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Comment by antoinevg | Hacker News Reader

The only reason this is a problem is because, in the EDM scene, "producer" has somehow become confused with "artist"

Or to put it another way:

George Martin didn't write play a note or write a single song on the Beatle's albums but there was no taint attached to him being credited as the producer.

Language is a funny beast.

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In hip hop and electronic music, "producer" is pretty much synonymous with "artist". In hip hop the MC is the one whose voice you hear, and the producer is, well, everything else: the beats and melodies in addition to the more traditional producer stuff like arrangement and mastering. Electronic music also follows this paradigm. As there is typically no live voice (any voice is typically coming from samples), the producer is the entirety of the production.

> George Martin didn't write play a note or write a single song on the Beatle's albums

I believe he wrote orchestrations and played keyboard instruments on a good number of Beatles songs.

in dance music the title "producer" has meant song writer / recording artist since the late 70s.

and George Martin wrote an awful lot of notes for the Beatles.

also there are many classic rock producers who don't actually touch the mixing desk or microphones. that's the engineer's job. Geoff Emerick did the mixing for the Beatles and he wasn't even allowed to move the microphones. he had to call in the studio mic engineers to do that. company policy.

In music the producer traditionally supervises the engineers and to some extent the artist. The producer explains what he/she wants, the engineers just implement it.

For example, artist comes in with guitar, a chord progression, and a song. Producers says 'let's plug your guitar in a Marshall Amp and mike the cab, then we'll double-track that with the direct signal.' Engineers goes and sets everything up, and at most makes suggestions on what sort of microphone to use or that this configuration sounds especially good with a bit of room sound, and takes care of setting up the mixing desk to avoid distortion on the recording and phasing between the direct and amplified signals.

Most producers start out as engineers rather than musicians. Their specialty is tone and mixing, which also feeds into song structure and arrangement.

The "producer" role in the 1960s was very different from what it is today. It wasn't until Dub Reggae was developed in Jamaica that the producer became more of a creator than someone sitting back and making sure the track sounded good while the band played it. A music producer and a television producer had similar levels of creative control, for example. But when Dub was created, that all changed. The producer became the focus of the track, because dub is just basic reggae that's been re-sampled and bathed in reverb, with some cool space sound effects thrown in. In this paradigm, the producer was also the DJ, sometimes (like in King Tubby's case) running their own soundsystem. Dub created the framework by which hip-hop and EDM are created and performed. But that didn't happen until the late 1970s.

I don't see it as a problem. As a consumer and amateur producer of EDM the only surprise that registers is that someone thought this was newsworthy. The practice doesn't bother me and I'm not sure anyone should feel threatened by it. I suppose fans might rightly feel cheated.

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