What does a record producer do?
A record producer is like a film director, in charge of all aspects of the making of the record: picking studios, deciding the additional musicians, what type of recording process and how much budget is available for the studio time, even down to food and taxis. It’s quite a wide encompassing role. How did you get your job? I left school at 17 and I started straight away in a recording studio, initially as a tea boy then trainee tape operator. After a year or so as an assistant I progressed to being a fully-fledged recording engineer. I worked with producer Bruce Johnson – best known as a member of the Beach Boys – as an assistant. He encouraged me saying, ‘You should be a record producer, your talents are wasted just as a balance engineer’. He took me to California where I learned an awful lot about being a record producer, I owe quite a debt. I was trained as an engineer by a famous classical engineer Mike Ross. Those foundations taught me an awful lot about microphone placement and
