Producing Music

During the last two decades, the field of music production has attracted considerable interest from the academic community, more recently becoming established as an important and flourishing research discipline in its own right.

Producing Music presents cutting-edge research across topics that both strengthen and broaden the range of the discipline as it currently stands. Bringing together the academic study of music production and practical techniques, this book illustrates the latest research on producing music.

Focusing on areas such as genre, technology, concepts, and contexts of production, Hepworth-Sawyer, Hodgson and Marrington have compiled key research from practitioners and academics to present a comprehensive view of how music production has established itself and changed over the years.

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer is a sound engineer and producer with over two decades’ experience of all things audio and is a member of the Association of Professional Recording Services and a former board member and continuing member of the Music Producer’s Guild where he helped form their Mastering Group. Through MOTTOsound (www.mottosound.co.uk), Russ works freelance in the industry as a mastering engineer, writer and consultant. Russ currently lectures part time for York St John University and has taught extensively in Higher Education at institutions including Leeds College of Music, London College of Music and Rose Bruford College. He contributes from time to time in magazines such as MusicTech, Pro Sound News Europe, Sound On Sound plus has written many titles for Focal Press. Russ is also the co-founder of the Innovation In Music conference series.

Jay Hodgson is an associate professor of Popular Music Studies at Western University, where he mostly teaches songwriting and the project paradigm of record production. In the last few years, he’s mixed, mastered, composed & produced records nominated for national Juno awards, which topped Beatport's global techno and house charts a number of times, and which have been featured on films recognized by the likes of Rolling Stone Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Spin magazine, and which screened at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. He was awarded a Governor General's Academic Medal in 2006, based primarily "on the excellence of his dissertation," according to the accompanying citation, and the dissertation was later nominated for a CAGS-UMI award, which recognizes dissertations at the national level which "make an unusually significant contribution to their fields." Jay’s second book, "Understanding Records" (Bloomsbury: 2010), was recently acquired by the reading room at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also written books for Oxford University Press and Wilfrid Laurier Press, and is currently at work on a book on mastering with his co-author, Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, for Focal Press.

Mark Marrington trained in composition and musicology at the University of Leeds (M.Mus., Ph.D.) and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Music Production at York St John University. He has previously held teaching positions at Leeds College of Music and the University of Leeds (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering). Mark has published chapters with Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge and Future Technology Press and has contributed articles to British Music, Soundboard, the Musical Times and the Journal on the Art of Record Production. Since 2010 his research has been focused on a range of music production topics with a particular emphasis on the role of digital technologies in music creation and production. Other interests include songwriting, music technology pedagogy, the contemporary classical guitar and British classical music in the twentieth century. His most recent research has been concerned with the aesthetics of classical music recording and a forthcoming monograph on the role of recordings in shaping the identity of the classical guitar in the twentieth century.