cigar standing at the back of the
room, saying to his artists, ‘I’m
gonna make you lots of money!
I’m gonna make you a star!’ It is
actually, essentially, a directorial role, and is analogous to a
film director,” Parsons said. “As
producers, we select material,
choose artists, and we try to get
the best performances from the
artists like a director tries to get
the best performances from actors.”
He is, however, quick to remind
that the engineer is equally important in capturing the best
qualities of a recording, and the
work the engineer does can often be quite physical. “The engineer is to the cameraman what
the producer is to the director.
He sets up the microphones to
get the right sound; he tweaks
the sound on the recording consoles, balances everything out,
and gets it onto tape or disk. A
“The old-fashioned notion of what a producer
was, in terms of the public perception, was
probably a guy with a big, fat cigar standing at
the back of the room, saying to his artists,
‘I’m gonna make you lots of money!”
New Jersey Stage
January 2015
pg 28