Beyond Reality: Why sometimes record production takes pain, obsession, and effort

This week I read a post that made me laugh. Someone was lamenting that they "wanted to hear Billie Eilish’s wonderful voice as she is, not tuned," and expressed genuine shock that her vocal track had been "meticulously compiled from dozens of takes by her and her engineer"

It made me laugh because, outside of a few specific genres, record-making has never been about presenting things truly as they are. It has always been about creating something beyond reality, especially in pop music. Record production is a tricky art!

Even outside of pop, if you think about it, mixing heavy metal is essentially trying to cram a Marshall-stack-crazed band screaming at you into a tiny speaker, while still making the idea feel believable and otherworldly.

The Illusion of "Easy" Greatness

Making commercial records is hard. Yes, you can occasionally write a masterpiece in an hour, but it rarely goes that way when you’re striving for greatness rather than "adequate."

I recently read Michael Beinhorn’s book, Taste The Pain, which accounts the making of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother's Milk album in the wake of guitarist Hillel Slovak's death. It didn't focus on the technical minutiae of engineering. Instead, it offered insight into the complex, volatile human side of making a record.

Often, you have to conquer the human element long before you even touch a fader, especially when a band's livelihood and career is on the line.

Most people have no idea what goes into making a record. Even proficient bedroom hobbyists rarely get exposed to the microscopic attention to detail that went into classic recordings, or even an average professional label session. This creates a massive disconnect in how people perceive "how things are/were done."

My Eye-Opening Moment

"At that moment, I realized I probably hadn't been working hard enough to achieve the level I aspired to. I wanted to make consistently great things, not just good things. I still do."

To be clear, I’m not talking down to anyone here. My own wake-up call came when I worked with producer John Brand, himself a former Trident engineer who came up alongside legends like Mike Stone. We were tracking a nice, simple pop song. The artist was an incredible singer who could absolutely deliver. Yet, recording the vocal took all day. We went verse by verse, then line by line, then word by word, syllable by syllable, refining, polishing, and comping. To John's credit, the final result was undeniably superior. At that moment, I realized I hadn't been working hard enough to reach the level I aspired to. I wanted to make consistently great things, not just good things. I still do.

Obsession is Nothing New

Technology has changed the game by making difficult tasks easier, but the obsession with perfection, whatever that is - has always been there.

• Metallica: The drums on The Black Album were meticulously sliced and compiled from multiple tape takes, then later further edited in an early version of Pro Tools to achieve that kind of consistency. (And no, we don't need any Lars jokes here!)

  
  

• Mutt Lange: Legendary engineer Mike Shipley recalled that on peak-excess 80s productions, like Def Leppard, they would often go through whole songs and EQ individual words or syllables manually to get them to sit perfectly in the mix. That sounds totally crazy, but today, we do the exact same thing in seconds with dynamic EQs to remove mud, or harshness.

  
  

• The King of Pop: We all know the story of "Billie Jean" being mixed by Bruce Swedien 91 times before they ultimately went back to use mix two for the final release. Even Michael Jackson had to trust the process and go through it.

  
  

Vocals have been "fixed" forever, whether through manual tape comping, punching in, varispeeding, samplers, pitch-shifters, all the way to now with Autotune, or Melodyne. Sure, there are rare vocalists who can open their mouths and deliver raw perfection, but they are the exception, not the rule. We back room boys and girls always put in the work!

The Human Gravity of Art

This isn't a modern phenomenon, either. Since Brian Wilson in the early 1960s, producers have been pushing the envelope. Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn't just "happen" live; sometimes they took weeks of gargantuan, manual effort with limited tools to complete a single song. Was it worth it? Yes.

Right now, there are thousands of people who truly believe typing a prompt into Suno makes them an artist. While I won't argue about what "is" or "isn't" art, I instinctively gravitate toward the human version, art born from emotion, obsession, talent, and grueling effort. That intense level of work adds a weight and permanence to a record that AI simply cannot replicate.

Ultimately, how you approach making music is your choice. But it gets tiring hearing people speak with unearned authority about high-end record-making when they don’t have a clue what the process actually demands.

It is the best time in history to make records. But let's not devalue or oversimplify the sheer art of the craft, especially if you've never tried to build one from scratch.

That obsession with the details is exactly why I ended up doing what I do as a mixer. It’s about finding those things that turn a good song into a timeless record. In the immortal words of "Macho Man" Randy Savage: "The cream always rises to the top." And it always will. You're the cream, "manual music maker" as the AI bros say !