Ask ten people in music what a producer does and you will get ten answers. It is one of the few job titles that has drifted so far that an artist trying to hire one often has no idea what they are actually paying for. In this episode Simon and Terry try to pin it down, not to gatekeep, but because a clear definition is genuinely useful when you are putting a record together.
The real question is not “who gets to call themselves a producer”. It is “what is the job, so you can tell whether it is being done”. And their answer starts by splitting the word into three.
Three Kinds of Producer
As they see it, there are three valid roles hiding under the one word. The traditional producer, which is what the two of them do, oversees the whole project: managing the team, the budget and the schedule, coaching performances and steering the creative direction. The beat maker, common in hip-hop and EDM, builds the instrumental for an artist to sing over, and is honestly closer to a composer or arranger. And the self-producing artist does the lot on a laptop. None is better than the others, they are just different jobs, and most of the confusion comes from treating them as one.
The Word Itself
Some of the muddle is borrowed from television and film, where “producer” means the person who funds the thing and keeps it funded. Simon tells the story of a TV producer who was subsidising an artist, sat at the back of the session doing nothing, and kept reminding the room that he was the producer. Asked, gently, what the chord progression of the song was, he said he did not know anything about that, he was just producing. He was not wrong for his world. The word simply means something different in a studio.
The Self-Producing Artist
They clearly love that this role exists, it is how both of them started, and the outlay now is basically a laptop. But it comes with caveats. Do not try to make your demos sound like finished records, leave wiggle room. Be honest about whether your genre and outcome are achievable with your resources, because trying to make a two-hundred-thousand-dollar record in GarageBand will have you blaming yourself when it is not your fault. And know when to hand off. Even people who can do everything outsource, for fresh ears if nothing else.
“You can’t expect a consumer to imagine the potential in something. What you put out is what the listener hears.”
Why Not Engineer and Produce at Once
One of the sharpest practical points is why Simon rarely agrees to engineer and produce the same session. The two jobs pull on different halves of the brain. Engineering is meters, mic position, tone. Producing is whether that was the right inflection, the right energy, the right take. Trying to hold both means constant, exhausting context switching, and their sense is that it takes forty-five minutes or more just to get back into flow after jumping between them. Hire the engineer, and the producer can actually watch the room.
Vocal Production Is Not Vocal Engineering
The clearest illustration of the role is vocals. Running six takes and comping the best of them and tuning it is vocal engineering. Vocal production is the ninety-minute conversation about what the lyric means, setting emotional anchors so you can put the singer back into the right state on cue, scheduling the croaky verse for the morning and the belted climax for the end of the day. It is directing a performance, not just capturing one.
How to Hire One
All of this pays off when you are choosing who to work with. Write down where you actually need support, then interview for it. Ask how they would handle your record. If you need session players and they say “my mate plays drums”, that is a flag. If they ask the genre first and then name the right player for a funk feel versus a rock feel, that is a producer who understands the medium.
Final Thoughts
Once the word is defined, you can look at your own project and notice what is missing. Maybe the person you hired is really just an engineer, and the producer role is sitting open. That is fine, as long as you know it. And the cleanest one-line definition they land on doubles as the whole point of the job.
“An engineer will capture what’s there. A producer will fight to make it better.”
