MUSICIAN
Many of the best-known popular music producers of the 20th century trained and/
or worked as musicians and/or arrangers: Fred Gaisberg, John Hammond, Mitch Miller, George Martin, Quincy Jones, Arif Mardin, Mutt Lange, Dr. Luke, and most classical producers. Of course, songwriters are usually musicians too (some lyricists are not in the strict sense), and many musicians write songs or compose music. Nonetheless, here we are talking about producers who are primarily players or arrangers rather than composers.
Dann Huff was one of the most sought-after session guitarists in Los Angeles in the ’80s. He played sessions for me and would show up with another studio’s worth of equipment in rolling racks, but what made him so valuable was his musi-cality, sense of the appropriate, and remarkable versatility. He fl ips from one style to another always sounding authentic. While playing on Shania Twain’s album, her producer Mutt Lange told him, “You are a producer in guitarist’s clothes.” He had no idea how to start, so Lange introduced him to Faith Hill. Known primarily for producing country artists such as Martina McBride, Keith Urban, and Rascal Flatts, he maintains his versatility, working across genres from time to time with groups such as Megadeth. He attributes his ability to do that to his experience as a session player and having to embrace many musical styles. 11
Bill Appleberry played organ as a child and then drums in the U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, training at the School of Music in Norfolk, which he said was one of the best decisions he ever made. Artists he has worked with include the Stone Temple Pilots, Joe Walsh, the Wallfl owers, 311, Puddle of Mudd, the Used, Macy Gray, the Fugees, Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green, Christina Aguilera, Jermaine Paul, and many more. Since 2011, he has produced and mixed every song by every artist on every episode of the NBC TV show “The Voice.” Various singles sales have reached multiplatinum status with many number-one hits on iTunes and
entries into the Billboard Hot 100. Appleberry frequently works a seven-day a week production schedule with little or no sleep. 12
Walter Afanasieff played keyboards for jazz-fusion violinist Jean Luc Ponty and Bay Area producer Narada Michael Walden. He stepped into the producer role in 1991, producing and writing a run of hits with Mariah Carey and others such as Barbra Streisand, Kenny G, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, Babyface, and Savage Garden. Afanasieff won the best producer Grammy in 2000.
ENGINEER
Flood got his nickname when he was assisting at Morgan Studios in London because he was so timely with tea-making, a vital function in U.K. studios. At that time in commercial studios, the fi rst few years learning the craft were considered vital. As it did for Flood, the process could take more than fi ve years to graduate from tea boy to tape op/assistant to house engineer and eventually to working free-lance. “When Flood was head engineer, the tape op to assistant to engineer process was very strict,” says his manager Ros Earls. Earls looked for people who could move through the ranks, such as dance producer Paul Oakenfold’s engineer Steve Osborne, who she employed as a “tea boy.” She pointed out that they have to “be easy to have around, be intelligent, have musical taste and personal creative ambi-tion, while being willing to make tea and good at fi lling out track sheets.” 13
She thinks that there has been an increasingly unhealthy pressure to move up through the ranks with some looking for a manager after only a year’s studio expe-rience. She said,
Engineers have always been regarded [in England] as “just” an engineer, which they aren’t in America. People there may be engineers for [40] years and they are formidable talents. 14
Engineer and mix engineer Marcella Araica (Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey) graduated with honors from the Full Sail Recording and Production program in Florida. She said that once she began working in studios, she wished she had started as an intern because the actual studio experience was so different from school. The pace of a professional session can swing from frustrat-ingly slow to impossibly fast. Missy Elliott was initially impatient with her because of her lack of speed with Pro Tools. Araica knew she had to step it up or she would be off the session, so she spent a couple of weeks with a friend who was a more experienced Pro Tools operator and long hours practicing so that she could handle the real-world pace. Her conscientiousness and hard work paid off, and she built a successful working relationship with Elliott, who became a signifi cant fi gure in Araica’s career. 15
Andy Jackson came up through the ranks at Utopia Studios in London, which was new at the time and expanding quickly. He was engineering demos and jingles within a year, which was “good discipline because you had to work very quickly.”
