A&R team (Artists and Repertoires) In the 1880s, the record industry began by simply having the artist perform at a
phonograph. In 1924, the trade journal
Talking Machine World, covering the phonography and record industry, reported that Eddie King,
Victor Records' manager of the "New York
artist and repertoire department", had planned a set of recordings in Los Angeles. Later, folklorist
Archie Green called this perhaps the earliest printed use of
A&R man. Actually, it says neither "A&R man" nor even "A&R", an initialism perhaps coined by
Billboard magazine in 1946, and entering wide use in the late 1940s. In the 1920s and 1930s, A&R executives, like
Ben Selvin at
Columbia Records,
Nathaniel Shilkret at Victor Records, and Bob Haring at
Brunswick Records became the precursors of record producers, supervising recording and often leading session orchestras. During the 1940s,
major record labels increasingly opened official A&R departments, whose roles included supervision of recording. Meanwhile, independent recording studios opened, helping originate
record producer as a specialty. But despite a tradition of some A&R men writing music,
record production still referred to just the manufacturing of record discs.
Record producers After
World War II, pioneering A&R managers who transitioned influentially to record production as now understood, while sometimes owning independent labels, include
J. Mayo Williams and
John Hammond. Upon moving from Columbia Records to
Mercury Records, Hammond appointed
Mitch Miller to lead Mercury's popular recordings in New York. Miller then produced country-pop crossover hits by
Patti Page and by
Frankie Laine, moved from Mercury to Columbia, and became a leading A&R man of the 1950s. During the decade, A&R executives increasingly directed songs' sonic signatures, although many still simply teamed singers with musicians, while yet others exercised virtually no creative influence. The term
record producer in its current meaning—the creative director of song production—appearing in a 1953 issue of
Billboard magazine, became widespread in the 1960s. Still, a formal distinction was elusive for some time more. A&R managers might still be creative directors, like
William "Mickey" Stevenson, hired by
Berry Gordy, at the
Motown record label.
Tape recording In 1947, the American market gained audio recording onto magnetic tape. At the record industry's 1880s dawn, rather, recording was done by
phonograph, etching the sonic waveform vertically
into a cylinder. By the 1930s, a gramophone etched it laterally
across a disc. Constrained in tonal range, whether bass or treble, and in
dynamic range, records made a grand, concert piano sound like a small, upright piano, and maximal duration was four and a half minutes. by recording a musical element while playing a previously recorded record,
Les Paul developed a recording technique called "sound on sound". By this, the final recording could be built piece by piece and tailored, effecting an editing process. In one case, Paul produced a song via 500 recorded discs. But, besides the tedium of this process, it serially degraded the sound quality of previously recorded elements, rerecorded as ambient sound. Yet in 1948, Paul adopted tape recording, enabling true multitrack recording by a new technique, "
overdubbing". To enable overdubbing, Paul revised the tape recorder itself by adding a second playback head, and terming it the
preview head. Joining the preexisting recording head, erase head, and playback head, the preview head allows the artist to hear the extant recording over headphones playing it in synchrony, "in sync", with the present performance being recorded alone on an isolated track. although many such songs are officially credited to specialist producers. Yet especially influential was
the Beach Boys, whose band leader
Brian Wilson took over from his father
Murry within a couple of years after the band's commercial breakthrough. By 1964, Wilson had taken Spector's techniques to unseen sophistication. Wilson alone produced all Beach Boys recordings between 1963 and 1967. Using multiple studios and multiple attempts of instrumental and vocal tracks, Wilson selected the best combinations of performance and audio quality, and used tape editing to assemble a composite performance.
Digital production The 1980s advent of digital processes and formats rapidly replaced analog processes and formats, namely, tape and
vinyl. Although recording onto quality tape, at least half an inch wide and traveling 15 inches per second, had limited "tape hiss" to silent sections, digital's higher
signal-to-noise ratio, SNR, abolished it. Digital also imparted to the music a perceived "pristine" sound quality, if also a loss of analog recordings' perceived "warm" quality and better-rounded bass. Yet whereas editing tape media requires physically locating the target audio on the ribbon, cutting there, and splicing pieces, editing digital media offers inarguable advantages in ease, efficiency, and possibilities. In the 1990s, digital production reached affordable home computers via production software. By now, recording and mixing are often centralized in DAWs,
digital audio workstations—for example,
Pro Tools,
Logic Pro,
Ableton,
Cubase,
Reason, and
FL Studio—for which
plugins, by third parties, effect
virtual studio technology. Physical devices involved include the main mixer,
MIDI controllers to communicate among equipment, the recording device itself, and perhaps effects gear that is outboard. Yet literal recording is sometimes still analog, onto tape, whereupon the raw recording is
converted to a digital signal for processing and editing, as some producers still find audio advantages to recording onto tape. Still, some criticize digital instruments and workflows for excess automation, allegedly impairing creative or sonic control. In any case, as production technology has drastically changed, so have the knowledge demands, although DAWs enables novices, even teenagers at home, to learn production independently. Some have attained professional competence before ever working with an artist. == Women in producing ==