posted a couple clips from the recording session on YouTube, the below being my favorite of the pair, Die Post Op 89 No 13 by Franz Schubert. Check it out.

The set-up is very similar to the one I used making my CDs as well. It is not a set-up designed for how it looks from the audience but rather the idea is to blow the horn out into the room for the best sound. Recording the horn is a large topic for another time but in short it takes good microphones and a good space for classical music.

One final note would be that there is one other type of producer we hear of often, an executive producer. In reality, especially for classical recordings, the executive producer is more of a money person than anything else; they are very likely a financial backer of the project. But they may offer additional expertise later in production, depending on their skills and the needs of the project.