He thinks that he would have had to wait two or three years before “engineer-ing someth“engineer-ing” at another studio. 16 Jackson subsequently engineered several Pink Floyd and Roger Waters albums. He commented that a period of assisting in a major studio is valuable because “you see good practice.” When he did encoun-ter bad engineers, it “reinforced the good techniques you learned.” Perhaps most important, he noted that “it’s not just the engineering tricks you pick up on, but the way the producer handles the session in general.” 17 He gave the example of Bob Ezrin, who “has a little saying, which is ‘Do anything even if it’s wrong.’ ” He can then react to what he did and if it is wrong, say, “This isn’t right and I can see why this isn’t right, so it gives me an insight into what would work.” 18
Smashing Pumpkins’ producer and mixer for the Foo Fighters, Alan Moulder, started as an assistant engineer at the famed Trident Studios in London. He describes how he moved from engineering to producing by building a relationship with artists. “They decide to bypass their producer to do some B-sides so you get to do some tracks on your own with them.” He adds, “It’s mainly from co-production, where bands want to do the record and have a big input themselves.” 19 To some extent, you can predict an assistant’s future in the business by the way he or she deals with the menial tasks. The assistants I worked with who consistently messed up the lunch orders did not translate into successful producers. The ones who got them right, including Tim Palmer (mixed Pearl Jam’s fi rst album Ten ) when he fi rst started at Utopia, Alan Moulder at Trident, Pete Walsh at Utopia (produced Simple Minds) and Flood at Morgan Studios, were always there when you needed them.
They read the “vibe” in the room. Teas and coffees arrived at the right moments, food orders were correct, and if you turned your head, they knew what you needed;
they kept up with the session. More than 30 years later when I talk to Tim Palmer, he asks me if I still like Earl Grey tea, weak with a little honey in it (I do). These are all extremely intelligent people capable of complex tasks, as they subsequently proved, but they understood their roles as assistants. They were pleasant, helpful, and fi t in seamlessly without being overly familiar.
Alan Parsons parlayed a background of engineering acts such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd into a successful career as a producer and subsequently as an artist.
Working with bands and producers of the Beatles and Pink Floyd’s magnitude not only instills an innate sense of how a successful record is constructed, but it also builds a formidable network of industry decision-makers. Like many engineers, he began contributing to productions with other producers, built a good network of A&R people from being in the studio with the bands he was engineering, and the word spread. Not coincidentally, his fi rst two projects as a producer were Pilot and Cockney Rebel, both on EMI—the label of both the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Parsons’s employer as the owner of Abbey Road Studios. Parsons’s progression from assistant to producer took about fi ve years.
After engineering successful records for bands like Whitesnake, Mike Clink produced Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction for the same label. Brendon O’Brien went on to produce Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam after engineering
for Rick Rubin. Hugh Padgham’s engineering career included Peter Gabriel’s semi-nal, third solo album. That project introduced the Phil Collins drum sound, and Padgham went on to co-produce Phil Collins, the Police, Sting, and Genesis. He subsequently commanded production credits of his own.
“Flood developed from engineer to co-mixer to ‘recorded by’ credit, which implies a better position than just engineer,” says his manager Ros Earls. With Depeche Mode, he began by engineering, but by the second album, “he was co-producing with the band and on the third one, he was co-producing.” 20
Jack Douglas’s discography includes six Aerosmith albums, three with Cheap Trick, John Lennon’s Double Fantasy and Alice Cooper’s anthem “School’s Out.”
Douglas started out in bands, but while recording at A&R Recording, found the other side of the glass more fascinating. An engineer told him about a new studio opening up, called The Record Plant, where “everyone was going,” including Shelley Yakus, Roy Cicala, and Jay Messina. Douglas started out cleaning toilets and mov-ing Hendrix tapes around, while they were workmov-ing on the Woodstock soundtrack.
