[Ballard: Being a Producer]

Well, I think I learned how to be a producer primarily from experimenting first of all. I mean, from a four-track reel to reel tape, where now where you have Pro Tools where there are unlimited tracks. But learning just how sound work, how you – literally what was going on, I was interested in gear.

A friend of mine, his parents owned a radio station and they had all these wonderful tube amplifiers, tube mics, tube limiters, and they had a little studio there which was where they made their voiceovers and everything, and we'd go in there on Sunday nights and make recordings. So by the age of 15, I was really understanding that if you compress the guitar, it would sound a certain way, and I actually got to work with some good equipment, which has – that was sort of my – just experimenting and the passion of trying to make it sound the way I wanted to started by experimenting.

So that was the first step, and then I think the second one is, as a songwriter starting out, it was always about trying to get a good enough demo that you felt like it would be – people would get the song. I mean, a piano/vocal, everyone says you should be able to hear it that way and I think you should. Nevertheless, good demos for me were very important, so that's really how I started to learn how to make records, by making good demos. And in fact, very often the demos would catch the attention of the people going to produce it and they would invite me in to either be involved as a player or as an arranger or to use some of the stuff that I had done in creating the kind of DNA for the song.

And so one of my first contacts with Quincy Jones, I wrote a song called What's On Your Mind? He recorded it for George Benson and sort of started – he liked the demo a lot. And so to have your demo noticed by one of the great legendary producers and just sort of take note of it, that was my first big break, without question.

And then not long after that, Richard Parry recorded some of my songs for the Pointer Sisters, and he loved the tracks and he said, "Why don't you come in and just work on these tracks, and we'll help you make it into a record?" So between Quincy Jones and Richard Parry, I had two mentors who recognized that I was a songwriter, recognized that I could play and that I could arrange, and they wanted some of that juice and it was a great way for me to be around people who really knew what they were doing. So it was, for me, a stroke of luck that Quincy Jones and Richard Parry heard something beyond the song. I mean, they liked the songs, the songs they recorded, but they also liked some of the flavor they heard that was in the demo.

So for me making 1,000 demos of the 1,000 songs I was writing in my early years, every time I would demo them, I would learn something else. And the more you do, the better you get. No question.

Well, when records first started being made, especially in the '30s and '40s, the arranger usually literally wrote the – whether it was a big band or a string arrangement or a rhythm arrangement, wrote it for the orchestra and was primarily responsible for the nuts and bolts of the notes and making sure that everybody had it in front of them because it was usually recorded live in maybe one or two takes, so you had to have really good charts because everybody was reading it and there weren't any overdubs.

So there's this great discipline that evolved then, which on some levels is probably lacking right now. But in those instances, the arranger was worried about the music and the producer was trying to figure out how to capture it and what it was going to sound like. And ultimately, it was kind of a division of labor. And I think you fast-forward to 2006, an arranger is still very important, just as it always has been, to make sure that the music is right, that it all kind of – at least that it makes sense together, that you have a starting place where you have musicians who are playing with the right attitude.

And then the producer is kind of like trying to figure out how it should really sound in its ultimate form, and hopefully guiding the performances in taking the structure that the arranger gives him and is really, at that point, becoming like the director of a movie, where you're really trying to get nuances out of performances and the building block is the arrangement. And in my case, I do a lot of my own arranging, so I'm kind of wearing both hats many times.

You know, it's probably as common as it is not. I mean, there's some producers who get more into the nuts and bolts of the music. There's some producers who really don’t wanna know about that, and who do remarkably beautiful work. So I've always been the nuts and bolts guy because I, as a songwriter, am interested in all the ways sounds are captured. I’m kind of interested in every aspect of it, so when I'm involved with a production, I'm involved usually as an arranger, as a player, and as the producer. So it's the most fun for me. It keeps me busy but I like it.

Well, I think a record producer, if you'll allow me to use another film metaphor, the record producer is essentially like a film director and a film producer rolled into one. The record producer has the creative responsibility for the whole record. He also has the financial responsibility to bring it in on time, on budget, to try to get the right people in the room at the right time, so there's a kind of administrative side to being a record producer that's still very important.

On top of that, your real mission is a creative one, like a director, but you kind of have to play both sides of it because it's – when you're in a recording studio and people are being paid and it's your responsibility both creatively and financially, it's something that you can't phone in. So preparation to me is always the most important thing. But the record producer really does combine both skill sets of sort of organizing the whole event and making sure that it's great creatively.

Oh, I think it's the best job in the world. I think that it's the thrill of somehow finding the right one, two, or ten or 100 people to play together in the service of a song and that ultimately, hopefully, will transcend all or some of its parts. It would be greater then the sum of its parts. That's the greatest thing ever. And somehow, the accumulation of all the details that suddenly make this picture so clear.

So you have to, for me, I'm constantly looking in a micro way, and then jumping back to the macro, back to the micro. Are you playing the C-major 7 there? And then jumping back and going, "What's it all feel like? Is this the wrong texture?" Whatever. So it's really, you know, you're constantly being challenged to kind of manage people's performances, manage your own performance as an artist in the whole mix.

And in some ways, because I play a lot on the records I do, I feel like I'm directing myself sometimes. I usually say to one of my engineers, "Was that a good take?" when I'm playing.