RealMusician said:

I think you are taking it too far. As a producer I'm sure Quincy Jones nor Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis ever had to worry about all that. They just had to hear the record and decide what to put on or pull off. THAT is the kind people here are talking about. By your definition then Prince has been doing a BAD job of production lately imo.

Quincy Jones, Jam & Lewis actually had to do all that - Quincy had a role even in deciding what kind of promotional shots they were going to use of Michael for the records - but yeah, that's taking it a bit too far. That definition has shifted from its original meaning and doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the cinema industry, for example.

The person who chooses the microphones is usually the engineer, not the producer (although the producer in the traditional sense of course has to approve of most everything heard on the end-result). It's however sort of silly to automatically expect that the person who makes the decisions on "which microphones to use" would be by definition the same person as who decides on the packaging of the record, and judging by that whether the verb "to produce" is applicable as an over-arching term to describe a situation. C'mon.

If we really want to be splitting hairs on the use of terminology, then what RealMusician lists there are many of the tasks associated to the role of the PRODUCER (a title for a person) in the context of making a record, but that does not mean the term "producer" would in itself define what the verb "to produce" connotes. Yet, people still seem to somehow romantically cling onto the age-old idea that the song consists of the song as some sort of a "metaphysical" entity - a pure unadultered song - and what they refer to with "production" is just the icing or the clothing of that imaginary thing. In other words: you could traditionally make a distinction between the composition as it is notated and its recorded performance; but this is hardly the case with today's music where the compositional process often takes place during the actual recording process. So the song may have sounded sort of "overproduced" already by the time Prince had laid down the first drum and guitar parts. In the end it has a lot to do with the choice of equipment, and I think this is one of the parts of the production of his records where Prince has failed to give a sufficient amount of attention more lately.

In fact, in order for a lot of stuff to sound "sparse" you have to intentionally try to make them sound sparse. The more polished end-result tends to come out pretty effortlessly in a today's studio setting. So with today's recording methods there's actually a bit of a struggle to get the music sound like "back in the old days" - one has to downproduce the material if anything these days. It often goes that way around, the "rough demo-like quality" does not necessarily exist there buried somehow underneath the typical commercial CD release.

Do you think his need for perfection takes his talents to this amazing
level and the master of all gifts he has makes it this way and he is not aware of it. and since the standards of his friends /coworkers are at this level also that is what makes him who he is?

novabrkr said:

Sure.

Although I still don't like the term "over-produced", since it implies that there's too much of something. Too much of what?
If I have too many songs on an album, does that mean it's over-produced? Too many instruments? Can you spend too many hours in the studio, or too much money?

Unless we really know otherwise (and usually we don't), we must always assume that any work of art is meant to be exactly the way it is.
So when we say that a record has too much of something - whether it's reverb, guitar solos, or song structures - it's as if we actually knew what the "proper amount" would be.
And do we, really?

Personally, I can't think of a single Prince track that I would call over-produced (or under-produced, for that matter).
I might say that I don't like certain stuff or certain elements - such as the density of "Eye No", the drum sound on "Life O' The Party",
the corny little trumpet on "Man In A Uniform", etc - but I still wouldn't call them over-produced. I would assume that Prince fulfilled his intentions,
and that the songs were produced exactly the way they were supposed to.

Just because I perhaps don't like it, and might have done it differently myself, doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with it.

Simple and straightforward is best.

What's that quote? Anyone can complicate things. Genius simplifies.

RealMusician said:

Yeah, this I was sort of trying to convey myself. Though I guess in the simplistic case of reverb it is easy to tell when it's a bit overdone (well, like you said it's not a case of being "overproduced", since it could have been just as easy to have less of it by just not having the controls at such extreme settings - so it was just potentially a bad production choice).

But what I was objecting against as well is that people tend to have this abstract idea that underneath the recorded performance there lies the unadultered song somewhere. Whereas, in the case of most modern music the recording itself is nevertheless the only thing we can draw our impressions from - and only based on what we are hearing we might come up with the ideo of something "being too much" in there. It is easier to criticize a track like "Last December" or "Strays Of The World" for having all the multiple sections going on all possible directions one after another - he could have slimmed down the parts easily - and since editing out stuff could be even to some extent done by yourself on PC if you really wished to. It is a whole lot harder to suggest that something like "Pheromone", "The Love We Make" or "The Sun, The Moon & Stars" are overproduced tracks though, because they are so strongly based on the sounds and textures of sound used themselves, If you take something away, they'd often change considerably - or might not work at all.

The common idea seems to be sometimes that the track would have been a whole lot better at one point, then they just iditiocally ruined it in the studio due to too much studio trickery. While this might be true in some cases, I think in many cases in the modern studio setting the "too fancy" parts were there to begin with already in the early tracking phases and set out even the tonality and the key for the pieces themselves. Another thing I've mentioned is that the bandwith of synthesizers Prince was using earlier was far much more restricted in the old days (though I prefer that sound myself), so even if you had several tracks of them they would not take up so much space. One reason why a track like "$" may sound "less overproduced" than the new version of "U're Gonna C Me" is because the main rhythm part is carried out by an electric guitar, which is actually a rather limited sound in terms of how much frequency range it occupies. Something like that quite automatically tends to sound "rootsier" upon the first couple of impressions.

He could start to use his old synths again, though. There should be a petition.

Too much of effects and instruments, that's why came to start this thread. Usually I like it but there are times where I just don't think it's necessary to have someone whisper something backwards, hear animal sounds, women moaning, someone screaming or "farting", tons of different instruments etcetera etcetera, all in one tune. Some songs just have way too much stuff going on.


Btw, thanks guys for all your thoughts on this, keep them comin!
[Edited 5/20/09 9:47am]

eelco said:

My impression of why he did another version of U'RE GONNA C ME -- it was a song he was comfy with using a new medium (and previous aversion with), Pro-Tools, to breath fresh life into it.

Crazy overproduction and labyrinthian layering would be the album that comes to mind first. But IMO it works, amazingly genuis, and gives that work it's identity.

novabrkr said:

great post

.
[Edited 1/2/10 1:24am]