Coproduction in the Recording Studio

Perspectives from the Vocal Booth

Rod Davies

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367705510
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000517026
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Coproduction in the Recording Studio: Perspectives from the Vocal Booth details how recording studio environments affect performance in the vocal booth.

Drawing on interviews with professional session singers, this book considers sociocultural and sociotechnical theory, the modern home studio space, as well as isolation and self-recording in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is cutting-edge reading for advanced undergraduates, scholars and professionals working in the disciplines of recording studio production, vocal performance, audio engineering and music technology.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003146865-1

Aims and focus

This is an untold story. A story about recording studio production, which in recent years has grown as a field of research but has not yet borne clear witness to the voices of the singers behind the glass. This book aims to help us understand what session singers do, within the scope and context of the Australian music industry between the late 1970s and today. I examine how changes to technology and recording environments have changed the nature of session singing, and how social and cultural changes have marked even greater shifts in recent years. By foregrounding the traditional organisational system of the recording studio with contemporary testimonies of session singer experiences, we may see clearly the way new technologies and new expectations have shifted the old framework and created a new type of coproduction, challenging former expectations and asking us to reconsider how a work in the recording studio is both coproduced and acknowledged in a contemporary cultural, social, technical and financial sense.

This book does not interview producers or engineers. It does not claim to represent perspectives from both sides of the glass, but rather a clear and unobstructed vocal booth perspective. It is my hope that when you are finished reading, you will be informed and challenged by some of the ideas presented. You might agree or disagree, but above all, I hope you will consider these perspectives when you form your own ideas about what coproduction in the recording studio looks like today.

The thesis of this book is as follows:

• Expectations of roles, responsibilities and processes within the recording studio system have been built upon traditional notions of coproduction. Yet even within the traditional system, ambiguities exist in relation to roles, responsibilities and processes.
• Change that was driven by technology in the late 1990s was the first major shift towards combining these roles and responsibilities and thus changing the processes of coproduction.
• The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has been the second major shift, challenging an array of expectations, roles, responsibilities and processes. However, many of these changes have not been acknowledged. Up until now, they have remained hidden, invisible to people outside the domain, and muted in tacit understanding to those inside the domain. This was not a technological change but rather a societal transformation that precipitated a cultural change.

To most outsiders and many insiders, perspectives from the vocal booth are ambiguous, unwritten and unexamined. This book aims to change that, not by prescribing what coproduction should look like or what the outcome of negotiations in the recording studio should be, but rather by equipping participants with knowledge that can assist in making the practices fair, effective and efficient. In so doing, it will hopefully interrogate the question ‘what do session singers actually do?’

By exploring this question in depth, and thus investigating the various types of coproduction that emerge from the discussion, conclusions may be drawn regarding what the implications might be for models of industry and education.

Scope

Defining recording studio production

In order to understand the recording studio domain, one must understand its cultural fabric, which is based on a particular organisational system and long-standing social norms. Cultural practices in the recording studio have been largely based on traditional roles that individuals have played in the recording studio environment over many years, including a producer, an engineer, musicians and songwriters or composers, who work together to coproduce a musical outcome.

At the centre of the collaboration is the producer, a role Howlett (2012) describes as a ‘nexus’ through which the work of the artist, technology and commercial interest come together. Moorefield (2005) describes how this perception has grown over the years and was catalysed by the emergence of individuals such as George Martin, Phil Spectre and Brian Eno, whose work greatly influenced modern popular music and culture. Most of the credit for creative decision-making in the recording studio is given to the producer, but it would be false to suggest that other participants do not contribute to the dissemination of ideas as well.

The studio engineer controls the tangible technical aspects of a recording session, a role that became more and more specialised as technology advanced throughout the 1950s and 1960s (Horning, 2004; Théberge, 2004). The engineer works with the producer to ‘deliver particular styles of sound on a recording’ (Watson, 2014) and to do it efficiently and instinctively. The role might involve placing microphones in optimal positions in the studio along with appropriate sound dampening, routing audio signals between recording spaces and control rooms (both tracking and headphone monitoring), managing effects and software plug-ins, and achieving consistent sound levels on input (recording) in order to preserve sound quality and fidelity, and output (monitoring) in order to optimise and preserve participants’ listening and hearing. In addition to the tangible technical aspects, engineers should also have good listening skills and be able to communicate clearly with the producer in terms of aesthetics and to effectively ‘engineer the performance’ (Horning, 2004).

The musician makes up the traditional triumvirate of recording studio personnel by providing the musical sounds to be recorded. In the traditional notion of this organisational system, musicians are present with the producer and engineer in the recording studio, taking direction from the producer and performing takes, which are captured by the technologies operated by the studio engineer.

In addition, there are other stakeholders who have direct interest in the work, namely publishers, record companies, advertising agencies, songwriters, recording artists, and other clients who may range from private individuals to large corporate enterprises.

While it is useful to assign labels to these individuals (as they appear on the credits of an album sleeve), in practice the delineation of these roles is less than clear (Davis & Parker, 2013; Moorefield, 2005). Mellor (1996) identifies the roles of ‘engineer-producer’ and ‘musician-producer’, while there has also been a modern emergence of the producer as composer or songwriter (Moorefield, 2005). As Driver (2015, pp. 44–45) remarks, ‘analysing the collaborative mix in the recording studio by attempting to analyse discrete individual roles is problematic, as these roles are flexible and blurred in practice’.

