The role of the record producer is an aspect of the music industry that can often be overlooked by those on the outside; in some cases reduced only to a footnote on album sleeves. Also, the success and reputation of record producers is often tied to the success and reputation of the bands and albums that they have helped create.

The Stereo Bus describes the three main roles of the producer as follows: “focusing the creative vision of the project, for acting as an intermediary between the artistic and technical worlds, and for overseeing the logistics of the project.” (2007) In overseeing the logicistics, producers will often be in charge of recording sessions, and as such will organise the studio time, meetings or pre-production sessions with bands, and other duties such as hiring an engineer to suit the job or finding session musicians.

Producers will also oversee the projects artistic or ‘creative vision’, but it can depend on how far they band or artist has progressed in their career. For instance, if the band is relatively young, new or inexperienced, then it may be the case that the producer is highly involved in crafting their sound and musical direction. Whereas if a band is more experienced, perhaps working on their second or third album, then they will have a more concrete sound and set ideas of what they want out of a particular project. However, often producers can have a ‘trademark’ sound, and bands could look to different producers in order to breathe new life in to their recordings. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of this is Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ in which he would double or triple track parts and layer them up, gradually building the ‘wall’.

“In addition to being adept at the musical aspects of songcraft, producers also need to be knowledgeable about the technical aspects of capturing and generating the recordings that represent the song.” (The Stereo Bus, 2007) This serves to bridge a gap between creativity and technical knowledge, sometimes bands will often know what they want to sound like, or have a rough idea in their heads, but will not always possess the technical know-how to achieve their desires. Here the producer can step in to help the process along, such as recommending microphones to use, whether a particular track needs EQing, or compression and so on.

Sound on Sound describes producers as fitting in to one of several different ‘types’, these being: Engineer Producer, Musician Producer, Executive Producer, Freelance Producer and Entrepreneur Producer. (1996)

Engineer producers often possess a lot of technical knowledge about the studio equipment, as well as knowing what microphones would be best suited towards recording certain instruments, there placement and how this affects the sound, although they perhaps might not be as skilled musically.

On the other hand, Musician producers may not be as skilled technically, but they have the knowledge and understanding of the way in which songs go together, and what needs bringing to the table musically.

For our sessions with The Suspicious Pigeons, we turned our first recording session in to a pre-production session, so that we could get to know them, and find out the direction they wanted to take the E.P. We got them to talk through some of their musical influences, and bands whose sounds they were fond of. The two that stuck out were Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian, which after a little research we discovered both of their debut albums were produced by Jim Abbiss.

Jim Abbiss stuck out for me personally as being the most relevant for our project, as these were successful debut albums, similar to The Suspicious Pigeons looking to put out their debut E.P.

In an interview, some of his words resonated with me: “The best use of my brain is not looking at a computer screen, it’s getting musicians playing.” (Abbiss in Sound on Sound, 2006) I realised that perhaps in the past I was too concerned with what was happening on screen, rather than listening to the music that was going on around me, and so for the recording sessions I would aim to be more active in the studio, listening to the instruments and making the room sound good before considering going back to the control room to open up Pro Tools.

Jim Abbiss’ philosophy towards recording matched also what we thought was best for The Suspicious Pigeons. In an interview with Sound on Sound he talks about the way he approached recording Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not by Arctic Monkeys. “I had the whole band in one room, with the two guitar amps in a booth, and the bass amp in the corridor. All the musicians stood around the drums and had headphones and their own mini-mixers.” (Sound on Sound, 2006) In talks with the band we discovered their desire to represent their live sound, and translate it faithfully to the E.P. recording, and so we followed the ‘all the band in the room’ example of Jim Abbiss (with slight variation). The band were more comfortable with recording this way due to their limited studio experience, and although we did have an attempt at tracking individually, everybody agreed that the feel of the songs were lost, and so we decided to get the foundations of the song from the whole band, and then re-track and track more parts as needed.