The Art & The Science

It’s no secret that today’s music production requires both left-brain and right-brain functions, and although neuroscientists have now largely dismissed the ‘left for logic, right for art’ paradigm, the notion is still useful for describing how we approach certain tasks. Music production involves a lot of technical decisions, and ‘housekeeping’ tasks like tweaking the timing of vocal parts, pitch correcting individual vocal segments, muting ‘noisy silences’, automating vocal levels to ensure nothing gets lost and, in some cases, automating vocal EQ to fine-tune the timbre of individual problem notes. All this is very ‘left brain’, and you need to be fairly disciplined to separate such jobs from the more creative right-brain work, as most people find it difficult to keep jumping between the two. Perhaps this is why there’s still a very real role for the non-engineering music producer, as this allows the engineer to deal with all the left-brain stuff while the producer can stay locked in creative mode. However, those of us that are working in home studios usually don’t have the luxury of a separate producer and engineer — we have to be both at the same time, and where you’re working on your own music, you’re also the artist.