One reason for this ambiguity is that the recording studio is often a site of contestation of ideas between its participants (McIntyre, 2008a) and how these struggles play out can be decided by the various degrees of capital each participant controls (Bourdieu, 1990). Cultural capital is derived through an understanding of a symbolic system of conventions, knowledges and techniques that are required to be a creative contributor in the environment (McIntyre, 2008a). Usually, the producer and engineer earn their roles as a result of their high level of cultural capital. Musicians are often valued just as highly for their social capital, which is determined by how ‘good’ they are to work with. Publishers, record companies, artists and advertising companies are often the chief stakeholders in the project and therefore typically hold the greatest economic capital. And finally, in each role, there is the possibility that an individual’s ‘celebrity’ attaches an amount of symbolic capital to the equation.

In most scenarios, the holder of the greatest economic capital will hire an individual who holds a large amount of cultural capital to facilitate the recording process. This person is usually the producer, whose role is to lead the coproduction, bring all the pieces together and provide final oversight so that the best outcome can be achieved. To do this, they determine the other participants who are required, which includes the engineer and musicians.

Session musicians, who are often the last in the chain of ‘hires’, account for a large proportion of production within the music industry worldwide. As Williams (2010, p. 59) points out, ‘much popular music is in fact made by unknown, unidentified musicians, hired collaborators who work out of the public eye in the recording studio or in the shadows of the concert stage’. These hidden musicians include session singers, who are a ‘specialized group of singing professionals skilled to perform in the studio’ (Campelo, 2015). Often their task is to record, from ‘first sight’, a song that is yet to be defined, which must be learned, developed and performed, all in the one recording session.

This book focuses on session singers because firstly, this rare skill is not widely understood, and secondly, because as we shall see, this is just one of the many skills a session singer brings to the coproduction process. When these hidden performers step into the recording studio they become the centre of attention, integral to the sound, the way the message is communicated and the overall aesthetic of the final outcome. As Williams (2010, pp. 63–64) states:

They must be malleable, moving from unobtrusive scenery to the center of attention and back again. They must shadow and support, or jump-start, initiate and generate momentum and excitement. They must simultaneously project, and be devoid of personality … Yet, freelance musicians must be able to deliver more than the expected right notes, the most successful musicians deliver the unexpected, the execution of particular and unique musical choices that define an identity to employers and to fellow session players.

Defining the three ‘waves’ of recording studio production

While identity and an advanced skillset have always been integral to the session musician’s toolkit, technological, social and cultural movements over the past 30 to 40 years have changed the way this toolkit is applied in the co-production process. In the sections below, I suggest definitions for three ‘waves’ that symbolise these movements.

The first wave – larger purpose-built studios

Professional studios of the 1950s and 1960s were full of new technologies that relied on skilled staff. Sound engineers were trained professionals who operated the mechanics in concert with the acoustics of large reverberant spaces that were designed ‘to “capture” a “natural” performance’. (Bell, 2018, p. 15). Studios were ‘formed for their acoustic properties’ (Gibson, 2005, p. 193), which required large physical spaces and economic resources to do so (p. 197). These were ‘highly regimented and bureaucratised institutions’ (Leyshon, 2009, p. 1319), which established professional organisational structures to match the high standards of the physical and technological structures.

By the late 1970s, technology had escalated rapidly with previous technology supplanted by ‘more compact and replicable successor(s)’ (Bell, 2018, p. 20). The release of the digital reverb dramatically changed both recording practices and the architecture of the studios themselves, with new approaches to ‘divide and isolate’ the recorded sounds giving rise to relatively smaller and more isolated recording spaces. Yet, throughout these major renovations, notions of specialists and custodians of the recording practices remained.

The 1970s, 80s and 90s were a boom time for session musicians in Australia, which was due in large part to the laws regulating advertising. All products advertised on Australian television and radio in this era were required to be recorded in Australia using local producers, engineers and musicians. This included advertisements from the US and UK, which would be ‘re-voiced’ before going to air in Australia. Budgets were large and work was plentiful, but in 1998, a change in Australian government policy spelled the beginning of the end for this lucrative industry. New legislation (Commonwealth of Australia, 1998) permitted the ‘parallel importation of non-pirated copies of sound recordings’ (Papadopoulos, 2000, p. 340), and opened the way for recordings made overseas to be broadcast on local media, a decision that decimated the local producers of content and made it much more difficult to sustain a thriving session music industry. But even bigger changes were yet to come.

The second wave – home studios

As far back as the late 1960s, people began establishing do-it-yourse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of illustrations Page
• Participants Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Stepping into the sociocultural space
• 3 Stepping into the creative space
• 4 Stepping into the sociotechnical space
• 5 Stepping into the remote recording space
• 6 What does this mean?
• Appendix 1: Case study 1: empathy
• Appendix 2: Case study 2: co-option
• Appendix 3: Case study 3: compromised music
• Index