Music directors and Music producers are so easy to look up as they are so different. There is no confusion between the two roles as there is in film and theater. In fact they may not even cross each others paths. For this reason I can define the two separately. First is
Music Director
This job can actually be a variety of things:
- Director of music in a film/ theater/ t.v production
- Director of music played in a radio station
- Head of music in an institution like a school
- Bandmaster
- Head organist or Choir master
- Someone who makes the creative decisions in a live performance (more commonly known as a conductor in Britain)
Any way this person will often really have to fulfill the roles of principal conductor, Artistic director and Community arts leader as well as sometimes dealing with budget and schedule.
The director would be employed by someone, so would often already have musicians to work with. Once there they would have to do quite a bit. Their timeline would be something like this:
- Choose Music
- Check score availability, may have to rearrange for instruments available
- Interpret score (e.g. pace, balance of instruments and voice etc.)
- Schedule rehearsals and performances
- Consider location and any artistic choices e.g. are you doing it in blacks or costumes
- Lead rehearsals
- Conduct the performance(s)
Now lets consider the other side of the court.
Music Producer
This job appears to be more to do with records. There are probably Music producers that help with Lady Gaga's next extravaganza, but when you say Music producer most people will think you mean a record producer.
Now these people can be divided into two main camps of Executive producer and Creative producer. We are mainly concerned with the more creative producer person. This is because:
Executive producer- Looks at finances
Creative producer- Works in the production of the music
As you can see an Executive producers job is less meaty to talk about.
Anyway moving swiftly on, the producers job is as a bit of a Project Manager. Apparently they can be compared to a film director in their involvement. They guide the making of the record and can often also be musicians themselves so can contribute musically. Their timeline may look something like this:
- Choose artist
- Allocate Budget
- Gather ideas for songs
- Write up some and possibly do scratch recordings, contribute to writing
- Choose best songs
- Coach the artists
- Schedule rehearsals and recordings
- Control the recording
- Supervise or do the post production arranging of song
Engineer- More involved in post production editing and settings
Mentor- Gets others to engineer and spends more time mentoring artists and helping them develop
Golden Ticket- A producer who may have a template for their artists, who seems to be of the habit of propelling them into success
Re mixer- Will remix already produced songs
Musician- May be very involved with writing the songs
Artist- Also performs in song
Visionary- Always trying to create something new
Most producers are probably a mixture of the lot. But this is a general list.
The Difference
This can really be summed up by the words Live and Records. Directors are putting together a live production with a team, producers are developing their artists tracks and putting them together on a CD or what ever music release thing we are going towards.
This was definitely the most easy category as the differences were so clear cut. It took me about 10 minutes short of the full two hours to do this section . I quite enjoyed it, but came up against a lot of terms I didn't really know of. And I found out a lot about how they make music. Its a lot like film and theater really, just trying to get all the elements of an art form together in such a way as it isn't a disaster.
Thank you for reading.
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