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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. "Producers who aren’t also engineers, and as such, don’t have the slightest fucking idea what they’re doing in a studio, besides talking all the time. Historically, the progression of effort required to become a producer went like this: Go to college, get an EE degree. Get a job as an assistant at a studio. Eventually become a second engineer. Learn the job and become an engineer. Do that for a few years, then you can try your hand at producing. Now, all that’s required to be a full-fledged “producer” is the gall it takes to claim to be one."

Why does a record producer or recording engineer need an EE degree? They might need to repair a console, I guess, but they aren't going to design one from scratch.

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That’s mentioned in the next couple bullets but it largely comes down to

Signals processing

Noise

I assume this was before the career path was formalized enough to have its own recognition in school. You would take an EE degree and specialize in the things that are relevant to recording. Similar to how Computer Science was originally taught to and by people doing math degrees (or sometimes also EE).

You needed engineers to maintain, calibrate, tune, and operate the equipment which was retro ee components, instruments that are used for decades. But as thingbs got more reliable, solid state, software emulation, hard drives instead of magnetic tape, you don’t need that ee knowledge to get a song made.

Recording engineers frequently design components from scratch.

Yeah, he goes on to partially answer the question with respect to the engineers' role, but I still don't see what any of that has to do with production.

Nothing. This is his point. A producer doesn’t really do much, if anything.

That might have been true in the bygone era of "bands", rock music and guitar-heavy genres that Albini seemed immersed in, but in contemporary pop a producer (or team of producers) is literally all there is, plus maybe singers/songwriters.

And even if you look closer at rock, the most groundbreaking and successful acts have always been at the forefront of innovation in the sound / production department (from the Beatles to U2 or Radiohead)

design-ed. I doubt they design anything in the age of digital.

Is DSP really harder than old school circuit design?

It's mostly that you don't need to, software can make pretty much any noise you want.

Not harder, just different (modulo your definition of old school circuit design).

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