Part 12 - Production

 I've gone back and forth about the order of these next two chapters several times, I'm still not sure they're in the practical order, but I think this is the right order for the finishing-your-song flow.

What is 'production' when we're talking about music and home recording? In the 'good old days' the music producer was someone who would work with the band to help them establish and execute their vision. They would cover things like artist management (making sure everyone was happy and productive), label liaison (making sure everyone was getting paid and deadlines are hit), session management (making sure the engineer and artists were on the same page), but they also had a hand in the arrangement of the track, the composition of any supporting parts and that all important job of taking the vision out of the artists' head and getting it on tape.

Sounds like a fascinating job, but how many people here can afford to pay a professional to do all that?

Yeah, me neither.

So it's just another of those hats that we, the song-writer, performer, engineer, marketer, promoter etc etc etc have to wear. Add it to the list right?

But if we just review that non-exhaustive list of producer jobs above, as the bedroom artist the thing that still needs doing is the bit about getting the vision out of our heads and onto the tape / DAW.

Production is, you'll be getting the hang of this now, another can of worms that we won't be delving deep into. Guess what, there's another book for that ,  but I do have a short list of theoretical devices that can help you avoid production paralysis and actually finish your song.

Establishing a vision - Carrier & Signal

This is another of my two-part tools that I introduced back in part two with Space and Permission; this time we're looking at two core components of the song but not in the 'writing' context that we’ve been focused on so far.

Carrier and Signal is an expression I have shamelessly stolen from the world of telecommunications. A carrier wave is regular periodic wave (think of dialling in the frequency on your radio) that is modulated by an information signal (the thing that you listen to).

For the purposes of producing and finishing your music, it can be useful to think of it in a similar way. The signal here is the core bit of the song that you most want to stick in your listeners brain. The 'what have you got to say' bit that we've talked about previously. In a typical song this will be the lyrics and the vocal melody, but in an instrumental it will be the hooks or themes that you've developed to tell your musical story.

If that's the signal, the carrier is then the thing provides the platform for that signal. Let's illustrate that with a couple of examples, both from Iggy Pop (because they're what popped into my head): Lust for Life and The Passenger.

In both cases the signal is the vocal, ask someone to sing them to you and that's what you'll get back. But I'll wager a good proportion of people won't go straight into the vocal, instead they'll take a moment to remember the track and they'll do a little mental (and possibly audible) repeat of that infamous drum beat (Lust for Life) or chugging guitar part (The Passenger) first. This is the carrier, it sets the scene for the piece and takes us on through, giving the structure for the signal to hang off.

Here's a couple more easy examples: Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now, again the vocal is the signal but this time the strings are the carrier. Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed is another easy example; again the vocal is the signal but this time the carrier is the bass. 

I don't know why I've gone all retro with these examples, let's get a bit more up to date with an instrumental example: Just Us, one of the theme's from Pixar's Soul by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Here the carrier is that arpeggiated piano with the higher register piano and the synth sharing the signal duties.

And that highlights another key point, neither carrier nor signal need to stay constant throughout the piece; these burdens can, and I would say should, be shared. But we'll come back to that in a future update.

Getting back on topic then, what does this mean for finishing your song? Well firstly, are you clear on what these two elements are for your music. You're probably pretty clear on the signal(s) but it's the carrier that will define the feel and vision of the piece. Or rather, your vision will define what makes the carrier the carrier.

So how do you want the piece to sound? And does it have everything it needs to sound like that? If yes, good, move on to the next stage. If no, what's missing? Find that and fix it.

Single vs EP vs Album

Production, and establishing your vision, are obviously more complex that just Carrier and Signal of course, and one question you need to ask and answer is how this bit of music sits with a wider release. Perhaps it doesn't? It's a one-off single for a playlisting world. No-one listens to albums anymore dude, etc. etc. etc.  Cool, you can work on this in isolation and it can stand on its own two feet however it so feels.

But what if you're one of these old-fashioned people who still writes and creates albums or EPs? Old timers like, I dunno, Beyonce or Taylor Swift? Because then your production has to factor in how this bit of music fits with all the other bits that go with it. 

We are no longer in the days of sticking a bunch of tracks together to make up a 45 minute chunk and lobbing them out as a release. If you're planning on releasing an EP or an album these days there has to be a coherent reason for those songs to sit together, and there has to be a bit of sonic gel to make them work as a collection. Otherwise all you're doing is trying to make someone's playlist for them.

Have a listen to Beyonce's or Swift's recent albums and you'll hear a clearly established sonic signature that works with the songs' signal to establish that overall vision.

And just as it does with your individual songs, an album has to say something as a collective work - so your production job isn't finished until you understand not just how the song works, but how it works as part of the collection.

I reckon.

One final thought on production then, that looks at one of the inherent tensions in music production. 

Ear Candy vs Honesty. 

I like to think of this as a production continuum. At one end we have the world of chart pop; I've heard it said that if you want to trouble the charts then your music needs to introduce a new or different element every seven seconds to keep your listener interested. That element doesn't need to be a whole new instrument, it might be a guitar lick, a synth swell, a delay repeat, a dropped sound, it doesn't matter. This is the Ear Candy end of the spectrum and if you listen to anything in the charts you'll hear these things constantly popping in and out to keep things evolving and interesting. Let It Be by Labrinth is probably one of my favourite examples of how to do this well and the video does a nice job of highlighting some of these elements.

At the other end of the continuum is probably a classical recording. Your job is not to start getting creative with the autopan and flanger, it's to give (or give the illusion of) an honest reproduction of the sound in the concert hall. The 'ear candy' is all in the composition thankyouverymuch.

Now have a think about your music, your references and your genre styles, and think about where you sit on that continuum. If your style is a three-piece punk band in an 'as live' scenario then you're going to be pretty close to the 'honest' end of the spectrum - it's about the power and the energy. But if you're playing in the more refined waters of the pop ballad, or EDM then you might be surprised at how much Ear Candy there is going on in your genre.

What might seem like a simple production often has a lot more going on under the skin. It wasn't until I started really listening to Good Man by Josh Ritter to do a cover version that I realised how much more there was going on than the simple piano, bass, drums, guitar and vocal that I'd noticed up to that point.

So line up those references and have a proper listen to all that stuff that's happening at the edge of the stereo spread and hiding underneath the lead parts.

Right, so that's you sorted for setting out your vision, next time we'll talk about what we need to do to get there.