Amandine Pras

The impact of technological advances on recording studio practices

Since the invention of sound reproduction in the late 19th century, studio practices in musical recording evolved in parallel with technological improvements. Recently, digital technology and Internet file sharing led to the delocalization of professional recording studios and the decline of traditional record companies. A direct consequence of this new paradigm is that studio professions found themselves in a transitional phase, needing to be reinvented. To understand the scope of these recent technological advances, we first offer an overview of musical recording culture and history and show how studio recordings became a sophisticated form of musical artwork that differed from concert representations. We then trace the economic evolution of the recording industry through technological advances and present positive and negative impacts of the decline of the traditional business model on studio practices and professions. Finally, we report findings from interviews with six world‐renowned record producers reflecting on their recording approaches, the impact of recent technological advances on their careers, and the future of their profession. Interviewees appreciate working on a wider variety of projects than they have in the past, but they all discuss trade‐offs between artistic expectations and budget constraints in the current paradigm. Our investigations converge to show that studio professionals have adjusted their working settings to the new economic situation, although they still rely on the same aesthetic approaches as in the traditional business model to produce musical recordings.

The role of music producers and sound engineers in the current recording context, as perceived by young professionals:

As a result of recent technological advances, musicians tend to produce their music themselves in home studios, without necessarily collaborating with a professional producer or a sound engineer. To understand how this new paradigm affects musical recordings, we need to study the context of recording sessions involving a producer and a sound engineer. In this article we investigate the role of producers and sound engineers, as perceived by young professionals actively involved in recording sessions. We collected verbal data from 16 musicians and 6 sound engineers, from different countries and backgrounds. Participants were asked to freely define in their own words the role of an ideal producer and an ideal sound engineer. Then, we invited them to describe positive or negative experiences they had previously encountered in the studio. We classified their spontaneous descriptions into emerging themes using the constant comparison method. The three main categories referred to mission, skills, and interaction. A consensus emerged regarding the respective missions of producers and sound engineers. While the producer is responsible for the artistic direction of the project, the sound engineer has to make appropriate sound choices by taking into consideration the musicians’ requests. The primary skills reported for the ideal producer were communication and interpersonal skills. The ideal sound engineer, paradoxically, was described as minimally interacting with musicians during sessions. To conclude, we discuss future directions to clarify the relationships between the missions and skills producers and sound engineers are expected to exhibit, and to further investigate the level of the producer’s artistic involvement.

L’échantillonnage dans l’improvisation : Rencontre de deux instigateurs du free jazz avec un jeune artiste de la scène noise à New York

In this paper we report on an experimental study that brought two free jazz instigators, the drummer Todd Capp and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, to musically meet Mikey Holmes, a young noise artist in New York in May 2014. Throughout an analysis of the improvisation process of these three musicians, our study addresses both the social and artistic continuity between different improvisation genres and generations. The two improvisation meetings have been filmed and recorded to allow musicians’ self-evaluation. We include two videos in the article to share the musical result of these meetings with the readers. We use musicians’ quotes to shed light on issues ranging from performance and recording time, the use of contextual sounds, transmusicality, free improvisation and the links between music and politics in New York between the late fifties’ jazz giants and today’s improvised music. Thanks to the issues tackled, we show how the subversiveness of a particular music and its resistance to time are related, and we suggest there is a link between the sustainability of musical recordings and their conditions of studio production. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to confront the art of sampling with improvised performance and to question the social and political aspects included in an improvisation.

Record Producers’ Best Practices For Artistic Direction—From Light Coaching To Deeper Collaboration With Musicians

Record producers interact with musicians to obtain the best artistic results from recording sessions. Commonly described as professionals without well-defined skills, the producers’ role has received scant attention. In this paper, we report a qualitative investigation of the producers’ tacit knowledge, skills and competences involved in making successful recordings, and we develop a model of artistic direction for studio sessions, extending Hennion (1989)’s concept of ‘intermediary between production and consumption’. We interviewed six world-renowned record producers about their mission, their methods of production and their contribution to the creative process of musical recordings. We first analysed their responses using content analysis. We then investigated emerging concepts using linguistic analysis with an emphasis on the producer’s artistic involvement during recording sessions. This combination of qualitative methods used in the Social Sciences (Grounded Theory) and in Linguistics allowed us to investigate in depth best practices for studio recording. Through this inductive analysis, we identified and described various levels of a producer’s artistic involvement during recording sessions, namely From context to situation, Intermediary role, Verbal communication, Management and Artistic collaboration. We also present inter-personal skills shared amongst interviewees to help musicians complete their recording project in the best possible conditions.