He worked his way up to tape librarian and eventually assistant engineer. His leap to engineering was sudden and dramatic during some sessions intended for The Who’s Who’s Next album. 21 Douglas was assisting an engineer called Jack Adams who pri-marily worked with R&B acts and did not like rock music. Adams told Douglas to go to another room and call to say Adam’s houseboat was on fi re. Adams allegedly started screaming, telling Kit Lambert (the producer) and Pete Townshend that his boat was on fi re and that Douglas was “a great engineer” who could take over the session. 22 In fact, Douglas had done only jingle dates and a Patti LaBelle session.
A number of other successful engineers and producers have had lucky breaks that were also sudden and nerve-wracking, if less histrionic.
SONGWRITERS
The Neptunes, The Matrix, Scott Storch, Timbaland, Max Martin, L.A. and Babyface, Jam and Lewis, Narada Michael Walden, Walter Afanasieff, Gamble and Huff, Holland, Dozier, and Holland, Benny Blanco, Shellback, Stargate, the Smeezingtons, Red One, and many more producers made their names primarily due to their skills as songwriters. As mentioned earlier, most songwriters are musicians in that they play instruments and have some arranging skills, formal or otherwise.
Songwriters are not necessarily skilled instrumentalists, and writing a song requires related but different skills than deconstructing and editing someone else’s material.
Benny Blanco had produced 13 U.S. number-one songs by the age of 24. He has worked with Dr. Luke and many of the most successful pop writers and pro-ducers of recent times including Shellback and Max Martin. Although he took music lessons on various instruments from the age of four, he claims that he is barely mediocre on any instrument and that recording a part takes him a long time, to the extent that he builds chords for guitar parts by playing one note at a time.
Nonetheless, he plays many of the parts on his productions, writes as part of a team, and reputedly has an innate sense of when a song is complete and ready to
be a hit. Dr. Luke calls it “Benny-proofi ng” a song, saying, “If Benny doesn’t get it, America won’t get it.” 23
DJ
From the South Bronx and temporarily transplanted to Atlanta as a teenager, Swiss Beatz produced tracks for DMX, Jay Z, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Chris Brown, T.I., Li’l Wayne, Beyoncé, and Drake. He made beats and was sneaking into clubs to DJ by age 17. He established his production career when he sold a beat through his uncles’ Ruff Ryders label that became DMX’s last hit single, “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem.”
David Guetta is the French house music DJ who changed the sound of the American pop charts. For nearly two decades, dance music topped the charts in Europe but remained a niche genre in the United States. American labels told him he would have to adapt his style to succeed in America:
When I recorded “Sexy Bitch” with Akon, [Akon’s] label said: “You’re going to have to adapt yourself to the American market. What we’ve done won’t work in the U.S. because of the style of the beat.” I told them they were wrong.
Guetta did not compromise; the track hit number fi ve on the U.S. charts and within 12 months, he had produced Black Eyed Peas, Madonna, and Kelis. Guetta trig-gered the vogue for strong four-to-the-bar, bass-drum grooves in the U.S. charts.
This pattern had rarely been heard in the U.S. charts since disco died. As all DJ producers must, Guetta recognizes the difference between a successful club track and one that works on the radio:
The more melodies and chord changes, the less good it is for the clubs, but the better it is for radio, because it makes it really emotional. Yet, what gives dance music energy and drive is that it’s hypnotic and repetitive. My battle is to fi nd the balance between the two. 24
Rick Rubin began producing with no training or background in bands or studios while he was still in college. He had been DJing at clubs and found rap fascinating, realizing it was a new approach. He said,
Being a fan and understanding what rap was really about, I just tried to capture that on record, and, ironically, part of the answer was not knowing anything about the technology and what was considered right or wrong in the studio.
