Peter Taplin argues why a recording producer needs to intervene as advocate for the dead.

What does a producer do? Why do you need one? Can’t the artist just play the music and the sound engineer record it in an expert way and hey presto? Well it’s possible, but the results are rarely entirely satisfying. It is the producer who really has overall artistic responsibility for the quality of the recording, because it is almost impossible for an artist to be objective about their own playing in the recording situation.

In a film, you don’t see ‘Take 1’ of every scene – you see the scene that the actors and director have arrived at through hard work, and development over the period of time available. It is the director who calls “Cut, that’s a wrap” and so it is in the music studio.

When you think about it, the recording studio is the most unlikely place for any creative process of any kind to occur. It’s generally unattractive, cold, clinical and devoid of much atmosphere, so can easily become the undoing of many a performer. I know from my own experience that for a long time, although I could quite happily address a live...