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| quote: | Originally posted by kewlness
One person produced (wrote) the essay
Another person engineered (proofread) the essay
Basically producing involves making the actual track itself.
Engineers then apply mastering to the tracks to make all the volumes of the CD sound equivalent, mix the different parts of the track to give it a good mix of different sounds, and apply a little bit of compression to make the overall sound louder (shitty engineers tend to overcompress to make the track sound louder but losing sound quality) |
That would be a mastering engineer. Don't generalise, as there are mainly three types of engineers (of course there are more, but the three categories are the main ones).
The recording engineer : he's the one that "decides" what gear will be used. Like microphones, preamps, the mixer used for recording, if there will be compression/eq applied at the recording stage already. And of course, placement of the mics. Stuff like that.
The mixing engineer : that's the one that does the actual mix. Balancing the levels, adding the effects (compression on individual tracks/groups of tracks, temporal effects, etc...).
Usually the recording and mixing engineer are one person. But in a highly corporate world, it can be that they are completely unrelated (always fun to mix something where you don't know what happened on the recording...). Of course, a lot of the known producers are engineers also, so like Freak says, it's very likely in that case that he'll take the technical side on him too with people assisting him. But it happens a lot too that the actual producer doesn't know jack shit about the technical side (imagine the self proclaimed producers is the rich uncle of the lead singer, he's paying for everything, so he got the last word. The engineer will basically be the guy that will "translate" technically what the producer wants artistically).
The mastering engineer : what kewlness said. Actually mastering is a bad word, it should more be premastering (actual mastering happens at the pressing plant. You can even have a dedicated vinyl cutting engineer for that example, who will handle just to accomplish the preparation to the vinyl pressing). He's the one that makes everything homogenic (album) or "radio-ready". A good engineer will try to make your stuff sound good on every possible output system, while trying to retain maximum clarity and naturality in your sound. A bad mastering engineer will compress the crap out of your mixes, to make them sound louder than the competition 
I've seen lots of times on board like this, that people who are into electronic music have kind of a wrong image about producing/mixing/engineering, as electronic music is in fact what brought the term home studio to the masses. A lot of electronic music producers do the first stages for themselves (creating the music, basic recording (if you can call recording synths that way, for me that means merely setting right levels, and press record), and mixing). Some of them try their hand at mastering too. When you see interviews of famous electronic music producers in their studio's, those usually are nothing more than the "better" home studio's with expensive equipment.
Pro studio's are a tad different, they are built for a particular sound, and usually have dedicated rooms (the studio is actually the room where the musicians take place, the room where the mixer resides is the control room, not the studio...). In some cases you can even see the studio as a firm on it's own. It's not the bedroom or living room of the engineer, but a place where people go to work like "normal" people. "Normal" people can't even afford half of what such places have, even if they work 20 years for it...
Try to visit some studio webpages if you want to get some info about what I said. For example one of the bigger (and better) studio's in Europe is Studio Galaxy in Belgium : http://www.galaxy.be/
Just look at their floorplans and stuff.
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