What Producers Really Listen For

If you've never sat in a control room while someone chooses between takes, you'd assume it's a technical job. Pick the one that's in tune. Pick the one where the timing's tightest. Pick the one with the cleanest signal.

I’ve personally worked on a session where the “in tune” one had genuinely terrible timing, the one with the best timing sounded terribly out of tune, and when they finally nailed it, the engineer had left an extra mic open on the same channel and the Sax solo was punctuated by the snare whose rattle had been left on. Easy to fix nowadays…

However, much though you might expect that, that's not really what's happening, or at least not with anyone good. What they're actually listening for is much harder to name because it’s all about feel.

Whether they believe you and your performance.

Whether the take has that specific, slightly indefinable quality of someone meaning what they're playing, right there, in that moment, rather than going through the (albeit correct) motions.

You'll hear producers reach for odd, almost embarrassing language to describe it.

That one's got it. That one's trying too hard. That one sounds like it's apologising.

None of that shows up on the VU meter. A perfectly tuned, perfectly timed take can still sound like nothing at all, and a slightly rough one can stop a room, because tuning and timing were never actually the thing being measured. Tension was. Confidence was. Whether there's a person actually present inside the performance, or just a competent rendering of the correct notes.

The best take is rarely the most correct take. It's the one where the players forgot they were recording and so forgot to be careful.

I think this is the part that's hardest to teach anyone starting out, because it can't be practised the way scales can. You can practise accuracy. You can't really drill believability, not directly, because the moment you start performing "believability" you've already lost it, the same way you can't try to look natural in a photo.

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen recorded some solo acoustic demos on a 4 track cassette recorder in his bedroom. The tape had everything wrong you could think of, tape hiss, room noise, distortion and a weak ghostly vocal. Once signed he was able to bring his famous E Street Band into the studio to record the tracks properly, but quickly realised that the refined studio ‘polish’ ruined the bleak ambience of the original recording and opted to master and release the original recordings.

It was called ‘Nebraska’. It’s now seen as a masterpiece.