When the songwriting and arranging is done and all the sounds captured, it’s partially the producer’s job to make them gel together, using all the various tools of the trade to make them speak to each other meaningfully. But that sense of wizardry is still central to the job title, even if the instruments to be orchestrated were cut to wax by musicians in different decades on different continents, rather than different takes at the same session. In the era of modern hip-hop, a producer is as likely to be a teenage girl on a laptop as a gnome-like rock sage behind a huge console. For the rock generation, the producer was the Man in the Booth – and it was almost always a man – a shadowy, Oz-like figure just visible beyond the glass of the control room and the seemingly endless yardage of the mixing board, teasing sliders and twiddling knobs, eliciting a coherent, harmonious work of art from the various recorded elements of a session the way a conductor conjured a symphony out of the various sections of an orchestra. There is a certain essential continuity, however, to the role of producer that runs through different decades, genres and personalities. A credit of “producer” can mean many different things – ranging from “DJ” to “ghostwriter” to “financier” – depending on who is carrying the title and what sort of record label their credit is printed on.
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