With Commentary From Veteran Producer Jeff Weber

By Grant Derigo, Sarah Johnson and Jackie Rapp

Jeff Weber, Music Producer

According to Jeff one of the most important elements of a good, let alone a great recorded song is the magic and chemistry that occurs when musicians play together.  They bounce ideas off of one another in the heat of the moment and create something truly spontaneous.  This is one of the few aspects of production that the influx of new technology has actually hindered.  It is not as though musicians and producers no longer have the ability to make music in this traditional sense, but the ease and convenience of recording tracks separately has caused many to forgo making live studio recordings and consequently to lose a bit of the “edge”

While Jeff agrees that the time and money saved by editing digitally makes it almost essential in today’s studios, he still prefers to do as much as he can the old fashioned way.  He records each instrument to its own digital track, but still opts to record his entire band live in the same room.  He can then tweak the sound of each instrument on its own, but the essence of the live performance is preserved.

Even though Jeff prefers the traditional methods of capturing performance, his distribution methods are slightly more innovative.  He employs some unique marketing strategies, such as having his performers give away iPod shuffled loaded with their music as well as selling albums with fewer songs at a lower price.  The justification behind this practice being that an artist can generally write about four or five hit songs for an album, the rest of the songs are usually just filler.  So why not give consumers just the really good stuff?  The success of his newest record label, Imagine That!, will show whether Jeff’s theories are correct.