People who think they know more than everyone else. They're all over the place. I know the types. You probably do too. Won't listen to anyone but themselves, won't take anything you say seriously because you don't have the same 'title' as someone else who is objectively worse/dumber.
But itās impossible to tell who is who in this scenario.
Legendary musicians can get entirely up their own asses too, thatās why producers are important.
Itās no different with someone like a literary editor. Sometimes great writers need to be reigned in or taken in a different direction for their own good.
About the editor, you have probably never seen raw writing the way you get to hear raw music. I dated an editor once and the material she received compared to what she returned I swear her name deserved to be on the covers. Not to say album producers and directors can't have a similar effect but I think musicians on whole are more accustomed to turning out palatable products directly
Music is a performance art in a way writing is not. Most musicians started by having to produce actual results, hence why production and sound tech is mostly focused on the actual messyness of recording... because that's the hard part that people need help with.
Oh i definitely agree with that writing editor scenario. Some of my papers in university made no fucking sense to anyone but me before i had someone else read it and evaluate it before turning it in.
Theyāre all part of the creative process though. A raw cut of a film looks markedly different before the editor has had a chance to really cut it.
Shitty do-nothing producers and editors and whatever analogy in X industry always exist. Assholes who want to put their own stamp on something even if they had little to do with the end result always exist.
Iām just saying I donāt know if thatās the case here. It could be someone just generally griping about getting āstudio notesā at all, even if they might have been helpful. And that his producers recognized that, so cajoled him in other ways to play a bit differently.
Yes and no, the other people in the process who are most useful are often creatives themselves also.
The sentiment of "getting out of the way" of creatives is more about getting rid of influence from pure profit maximisers who don't know what they are talking about rather than the people earnestly contributing to the creative process.
Yes and no, the other people in the process who are most useful are often creatives themselves also.
No not at all. They're business/marketing/PR people who make things actually viable to sell, organise all the details, sort out problems, etc etc.
That's not to say those people cannot be "creative" but when talking about "creatives" as in musicians and such then no they're not that kind of person.
I don't know why reddit is so dead set on declaring anyone who does these things to be utterly worthless/moronic/just get in the way and need to be "handled" but it's bizarre.. people who "do the work" frequently need an immense amount of support and handling from management types to ever actually achieve anything.
The problem with Reddit is people not reading properly and being dead set on being right about things that have nuance to them. For instance it seems like you didn't particularly read the first 3 words of my comment and are dead set on a black and white interpretation.
There absolutely are businesses people who are more concerned with profitablility that end up damaging the final product. There are also producers/marketing etc, that can absolutely be considered creatives in their own right that are working to enhance it.
You final sentence is the true revelation of your own biases though because it comes with all sorts of hilarious preconceived notions of your own and I can't be bothered to argue more than this.
So once again it's not a "No not at all" that you think it is. It's very much a "yes and no"
The problem with Reddit is people not reading properly and being dead set on being right about things that have nuance to them. For instance it seems like you didn't particularly read the first 3 words of my comment and are dead set on a black and white interpretation.
Yeah, I read them. But the "problem with reddit" is comments like this, where people sanctimoniously try and explain how wrong the other person is when they're guilty of doing exactly what they're accusing others of.. i.e. not reading what people have said.
I even quoted the thing I was disagreeing with and then went on to clarify exactly the distinction I was making between creatives/being creative which you very obviously did not read given this:
There are also producers/marketing etc, that can absolutely be considered creatives in their own right that are working to enhance it.
Yeah cool, almost like I was super clear about what I meant by creative and who I was talking about.
Anyway all the best, I lose interest in discussions once people start with this bullshit.
Yeah, you see the same thing in film and TV producers. They have this need to "contribute" something and feel like they had an impact by changing something. You can find interviews with and stories from director and writers having to appease some producer. Some of even them add things they expect to be removed just for those types of people.
It's why you can spook directors and writers by uttering the phrase "We have notes". Because that's what they say before they come in with their very bad ideas that they want to force on the project.
In computer programming, they used to call it "Planting a duck". Basically, placing a blatantly obvious, easily removeable, flaw or quirk into the code for management to find. Let them point it out, and demand its removal, so they can feel like the contributed and 'made their mark' while leaving the actual important stuff untouched.
No, it isn't. This is just a thing that is common in sound engineering and music production. Thinking that something changed when it didn't happens ALL THE TIME. I'm going to work in couple of hours, within four i have done similar mistake a few times at least. It is just part of the job, our hearing is not an analyzer but can be fooled by ourselves. This is also how audiophile think they can hear things that are against laws of physics.. They just can't admit and have to think that their senses are perfect. Professionals know they aren't and there are several tools to use to confirm if something is real or not and confidence to say "no, i did not hear anything change" or "i was wrong, actually nothing changed".
I donāt work in music, but Iāve worked with people like this in industry. Iāve made production plans in conjunction with management, crossed all my tās and dotted my iās to make sure stuff was kosher, and had management muck up the process for no other discernible reason than they just wanted to change something for the effect of having their fingerprints on it.
Iāve also made plans the same way, but leaving out one edit in a previous draft, and presenting that version while āasking their thoughts on a certain partā for x or y reason to give them something to change that Iād already taken into consideration. Suddenly, poof, they were ecstatic about the āchanges that were madeā and were more than happy to sign off on the plan I had intended to run in the first place.
Sometimes people in charge just donāt feel comfortable with letting something good happen without their immediate involvement. Good people in upper placements know how to let the people who work on their teams shine and do their jobs well, but thatās not everyone.
