production v. arrangement - what's the difference?

the question may be a bit of a misnomer. an 'arrangement' for a song, that's obvious, is the way its parts are arranged. and 'production' refers to the wider enterprise of getting this arrangement onto tape, no? arrangement is the creative end; production is the technical. er, maybe.

Whereas production is the way that the song is actually recorded - use of natural and artificial effects, choices made by the producer and the artist in getting the song onto a recording medium.

(cross post)

And "arranged" as the actual details - what each instrument plays - as a deviation from the original score. i.e. an arrangement is a rescoring.

Come to think about it, production can basically be summed up as reverb.

There is a bit more to it:

For instance, drum sound. How to get that particular snare drum sound (sure, maybe a sort of reverb thing that too).

Also, stereo effects (and recently, also surround effects) are often the result of the production rather than the arrangement.

Bump.

What Geir's saying at the end is engineering, not production. Production is... vision, and direction, not necessarily details. I want to run parallels with the film industry. Who's the 'director' of an album?

Depends. Sometimes the artist, sometimes the producer, sometimes both.

A&R?

They're more like producers? In the film sense, I mean, getting complicated.

I want to run parallels with the film industry.

Don't.

Funny - I was gonna make a film/music comparison on that "best production job ever" thread

Who's the 'director' of an album?

James Lavelle described himself as this for 'Psyence Fiction'. lulz.

engineering is making things sound the way the producer wants them to, not unlike say a cinematographer or other creatively technical film roles are trying to achieve the feel that a director is looking for. the producer is generally the director i would say, with the song writers being the script writers and the band being the actors. and obviously those 2 jobs are done by the same group of people many times. sometimes a band works closely enough with a producer that they could be seen as co-directors, but that isnt always the case.

Bump, again.

I got a few people talking about this on twitter the other day, inspired vaguely by Four Tet tweeting that a lot of the credit being chucked at him for producing Neneh Cherry's album should have been thrown at Rocketnumbernine.

From interviews with all concerned, it seems that Neneh wrote a bunch of songs (partly in the company of her husband; but not 'with'), and then sent just the vocal stems to Rocketnumbernine, who then put together all the arrangements. Hebden then recorded them in the studio pretty transparently, going for first and second takes mostly, and, generally, taking stuff away from the mix rather than adding to. He did not, as some people seem to assume because of the nature of his own music, put together the 'backing tracks'. So he wasn't in control of arrangements; it seems like he oversaw engineering, recording, and project management, like a film director oversees cinematographers and actors and dolly grips (whatever the fuck they are) and so on and so forth.

Anyway, let's talk about the different between composing, writing, arranging, recording, engineering, producing, mixing, mastering, etc etc.

Here's a great piece with Nils Frahm talking about mastering (and other stuff) - http://www.chartattack.com/features/2014/02/27/essential-albums-nils-frahm-art-of-imaginative-mastering/

to start with the original question, arranging is a specific musical job, accurately laid out by several posters above. it is, in essence, deciding a) how to harmonize the music and b) which instruments should play each note. this is sometimes done entirely by the composer, sometimes by a band, sometimes by an independent arranger (common in some genres, almost unheard of in others), and sometimes by the producer. it is largely synonymous with "orchestration," though there are people who will cite differences (that could be its own thread, and could involve semantic needle threading).

producing is not at all a specific job. what exactly it entails differs from producer to producer, genre to genre, and artist to artist. on paper, it's the guy in charge of the recording. it may or may not include arranging. it may or may not include engineering, which, like arranging, is a specific and fairly easy to define job. it may or may not include vision, or song selection, or creating beats, or programming and/or playing music, or hiring all the other guys who will do all the other jobs, or showing up every four or five days, listening for four or five minutes and saying, "good!" or "try again!" it can involve being a babysitter or therapist or co-conspirator. it really depends.

composing and writing are synonyms, and though what they entail might seem obvious, it is not. some people consider writing to equal words and melody and nothing else. some people think rhythm and arrangement should be considered part of writing. some people will argue for various other tasks. this can get messy and heated, because writing credits are probably the single most lucrative thing that most artists and bands own. in hollywood, they have unions, agents and lawyers to sort this stuff out.

engineering, mixing and mastering are fairly discrete, definable jobs that all involve knob twiddling (or mouse clicking) with specific goals in mind.

i don't think a musc producer is generally comparable to either a film director or a film producer. different media, different chains of command and production. but in general, every creative person on a film set is serving the director, whereas in a musc studio every creative person is serving the artist. emphasis on the phrase "in general."

The thing is, there are two separate meanings of the word "Production" in dance music (where it usually means, supplying all the music for a track) vs in rock music (where it means doing the engineering and mixing) and people use them like they are interchangeable, but really though the skillsets *can* overlap (knob twiddling) they are not really the same thing at all.

And ha, my half of that twitter conversation about producing vs engineering ended up reproduced in the dialogue of my LOLnovel so guess it was helpful all around.

Sick, really, you should read the Chronicles of Mixerman. If that even exists on the web any more...

I shall have a google.

Arranging is any aspect of musical creativity that isn't topline melody or lyric writing. You change a chord sequence, rhythm pattern or song structure, that's arranging. You make a decision on sounds or instruments that would suit the song, that's arranging. In a rock band format its initially done by the band in demos, and by the producer and band as the final recordings take shape.

There's a huge variety in what the producer actually does. Sometimes they will be very hands on with recording- choosing and placing mics, applying effects, guiding performances, working on arrangements and even rewriting parts of the songs. Sometimes the producer won't have a great deal of knowledge of the technical side of the recording process and will leave a lot of that to an engineer, but will guide the sessions in different ways and make decisions about the direction of the process and music. There's a lot of man-management involved in most producing, learning how the artists operate and what their view of the final product is, and making the band trust you and your visions for their record. Ultimately what all producers share is that they are accountable to the band and label about the outcome of recordings.