MTF, Week 5 (5th April 2007) "The First Round"

Ken, enthusiastically began the producer oral presentations, providing the class with a thorough and humorous insight towards the highly successful musical production trio Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW). What I found interesting from Ken’s presentation was that the style in which SAW produced was some of the most over produced glossy pop from the 80’s like Kylie Minogue, Banarama, Jason Donovan - The fact that Ken made a seemingly ridiculous clown era, into something very interesting and insightful was excellent, and made me more aware to my opinions of such musical styles the he raised.

Unfortunately, I missed the next two presentations made from Alyssa and Lauren; however I will attempt to make a gathered response from my readings of the write-ups.

Barry Gibb, was the choice of Alyssa. From her write up I was surprised that Gibb is considered to be the second most successful producer of all time after George Martin. After thinking about it, I did know that Gibb was a successful musician, and writes a lot of highly successful songs for pop acts. Alyssa stated that she didn’t provide the distinct techniques associated with Gibb, however, just listening to his work, I believe you can still picture to an extent of how “that” sound may have been achieved.

As long as Radiohead are around, the name Nigel Godrich will be alongside them. Lauren didn’t produce a write-up is seems of her presentation, but what I did gather was that his style is layered and dense. While listening to any Radiohead album, you can hear just how dense it all is, and even some Beck records share this. Lauren surely would have pointed this out in her oral, because it is such a distinctive factor amongst his work and perhaps Radiohead’s sound itself. However is also points toward style it itself and is something which I look forward to presenting myself.

So far it has been interesting to see how all of these producers and a couple others such as Bob Ezrin and Matt Bayles, all share a very similar role to one another, even though the music differs tremendously. The presentations are a great example of how the class is learning to recognise the qualities of a producer, and how their role is more or less the same for any recording. I believe this is why Steve Fieldhouse introduced us to the area of what a producer is and does for an artist before we embarked on this task.

As a final post script, I’d like to add I thoroughly enjoyed the 15 minutes that Steve went through classical music recording. It’s something the sounds so interesting, and I was very intrigued by the notion of stereo classical recording techniques, and left right panning.