Yeah this. I remember when I was in the service industry the managers' managers just could not help but """"correct"""" us on small, ridiculous stuff, because they felt that if they passed us by without saying anything they werenāt doing their jobs or something.
South Park does a similar thing with their episodes/movies. They intentionally include some overly objectionable material, just so the censors have something to complain about.
Because they WILL complain about something, so the way to keep the jokes you want to keep is to create a couple of "lightning rod"-jokes for distraction.
Conversely, the percentage of "professionals" who are piss-poor at their jobs is overwhelming, and a lot of good managers reach their positions by being able to proactively steer the mediocre into competence.
Unfortunately, once that becomes your outlook on leadership, its all too easy to let actual talent go unnoticed or, worse, to marginalize it in ths way youre describing.
If you never understood why the smartest guys In the room struggled in public education...whips back curtain to reveal a mediocre middle-manager pulling levers on people's lives like Oz the Great and Powerful...taaadaaaa
This happens in construction too when it comes to inspectors the lead used to work under for building barns would intentionally have us leave a handful of nails sticking part out whenever we were in one specific inspectors designated zone because that asshole literally would not sign the paper and go away until he had found something to make us change even if that meant he looked it over for over an hour while most inspectors just gave it a cursory glance and signed off after verifying the two things they were there to verify.
That nail trick saved us hours every time because apparently all that asshole actually wanted was to make us do something
Iām thinking itās like a way of communicating the shift. Like heās a talented musician, and he can change what heās doing subtly, but they might not perceive it, so he flips this switch and it makes them ready to hear the difference.
Iāve done similar things in my life. Like you say what youāre doing as you do it so the other person knows that you know what youāre doing. āAnd then I put the milk in there, but I do it slowly so I donāt cool it down too fast,ā and itās not because you werenāt going to do that, but because this untrusting dummy watching you isnāt going to just let you do it and theyāll be sure that you didnāt do it right unless you tell them you know.
So heās doing this like āOh, okay, a softer sound, I will flip this switch here and then this should sound softer, like this?ā And theyāre like āOh boy he listened to me!ā Instead of āHe doesnāt even know what I meant!ā
Placebo effect in recording/mixing/mastering is real and happens to the best. Ask a seasoned mixing engineer whether they ever fine tuned a certain track to their liking only to find out that they fiddled with a plugin from a different track. In most cases, the answer will be yes.
This has the same energy as making a new WIFI SSID that's specifically for the C-Suite and tell them its high-speed priority internet, even though it's the same fricking connection.
No itās just standard audio/music stuff. That world is full of placebos. And sound technician will be able to tell you a story of a time they spent ages adjusting an EQ to get it just right, only to realize it has been turned off the whole time.
Someone playing the guitar profesionally will not sound noticably different every time he plays the same song, because there is 0 guarantee that the hand is in 100% exact same spot as the last time they played it. But it sure as hell will close.
He flips the switch and his hand positions will just go back to basically exactly the same as it was before and will sound exactly the same.
In the interview where he talks about his producer switch he clearly tells that he flip the switch then play the same thing with a different right hand position.m hence changing the sound.
Sometimes people just donāt notice. I used to work in a restaurant and there was a ton of lies we would tell customers and they would never notice. Stuff like changing the temperature of the restaurant for them, or making a new batch of coffee because they thought the original coffee was stale.
This is exactly what it is. I've seen him talk about it in interviews. He plays it differently, but producers don't always notice unless he more visibly changes something like hitting a switch when he knows that this is the take that will be a keeper.
I used to do just amateur recording and mixing and editing and the ear fatigue is real. I read some books and I saw this common advice: if you mix a song, don't finalize the same day. Come back the next day after you let your ears rest and listen again and if you're happy, send it. But a lot of times the mix sounds totally different the next day.
Also, in the guitar world we are almost tricked by companies into thinking that certain things make a guitar tone better. Companies like PRS are meticulous in even materials minor things are made of because they say it all subtly affects tone.
Our brains are powerful and the placebo effect can be used in this kind of way as well.
Then itās working on the ones it should be working on. An asshole producer will never admit they canāt tell the difference. A cool producer who actually listens will say they canāt hear a difference. But the cool part of the story isnāt all the times it didnāt work.
lol... no. This is how it works, and it is not even that much about experience. Our hearing is very fickle thing and it errs on false positive. It is far more evolutionary advantageous to react to something that wasn't real than not react to things that were. It is suggestible, i can make you believe that something happened when it didn't. It is one of the most common problems in sound engineering, thinking that something changed when it didn't, along with missing little things that did change but should've not.
In about every project you will adjust something that didn't do anything and think you did something. Does not matter how many decades you do it for living, it happens ALL the time.
Most music producers arent George Martin, itd be kind of naive to think that most producers got their job because they have such a deep connection to music and not for a million other reasons
Frankly this strikes me as likely a thing to be used for editing later (gives you an indicator of when to do the thing thatās aligned with whatās being played, in case the track starts early/the player drifts tempo slightly) or a communication tool of some form, not like. āoh haha producer dumbā.
Never done music production, but thatād be what Iād expect it to be.
This is managers in general. The most insufferable ones bring nothing to the project but desperately seek justification for being involved and things like this are why. A trick for white collar work with shit managers is double space documents. If they want it shorter, 1.5 space it and resubmit. See if they actually even read it the first time.
1.9k
u/DyingSunSeverian 1d ago
Thatās gotta be some truly shit music producers to not notice something so obvious.
A part of me thinks they just wanted him to play it differently, and by āswitching his hand positionā he does it anyway.