This is one question that we get asked time and time again: "Can you tell me how to be a record producer?" That's a much more complicated question than the questioner would have thought, in fact, about any music producer would have to stop and think before having a stab at giving a helpful answer to put them on the right path to music production success. This question even crops up when visiting universities where courses are supposed to answer this.
The big question to start with is what does a music producer, or record producer (same thing), do? The roles are so varied and the input required by an artist, manager or record company are different every time. That's partly the good news, there is always someone looking for your skills and your personality.
Traditionally a record producer got the first break recording music as a recording engineer who got on well with the artist, eg Ken Scott with David Bowie. Another route was to be a musician working in studios a fair bit getting an understanding of the business and also bringing musical input and direction if required. We notice that there seem to be more ex-drummers as producers than anyone else, maybe down to sitting in the studio control room for so long while other band mates overdub for months and pick up the skills.
Some older producers may shake their heads when some people call themselves a music producer these days. The fact is, times keep moving on and the industry changes and evolves, what works well today will not tomorrow so if you are unwilling to keep adapting you'll be going backwards.
So, back to the question of how to be a record producer... There are a million different answers. We have been been recording music producer interviews with well over 300 producers during the site's 14 years and each producer tells a different story about how they got their first music producing job. The common thread is a determination to succeed which spurs on the desire to learn, to network and to work with others to build up recording skills, people skills, recording software skills and much more.
We don't have the only record producer website in the World but we have been dedicated in recording many hundreds of exclusive interviews with music producers, spend a week watching some of them and you will have all of the answers! Best of all, each video can be watched for free.