It was about capturing some really awkward sounds at times. Looking back, they’re pretty funny-sounding records, but that was what was going on.
Part-time DJ and record storeowner Shep Pettibone capitalized on the ’80s remix craze by rebuilding tracks for dance artists such as Gloria Gaynor, Alisha, and Loleatta Holloway. Pettibone was remixing British acts such as the Pet Shop Boys, Thompson Twins, New Order, and Erasure when U.K. radio discovered dance music, and remixes became “the sound.” Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, MC Hammer,
Lionel Richie, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna were all recreated for clubs by Pettibone. He said,
By the time I worked on “Like a Prayer” and “Express Yourself,” it looked as if Madonna liked the remixed versions better than the ones that were on the album. That was great, but producing was still at the top of my wish list. 25
Finally, she asked him to write and produce a B-side for the single off her Breathless album. That B-side was “Vogue,” which became the biggest selling single of 1990 and introduced Pettibone as a producer. Madonna encouraged him to continue writing, and a single evolved into the album Erotica .
Shep Pettibone was able to make the move from being Madonna’s remixer to her co-producer on the Erotica album by collaborating with her at the writ-ing stage. Obviously, they already had a good workwrit-ing relationship because of the remixes he had done for her. Had he simply tried to submit songs to her, he would have been competing with many professional songwriters for every song on the album. Instead, he did what he does best: built tracks in the style of his remixes for which she could write the lyrics and melodies. The nature of dance music is such that the production ideas, the parts, and the sounds almost inex-tricably intertwine with the song itself. Once Pettibone and Madonna had writ-ten and demoed the songs together, not only was there little point in bringing in an outside producer, but they wound up transferring most of the stuff they had recorded on the eight-track demos over to 24-track tape and onto the fi nal record.
Arthur Baker worked in a Boston record store. He went on to spin records at a local club, where he met Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records. Baker moved to New York City in 1980, producing electro-dance for Emergency Records and working with some of the early hip hop artists such as Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force for Tommy Boy. His work as a producer and writer led to remix work with artists such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Cyndi Lauper.
Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs has written, produced, and mixed tracks for the Beastie Boys, Ice Cube, House of Pain, Funkdoobiest, Daddy Freddy, YoYo, and Mellow Man Ace. He did remixes for Janet Jackson and U2. His own band’s “Black Sunday” went straight to number one on the Billboard charts. His real name is Larry Muggerud, and he grew up in Queens, New York, moving to Los Angeles during high school. It was his love of rap music and break-dancing that led to DJing. He began producing his own tracks using a pair of Technics SP1200s while in tenth grade. In the mid-1980s, he formed the “Spanglish” rap group DVX with B-Real and Sen Dog, the three of whom would eventually become Cypress Hill.
When DVX broke up, he joined forces with the rappers 7A3, released an album on Geffen, and got a song on the Colors soundtrack. Muggs decided to get back with B-Real and Sen Dog to form Cypress Hill, sending the early demos to Joe “The Butcher” Nicolo, a young engineer from Philadelphia who he had connected with
on the 7A3 album. Nicolo signed the band to his newly formed Ruffhouse Records and got distribution through Columbia.
SELF-TAUGHT
Jack Endino, the “Godfather of Grunge,” used a home studio to develop a unique style and to create a place in rock and roll history. He was instrumental in shaping the early Seattle sound, having recorded over 80 albums, 110 seven-inch singles, and 300 EPs, from more than 200 bands, including Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Afghan Whigs, L7, Babes In Toyland, and, perhaps most famously, Nirvana.
Endino talked to Daniel House about getting started:
The fi rst band I was in I played drums and from the fi rst time we jammed I had a cassette deck with two microphones right behind me at the drum set. I was making these little stereo recordings and I thought, well, this is really easy and
The fi rst band I was in I played drums and from the fi rst time we jammed I had a cassette deck with two microphones right behind me at the drum set. I was making these little stereo recordings and I thought, well, this is really easy and