ernestsewell said:

I've been sayin he's needed a producer for years.. we would actually get a prince album that wouldn't go stale after two months.

I believe in the 80's his creative outlet was so strong he didn't actually need one.. but when the 90's came around.. things started to sound stale, and I think he had his hand in too many genre's like rap and a few others and tried to fit it all on a disk and it sounded awful.

Sdldawn said:

He doesn't need a producer to capture his sound as much as he needs a producer who was also a critic, like Paul McCartney had for Chaos & Creation. Someone who can help him focus his vision & point out weak spots in his songs.
[Edited 1/6/10 10:53am]

NDRU said:

exactly. Chaos is a good example also. I still think Nigel could have knocked off a couple but for the most part it was consistent and paul sounded really good considering his age.

My studio experience is mostly with live rock bands, not beatmakers and modern R&B, but I imagine it's basically the same.

For any recording you need a producer and an engineer; they can be the same person.

The engineer does everything technical - sets up the mics, plugs them in, turns the tape machine on and off.

The producer though is the decision maker. Do we like the sound with the mics pointed straight at the drum, or tilted 45 degrees? 1 inch from the heads? Further? The engineer will make the adjustments but the producer will make the decision which one sounds best.

Then when the band starts playing, the producer decides whether they've got a perfect take or need to re-do it. He might decide the song would sound better a little faster and tell the band to do a take that way. Is it better? He gets to make the call.

The mixing stage also usually involves an engineer and a producer, and again there are a million decisions to be made. Would the drums sound better a little louder? Should we do something to the tone of that guitar to make it stand out? Maybe a little reverb? How do we set the soundstage - which elements are far left or right and which are more centered? Someone's gotta call the shots.

Nowadays there are also "mixers" who work independently. For instance Butch Vig "produced" Nirvana's Nevermind - handled the recording, told the band when they had the killer take etc - but then handed over the master tapes to Andy Wallace, whose only involvement was doing the mix. And studio guys will argue to this day about which one of them is TRULY responsible for that album sounding the way it does. Wallace became a millionaire doing this in the 90s, and he never has to set foot in a room with a musician.

And as some have pointed out there are producers who bring other skills to the table such as arranging, or even getting their fingers in the songwriting. Todd Rundgren and Quincy Jones are well known for total front-to-back involvement in the projects they work on. Expect them to choose which ten songs make the record, write the horn charts, maybe tweak the choruses.

The earlier post that used the metaphor of a movie director is apt. The director doesn't necessarily write the script or act in the film (though some do) but the finished product is the result of a million little decisions that person made.

It's possible to make records "without" a producer but it's very challenging. Was that a good take? Two guys say yes and two want to do it over, and nobody wants to tell anyone else what to do. Someone has to make that call and tell people what to do or the record never gets finished. Or, OK it gets finished, but nobody really made any choices and it doesn't sound distinctive.